Anti-Choice Voices Disingenuously Try To Co-opt ‘Black Lives Matter’ Theme

One of the more awkward responses to the Ferguson protests has been ?attempts by anti-abortion?activists to dismiss police killings?of young African-Americans as insignificant, while trying to co-opt the “black lives matter” slogan for their own agenda. For example, Matt Walsh at ?the Blaze penned a piece titled?”Black Lives Matter, So It’s Time to Outlaw Abortion.” Steven Ertelt at LifeNews lamented that since the day Michael Brown was killed, over 900 black “babies” have been aborted?in Missouri without any anti-abortion riots.

black lives matter

Tristyn Bloom, writing for the Daily Caller, contributed a column titled “Without a Hint of Irony, Planned Parenthood Joins #BlackLivesMatter Protest”. Bloom called the tweet “cruelly ironic” and then regurgitated a litany of falsehoods about Planned Parenthood’s history, motives, and contemporary practices. Walsh at the Blaze went even further arguing that:

“They’re just wiping out the black race for the sake of making a quick buck. This is a holocaust for profit, which makes abortionists like Nazis, but in some ways worse.”

In his screed, he accuses Planned Parenthood of ethnic cleansing and moans that white physicians who terminate pregnancies will never face a grand jury for performing??abortions (well one reason he might be?overlooking, is?that it would be difficult to?indict somebody for performing a medical procedure that is perfectly legal).

Of course there is nothing ironic about Planned Parenthood supporting the concept that “black lives matter”. The organization does not discriminate based on race. They provide contraceptives, cancer screenings, counseling, and abortions for black women as readily as they do for white women, because black women matter.

The right-wing attacks on Planned Parenthood are longstanding and rooted in a revisionist history of the organization. This revisionist history, built on fabricated quotes and half truths, casts Margaret Sanger as conspiring to commit genocide against?black people. However, the reality is that Sanger saw birth control as a way to empower women (including black women) not as a way to reduce the black population. She also never advocated for abortion, which was unsafe before Roe v Wade. She merely promoted making contraception available to women.

None of this is to suggest that Sanger did not hold any racist?views whatsoever. However, almost all white Americans in the early 20th century expressed a measure?of racism that would make most of us uncomfortable today. Sanger’s racial attitudes were not dissimilar from contemporaries like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, for example. One of them is on Mount Rushmore (where his face is sharing space with three other Presidents, including two slaveholders, whose views could also be characterized as racist by contemporary standards).

Returning to the present, the Right continues to make the preposterous claim?that Planned Parenthood’s goal is ridding America of black people. They usually begin by?creating a fabricated statistic suggesting that almost all abortion facilities are in black neighborhoods. However, the Guttmacher Institute reports that just 9 percent of abortion providers are located in majority black neighborhoods.

So we recognize that conservative critics of Planned Parenthood lie about ?history, and concoct?their own imaginary numbers, but what about the substance of the argument itself? Here is perhaps where we can finally note a certain level of irony. For conservatives like Bloom, Ertfelt, and Walsh, showing “black lives matter” would be a implementing a program?that forces?all black women who are pregnant to carry their pregnancies to term. That may sound absurd, but that is what their argument essentially boils down to. While all three of the critics of black abortions are probably anti-abortion for all races, none of them mention that 63 percent of abortions in the United States are performed on women who are not black. Presumably, those women are smart enough to decide how their pregnancy should end, so they are not victims of secret genocide?

Ultimately the conservative argument fails, because in their efforts to argue that being anti-choice is a way of asserting “black lives matter”, the conservative critics can barely conceal their contempt for black people.?The white authors mentioned above each follow a similar script. They begin their articles by completely dismissing any notion that black people are discriminated against and then they mock African-Americans?for protesting the death of Michael Brown, regarding the killing as inconsequential. They then proceed to portray the black community as uniquely dysfunctional and go on to?accuse black mothers of exterminating black children.

Furthermore, by accusing Planned Parenthood of committing genocide, they imply that black women have no personal?agency and that they are just unwitting co-conspirators.?The argument denies that elective abortions are consensual arrangements between patient and physician, achieved through cooperation not coercion. The concern trolls on the right, feigning interest in black lives, refuse to acknowledge?that their goal is to disempower black women even further by denying them reproductive choice. Instead they appeal to the “black lives matter” sentiment, to argue that the black lives that matter most are the ones that have not yet been born. As for the actual black lives that are real and present, their concerns are brushed aside with tone deaf dismissals. The conservative?columnists?chastise?black Americans?saying?racism is not real and adding that the only black people you should be concerned about are the ones “we say you should?be concerned about,” without a hint of irony.


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Keith Brekhus is a progressive sociologist who resides in Red Lodge, Montana. He is co-host for the Liberal Fix radio show. Keith is a former Green Party candidate for US Congress (2002 in Missouri's 9th District). He can be followed on Twitter @keithbrekhus.