Racism and Abortion, Part 1

Bishop Vincent Mathews Jr., President of the International Missions Department, Church of God in Christ

I am deeply indebted to my co-writer on this article, Bishop Vincent Mathews Jr., President of the International Missions Department, Church of God in Christ

In the wake of the Dallas shootings a few weeks ago, Christian leaders held a prayer and healing service at a large, predominantly African-American church in Dallas. The service involved a beautiful mix of races, colors, denominations, and backgrounds, all coming together to seek the divine help and healing of a Jewish Carpenter.

Several prominent church leaders from around the area spoke or prayed during the service. Dr. Tony Evans, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship, gave a particularly encouraging message about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. And he reminded us that God is at work—even when tragedy and confusion strike.

That evening’s gathering was an appropriate response to a pressing problem: Racism is alive and well in America. Although the number of police brutality incidents is small, we have been deeply disturbed by the horrific episodes involving Alton Sterling, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, and others. These tragedies, in which white police officers killed unarmed black citizens, have amplified racial tensions in America.

The strict definition of a racist is someone who believes that one race is superior to another. Although the term racism has become overly broad in today’s media-saturated, hypersensitive culture, the reality is every one of us has racist sentiments and thoughts.

Let’s not take that statement out of context. What we mean is, as sinners, we all judge and categorize people based on all sorts of criteria, including color, nationality, gender, occupation, etc. We all sin; therefore, we all fight being racist.

However, our nation seems to ignore racism’s deadly impact on the most innocent, helpless members of the human race. For all of the current media coverage about racism, we’ve seen virtually no stories about the most vile, most prolific contemporary result of racism in America—abortion.

If you consider yourself a person who’s concerned about racial reconciliation, you can’t possibly achieve that reconciliation until you deal directly, openly, and accurately with abortion’s bloody reign of terror on America and, in particular, its minority communities. Racism is alive and well in our country, and its primary weapon is abortion.

Consider this: the leading cause of death in the African-American community is not HIV, cancer, heart disease, accidents, or violent crime. Abortion kills more African Americans than all of those things combined. (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, “Abortion Surveillance—United States, 2012,” Nov. 27, 2015)

Skeptical? Consider the history of abortion in America and how we got where we are today.

(Note: In what follows, we’re heavily referencing material from Brian’s book Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women. Where other material is included, it’s cited.)

Let’s start with Charles Darwin who, in 1859, refined and promoted the Theory of Evolution. His landmark, history-changing book, On the Origin of Species, dealt mainly with the animal kingdom. However, the full title of the book (which you rarely see mentioned anymore) is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

His follow-up work, The Descent of Man, expanded on the idea that man, having descended from apes, continued to evolve, with certain races having achieved higher development than others. In Darwin’s view, his own race was more advanced than others, such as pygmies. Darwin wasn’t the first to promote a biological argument for racism, but there is no doubt his books accelerated its acceptance. (https://answersingenesis.org/charles-darwin/racism/did-darwin-promote-racism/)

Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton was a passionate promoter of Darwin’s work and coined the term eugenics. (https://saynsumthn.wordpress.com/tag/dr-george-grant/) The term fell out of favor after the fall of Nazi Germany. However, the practice is still alive and well today—it’s just cloaked within other, more socially acceptable terms like “population control.”

Eugenics is “a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher rates of sexual reproduction for people with desired traits… or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits… or both” (Wikipedia). In other words, it promotes policies and practices that advance desired races and seek to minimize or eliminate others. Think of eugenics as racism trumped up as pseudoscience.

In addition, by advancing “desired” races and/or eliminating others, eugenics also affects people with disabilities, intellectual challenges, and other “undesirable” traits.

Galton studied and promoted eugenics, and one of his key disciples was a British sexologist named Havelock Ellis. Ellis was an overt eugenicist who favored voluntary sterilization of the unfit. Darwin, Galton, and Ellis were all white men.

One of Havelock Ellis’s prized students (and his lover) was none other than Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. She started the first birth control center in America, and she and her friends invented the term birth control.

Sanger was a eugenicist in favor of both segregation and sterilization as a means to weed out unwanted populations. And if you think she wasn’t referring to a person’s color with that sentiment, keep in mind that she kept company with such gems as Lothrop Stoddard and C. C. Little. Little was an outspoken advocate of eugenics, birth control, and euthanasia. And Stoddard wrote a book called The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, in which he warned of a “dreaded” tide of color that would “swamp whole populations and turn countries now white into colored man’s lands irretrievably lost to the white world.”

Personally, we think Sanger was in support of abortion as a means of controlling minority populations. She was counseled by Ellis to keep that quiet, however, and left abortion promotion to her successors. After all, she did say, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” (Brian E. Fisher, Abortion: The Ultimate Exploitation of Women. [New York, NY: Morgan James Publishing, 2014, P.43]

The second president of Planned Parenthood, Alan Guttmacher, quickly moved to make abortion a key platform for the organization, and he joined Dr. Bernard Nathanson and Lawrence Lader in their efforts to legalize abortion. (Nathanson later recanted his pro-abortion views and become a pro-life activist.) In 1973, their mission was successful, as seven men on the U.S. Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion in the most liberal way possible, striking down pro-life laws in all 50 states.

The roots of abortion are deeply and intimately connected to racism and eugenics. The effort to legalize abortion and drive its agenda was run, almost exclusively, by white racists and white funders (most of whom, incidentally, were men—so much for women’s reproductive rights).

Has it been effective? Is eugenics alive and well in America today, and has it been able to drive the abortion agenda and deftly promote the weeding out of “inferior races” in our country? The numbers are clear. Nationally, African Americans now comprise around 12.6 percent of the population, yet they account for over 35 percent of all abortions. Not only are abortion and race closely intertwined, but the agenda of abortion promoters has been horrifically effective as well.

We must unite. We must speak openly and honestly about racism and the extent of its deadly influence.

In the second part of this message, we’ll explore more deeply the connection between abortion and racism. We will also consider the path toward healing and reconciliation, which is both possible and of the utmost importance.