An Acceptable Racial Inequity

This past week I posted on the topic of race and the topic of abortion. Today I'm going to talk about both.

Jason Riley at the Wall Street Journal makes some interesting points in his Thursday column (subscription required). He notes, for instance, that the left is very much concerned with racial inequities in our society except when it comes to abortion.

On this particular inequity, one that involves the deaths of black children, they're mute. He writes:

In other contexts, group differences in outcome set off alarms on the political left. The racial gap in test scores has brought calls to eliminate the SAT and other admissions tests. The racial gap in arrest and incarceration rates has brought calls to legalize drugs and reduce resources for law enforcement. Racial differences in wealth and income fuel progressive demands for slavery reparations and a larger welfare state. And so on.

When it comes to abortion, however, left-wing concern seems to stop at making the procedure safe and legal, even while black-white disparities have not only persisted but widened.

A 2020 paper by public-health scholar James Studnicki and two co-authors cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to note that the black abortion rate is nearly four times higher than the white rate: “Between 2007-2016, the Black rate declined 29% and the White rate declined 33%—meaning that the racial disparity actually increased rather than decreased.”

Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in a 2019 abortion case observed that “there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.”

Mr. Studnicki and his co-authors likewise conclude that abortion’s impact on the size of the black population is pronounced. Using Pennsylvania as a case study, they note that in 2018 there were about 61,000 premature white deaths from all causes and 21,000 premature black deaths. “Abortions were 23.9% of the White deaths and 62.7% of the Black deaths.”

So, why are we not concerned about the radical disparity in deaths of unborn blacks? Why does this racial inequity not seem to matter so much? Perhaps silence on this issue is due to one very plausible reason for the disparity put forward by Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks in his book “Is Marriage for White People?”:

Having a spouse, Mr. Banks speculates, may be what matters most in a woman’s decision to seek an abortion. “A single woman with an unplanned pregnancy is about twice as likely as a married woman to abort,” he writes. “Black women thus may have so many more abortions than other groups in part because they are so much less likely to be married.”

The irony, he adds, is that even though single black women are less likely to abort than other groups of single women, black women still have more abortions because they are far more likely than their white counterparts to be single. “Some portion of the racial disparities in abortion are yet another cost of the marriage decline” among blacks.

In other words, we might suspect that the left doesn't talk about abortion inequity because the solution involves stressing the importance of husbands and traditional marriage. Yet not only does marriage reduce the likelihood that a woman will abort a pregnancy, it also reduces the likelihood that she'll be poor.

Riley finishes with a couple of thoughts on marriage and poverty:

The black poverty rate has been roughly a third higher than the white rate for close to 30 years. Among married blacks, however, poverty has been in the single digits over the same period. In some years, the poverty rate for black married couples has been below the rate of not only blacks as a whole but also whites as a whole.

If activists believe that higher black incomes will result in fewer black abortions, why not focus on how to increase black marriage rates?

One problem is that such a conversation requires frank talk about counterproductive attitudes toward marriage and solo parenting in low-income black communities. It requires discussing antisocial behavior and personal responsibility.

The Democratic left has fashioned a politics around avoiding those subjects and accusing anyone who broaches them of racism. No issue has a bigger impact on America’s black population than legal abortion, but we’re not supposed to talk about that.

No, indeed. Ever since Karl Marx the left has been seeking to undermine the traditional family. Encouraging black women to get married and stay married is hardly going to be a popular strategy with those who consider the traditional family to be a form of oppression that needs to be done away with.