By Mecca Fowler
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
According to an internal draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and acquired by POLITICO, the Supreme Court has voted to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade decision. This leaked draft is the latest event dividing Americans.
Abortion is a deeply moral topic about which Americans have radically opposing viewpoints. Some people passionately believe that people are created at conception and that abortion terminates an innocent life. Others believe that regulating abortion infringes on a woman’s freedom to regulate her own body and stops women from attaining complete equality.
The topic is so polarizing that it’s difficult to get the opposing views to meet somewhere in the middle. However, the hysteria over SCOTUS possibly reversing Roe v. Wade is completely unnecessary. The topic is a lot more nuanced than what the news headlines would have us believe.
Abortion is being mocked and callously desensitized to the American public. This may sound like a reach but look at the many conversations about the topic today. You’ll find all over social media people even joking about carelessly discarding human life. Abortion should be seen as a rare and serious last attempt at ending a pregnancy.
Regardless of one’s position, we need to stick to the facts about the history and conception of the popularization of abortion in this country.
First, let’s start with the basics and the root of abortion. It is important to be truthful about the words that we use, even when we don’t want to. Terminating a pregnancy is indeed terminating a life. You cannot out-rationalize this fact with propaganda or “evolving science.” For pro-choice people and pro-abortionists, it’s hard to reconcile with this.
Next, let’s analyze the groups that supported the pro-abortion movement at the heights of their publicity. The first Planned Parenthood was started by eugenicist Margaret Sanger in New York in 1916. Eugenics is the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.
Although people try to decouple her views on the human race from the abortion movement, even the employees of Planned Parenthood have had to acknowledge their founder’s problematic views. At the root of the pro-abortion movement is a desire to weed out undesirable lives. Whether it’s people with disabilities or people with different racial or hereditary traits, the theories of eugenics can be considered harmful junk science in modern society.
Planned Parenthood collaborated with and received funding from groups pushing the theory of population control. As such, some think of abortion as a method to control the populations of growing countries. In fact, it’s even been praised for this. Population control through abortion has been cited as a social benefit in scholarly articles. Large family foundations such as the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation have contributed significantly to the abortion movement and efforts.
The last fact is that abortion affects the black population the most. According to Planned Parenthood’s Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate for black women in America is five times that for white women. That is extremely high considering black people only make up approximately 13% of the population.
Abortion is the leading cause of death of the black population compared to black deaths of all other causes, according to the anti-abortion Protecting Black Life organization. Almost 80% Abortion clinics are in walking distance of minority neighborhoods, according to the anti-abortion Life Issues Institute. With 474 abortions per 1,000 live births, black women have the highest abortion rate in the country, according to a 2011 report from the Centers for Disease and Control. Since 1973, more than 19 million black newborns have been killed based on these percentages.
These are all indisputable facts and context that should be considered when having any conversation about abortion. From the media suggesting that contraception could be next to questioning whether this decision could lead to same-sex marriage being outlawed, the fearmongering about what doors this decision could open are astounding and absurd. The hysteria needs to die down so that people can properly access what is that they are supporting when they consider abortion. Ignoring its background or origins will not make the history go away.
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