It’s the cherished myth of abortion-rights supporters that simply won’t die — the false claim that white supremacists oppose legal abortion, and therefore that there’s a sinister link between racists and pro-lifers. This time it’s being peddled in the Washington Post by Marissa Brostoff. Two weeks ago it was being bandied about on Twitter by Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe.
Here’s some of my response to Tribe on NRO:
There is indeed a link between abortion and white supremacists’ concern about “non-white replacement.” It is precisely because of this fear that white supremacists and members of the alt-Right have long supported legal abortion, applauding the fact that minority women abort their children at disproportionate rates. . . .
One need only do the barest amount of research to discover that Richard Spencer, a leading white supremacist, is highly supportive of legalized abortion, because, as he puts it, “the people who are having abortions are generally very often black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” White women, Spencer notes, avail themselves of abortion “when you have a situation like Down Syndrome” — an acceptable use, in his twisted view. Meanwhile, Spencer says, “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics . . . use abortion as birth control.”
Statistically speaking, the legal-abortion regime in the U.S. has lived up to white supremacists’ hopes. An African-American woman is nearly three times as likely as a white woman to have an abortion, according to pro-choice research group the Guttmacher Institute. Centers for Disease Control data indicate that African Americans accounted for 36 percent of abortions in 2015 despite being only about 13 percent of the population. . . .
The earliest advocates of loosening restrictions on abortion were closely tied to the population-control movement, and many of today’s most vigorous abortion-rights organizations spend much of their time and resources pushing abortion and contraception on women in Africa who want none of it.
It’s time for abortion-rights cheerleaders to drop this malicious falsehood.