Noah Smith Says the Quiet Part out Loud on Abortion

Since oral arguments in the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s abortion ban concluded, we’ve been treated to a long line of bad takes from the pro-abortion crowd. But blogger Noah Smith might have taken the cake. On Wednesday night, he tweeted:

Think about what Smith is admitting here: Abortions disproportionately take the lives of non-white — and particularly black — babies. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, Hispanic women have double the amount of abortions that white women do. Black women have five times the amount. In cities such as New York, more black babies are killed in the womb than are born every year. Nationally, some 474 black children are aborted for every 1,000 live births to black women — in other words, almost a third of black babies are aborted every year. These are staggering, horrific numbers to contemplate.

In fact, contra Smith’s odd assumption that conservatives aren’t aware of these racial disparities in abortion rates, the numbers on black and Hispanic abortions are cited regularly by pro-life activists — and particularly black pro-lifers, who often refer to abortion as “black genocide.” The African-American Issues4Life Foundation deemed our national abortion regime “the Darfur of America.” Even Jesse Jackson was once pro-life, regularly referring to the procedure as “murder” before eventually reversing his position in preparation for his 1984 presidential run. In 1977, Jackson said:

Politicians argue for abortion largely because they do not want to spend the necessary money to feed, clothe and educate more people. Here arguments for inconvenience and economic savings take precedence over arguments for human value and human life. . . .

Psychiatrists, social workers and doctors often argue for abortion on the basis that the child will grow up mentally and emotionally scarred. But who of us is complete? If incompleteness were the criteri(on) for taking life, we would all be dead. If you can justify abortion on the basis of emotional incompleteness, then your logic could also lead you to killing for other forms of incompleteness — blindness, crippleness, old age.

The abortion lobby and its activist allies argue that these disparities are the result of racism and poverty, but as Jason Riley pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “black women have much higher abortion rates even after you control for income.” In fact, non-white abortion rates have much more to do with abortion’s well-documented racist roots. It’s no coincidence that 79 percent of Planned Parenthoods are situated in minority neighborhoods. Pro-lifers are all too familiar with the racist and eugenicist views of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who (though not pro-abortion herself) vigorously pushed for forced sterilization of “morons, mental defectives and epileptics,” and framed this belief — and her support for birth control — in explicitly racist terms. In a 1939 letter to a friend discussing her Negro Project initiative, which targeted black neighborhoods with birth-control programs and tried to persuade community leaders to push contraception and sterilization, Sanger wrote: “We don’t want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the [African-American] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

This is abortion’s legacy. It’s what the abortion industry has always been. Despite what flowery messaging from Planned Parenthood and NARAL would have you believe, this is very much still a part of the abortion regime today. None other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself described abortion as a way to control “populations that we don’t want to have too many of” in 2014. And in pitching abortifacients to Bill Clinton, Ron Weddington, a co-counsel for the pro-choice advocates in Roe v. Wade, said: “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

Kudos to Smith for his honesty — he just comes out and says that “people of color are disproportionately high users of abortion.” That’s why the alt-right embraces the practice. Richard Spencer applauded the fact that it is only “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control.” As Elliot Kaufman pointed out, the alt-right doesn’t “oppose abortion because it’s good for racial minorities; they support abortion because it kills them. They hate black people and think America would be better if fewer of them were born.” Smith and other pro-choicers who make this argument simply don’t know what pro-lifers actually believe. 

Editor’s note: This post originally stated that almost half of black babies are aborted every year. It has since been corrected.