Overall, abortion rates have dropped to their lowest point since the Supreme Court legalized it in Roe v. Wade, according to a Guttmacher study.
As expected, blacks are still overrepresented among women who abort. Last I read, black women aborted at three times the rate of white women. In 2004, black women aborted at five times the rate of white women.
Download the 28-page Trends in the Characteristics of Women Obtaining Abortions, 1974 to 2004 in PDF.
To what can we attribute these disproportionate rates of child killing? “Poverty” is an oft-cited factor. I’d add “ignorance,” “apathy,” and “plain old immoral” to the list. The cure for one is education; the cure for the others is a shift in values. Before I’m accused of race baiting, the reasons I believe women abort apply to all women, regardless of race. But we’re still left with why black women kill their babies at a disproportionately higher rate.
At this year’s GodBlogCon, someone asked me what I thought could be done to reduce abortions. Perhaps educating pregnant women about the adoption option and making the process easier would help reduce abortions. Opening more homes for unwed mothers, where they can receive spiritual and financial support, may encourage pregnant women without family support to carry their babies to term at the very least, and bless a childless couple and provide an intact family for the baby.
The ultimate responsibility falls on people who have sex outside marriage, regardless of their financial condition. Killing the baby shouldn’t even enter their minds. Bringing forth that life and doing what’s in the baby’s best interests, despite what it costs you, should be the top priority.
That’s my simple, naive, and “impractical” answer.
(Hat tip: Hot Air)
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Good article. Speaking as a black woman, any statistics about black men needing the same kind of resources as unwed mothers? We know of course the girls or women did not make the babies by themselves. Girls need to know there are men (and I do specify black men, I don’t know about others) who are on a mission to make babies with no plans of being fathers to them or husbands, maybe it would help.
As unpopular as the topic is today, if we do our homework it is seriously plain, Many Black men are still living out a slave mentality when it comes to breeding children. Young men need to be educated as to how far back this goes.
They should understand during the African slave era, African men were used to breed babies to grow up and work not only for plantations, but later, to provide a slave wage work force for the Industrial era they knew was inevitable.
Do black men and women today have a clue that it was once unheard of for blacks to kill their children? Survival of the Black family was the all important goal of slaves. What happened? Feminisim which black women bought from white women. It had little to do with the experiences of black women.
The abortion statistics you cite are a result of buying into the feminist mystique and making black women believe it is part of their rights to kill their children. Slaves would turn over in their graves to see where their blood sacrifices have traveled. Cradle to grave so quickly. We need a serious wake up call in Black America.
Blacks are throwing off their history before they even know their history, What other race does this?
Many of my pregnant students got a great deal of acclaim for their pregnancy as if they had accomplished a rite of passage. Naturally, we want the best for the child, but it often impressed me that the child was an image enhancement rather than a serious life altering event.
Additionally, I have had numerous grand parents who had children who abandoned their kids to them to raise. Many times, these kids were way too much to handle for their elderly grand parents to keep in check. I suppose some grand parents are now raising great grand children.
Our adoption laws make it easier to adopt from a foreign country rather than from within the USA. That is really an important fact at the heart of this problem.
Planned Parenthood does not go beyond contraception with abortion just being another form of contraception. We should have a national organization that helps women and girls deal with pre-natal care, motherhood and/or adoption.
“Pro-choice” should allow women and girls to know that they can deliver the new life and “deliver the mistake” to loving adoptive parents or adjust to the responsibility of single motherhood.
I think part of the problem is that a woman without a man is looked at askance, as if there must be something wrong with her or somebody would “want” her. We need to build up the value of a woman who doesn’t need a man to be whole and vital. Too many women are settling for somebody, anybody, even a slimebag they’d not trust to help carry groceries in if they had an ounce of sense and self-respect.
It was a wretched thing to listen to National Abortion Federation nurses lament that they couldn’t get the women to abstain from sex until they’d healed from their abortions — not because the women were ignorant or unwilling, but because their “partners” wouldn’t tolerate it.
The woman who isn’t in a sexual relationship needs to be held up as a role model, admired for, as Gloria Gaynor put it, “saving all my loving for someone who’s loving me.”
“The ultimate responsibility falls on people who have sex outside marriage, regardless of their financial condition.”
~So very well said. I just challenged a group of people to imagine this world if all sex was reserved for the bonds of matrimony, and how that would affect not only today’s social ills, but today’s social structure in general.
The few who took the challenge seriously were pretty amazed after thinking it through.
Vanessa,
I don’t agree that the high abortion rate has much to do with the slave mentality. If that were true, the pre-1960’s would have seen more out-of-wedlock births and back-alley abortions among blacks than we have now, because that era was closer to the time of slavery. But back then, black families were stronger, and dads stayed married and raised their children. Something changed, but it sure wasn’t slavery.
SkyePuppy–
Slavery did do one thing (I’m not saying it was the only thing) to wreak havoc on black families: it got them used to the idea that fathers don’t have to live with their children. But it wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” (boy, was that a misnomer) that poor families, black and white, began to disintegrate.
My sister-in-law, in talking about why she walked out on her illegitimate daughter, complained about her mother, the child’s grandmother, and her interference with the baby’s upbringing:
“All my friends had the same problem, and my mother swore she would never act that way.”
All her friends had the same problem. She knew what was going on, and decided to conceive that child anyway.
It was no accident, either. She had already given up two children for adoption. She conceived this baby because she wanted a baby, and screw what was right for the kid.
I have to question the abortion statistics as dropping. The new pills that act as abortion have skewed the numbers, but abortion is abortion. To fall for the belief that “It’s too small to be human” is to believe that a penny is not money.
Besides, all that nonesense about fetal tissue and when does it move in the womb are all put aside now. Obama had shown us that the real choice will include the murder of a fully born child – infanticide.
“First they came for the fetuses…”
Christina, I disagree that the problem is society perceiving women without men badly. The last few decades have done much to “liberate” women from men, and look how far we’ve come.
I think what our society needs — men and women — is some self-respect. Notice I did not say self-esteem.
Self-respect begins with God-respect. We know that we are worthwhile because ELOHIM (God who created us) is worthwhile, and He would not have created us if we were not.
The second part of self-respect is purpose. We are worthwhile because we have a God-given purpose. We need to recapture our purposes as husbands, wives, parents and see that it is GOOD to be part of something bigger and more important than ourselves, that the purpose of life is not self-gratification. When young boys know that they will grow up to be the heads of households, that it will be there job to provide for and protect their wives and children, we won’t have to worry about women unable to say no to sex when recovering from surgery. When young girls know that they will grow up to care for their homes and their children, we won’t have to worry about them aborting their “mistakes.” When the center of the universe is moved out from inside each of us, then we can really respect ourselves and each other, and then things will be right.
It is so important to tell black women the truth about this. We abort our babies at higher rates than women of other races. I believe that getting black women to face that head on is a start at solving the problem.
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