A Pepper Grinder Post

Equal Rights for the Unborn

My wife used to have a pink sweatshirt.  It had a logo similar to what you see below and it had the words, “Equal Rights for Unborn Women.”  I loved that sweatshirt because it pointed out the basic disconnect in the claim that to be pro-choice was to be pro-woman.  I would vigorously disagree with the statement that abortions are good for the pregnant women having them. (I will never forget my wife telling me about a woman she met who worked for Planned Parenthood, telling my wife and her sister about how she talked with young women coming into a clinic considering abortion.  She had aborted her own surprise third baby.  Her eyes filled with tears as she said she told these potential clients, “It’s not so bad.”)

equal rights for unborn women logoHowever, even if we were to accept the argument that helping women “get rid of” their unwanted offspring is good for them, there is another group of women for whom abortion is lethal—the ones who are in the womb.  Ignoring the fact that women are being killed supposedly to help women would be appalling if an equal number of boys and girls were aborted, but it’s worse than that.  A natural boy-to-girl sex ratio is 1.05:1.  Among children of Chinese, Korean, and Indian Americans, first children showed the normal sex ratio, but second children showed a ratio of 1.17:1 if the first child had been a girl.  If the first 2 children were girls, the boy-to-girl ratio for the third child was 1.51:1.1 This means that a female baby with two older sisters is one and a half times as likely to be aborted as a boy would be. This is in the United States where the problem is not as severe as in some other countries.  You can find much more information about gender-based abortions at .  The fact that a procedure that kills considerably more women than men is considered to be pro-woman is conveniently ignored by pro-choice groups.

But there is something equally or more disturbing going on than sex-biased abortions in the U.S.  Some of you may know that we recently had the 41st anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in America.  I also recently had a day off from work because of the 85th anniversary of the birth of the famed civil rights activist, Martin Luther King, Jr.  So?  What does abortion have to do with civil rights?

pregnant bellyFor every 1000 births by white women, there are 138 abortions.  For black women, there are 501 abortions for every 1000 births.2  Yes, you read right.  Abortions are almost FOUR times as prevalent in the African-American community as in the white community in the U.S.  It is better in the Hispanic community but still out of proportion with non-Hispanic whites.  Hispanic women accounted for 20-25% of the abortions in the U.S. even though Hispanics only make up 16.3% of the U.S. population.  (The CDC lists the number as 20.6%, while the Guttmacher Institute puts it at 25%)

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a firm believer in eugenics.3  Much of her motivation for preventing pregnancies was to decrease the number of people she saw as inferior or “unfit.”  Although she did not agree with the Nazis and their plans to exterminate less desirable groups, she shared the desire to better humanity by increasing the proportion of “superior” people.

Now fast forward to the present day.  It is a fact that “the majority of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics are located in communities with minority populations that exceed the city or state averages.”4 However this came to be, we cannot deny that many more minorities die from abortion than whites.  In spite of this, just as with the fact that more girl babies are aborted than boy babies, there is general silence about this.  Here is what John Piper has to say about the racial makeup of abortion victims:
The de facto effect (I don’t call it the main cause, but net effect) of putting abortion clinics in the urban centers is that the abortion of Hispanic and Black babies is more than double their percentage of the population. Every day 1,300 black babies are killed in America. Seven hundred Hispanic babies die every day from abortion. Call this what you will—when the slaughter has an ethnic face and the percentages are double that of the white community and the killers are almost all white, something is going on here that ought to make the lovers of racial equality and racial harmony wake up.5

Martin Luther King JrRead the following where Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes King, and adds her own comments about abortion in the black community:
“The Negro cannot win as long as he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for comfort and safety.” How can the “Dream” survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.6

I have not even mentioned the incredibly high percentage of babies with Down syndrome who are aborted.  (92% according to Dr Brian Skotko, pediatric geneticist at Children’s Hospital in Boston)7 I believe that the sad fact about the human condition is that when we are given the power of life and death, we decide who is desirable and who is undesirable, and we give life to those we like and withhold it from those we don’t.

Thank God that he is more kind and merciful than we are.

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1 “Son-biased sex ratios in the 2000 United States Census” by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund
2According to 2010 census data, African Americans make up 12.6% of the U.S. population, but the CDC reported in 2009 that black women accounted for 35.4% or all abortions in 2009.  For more details and documentation, see (You will see this article referred to several times in these notes.  I thought it was an excellent article and many of the ideas presented here are shamelessly lifted from that website.)
3See for example the eugenics section of the Wikipedia article on Sanger: 45John Piper, “When is Abortion Racism?” January 21, 2007.
6Alveda King quoting King in her article “How Can the Dream Survive if We Murder Our Children?”  7

Final Note: You may think that I am overstating the case in this post.  I am not.  I invite you to do the research on this yourself, starting with the references listed above.  You will find that there are many more shocking truths connected to the subjects of abortion and gender, abortion and race, and abortion and disability than I have mentioned.

*Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr is from the bio website:

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