The Cook County (Chicago) Republican organization has issued a press release claiming that the Democratic party is conducting genocide against black Americans by supporting abortion rights. The language is unbridled, and the explicit appeal to racial animosity is as stark as anything seen in the days of Jim Crow. (It is progress, I suppose, that they are now race-baiting in favor of blacks, but it’s hardly less ugly.)

The Democratic Party, true to its pro-slavery past, recently defined another group of human beings as non-citizens, thereby excluding them from legal protection under the law. This group of Americans is the unborn. In the tortured reasoning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, unborn children are essentially property. And just as the Dred Scott case predominantly (though not exclusively) affected African Americans, the Roe v. Wade decision has paved the way for a veritable black genocide.

Here the GOP unveils its “Dred Scott” codeword. Prominently, but puzzlingly, used by George Bush in the 2000 debates, “Dred Scott” evokes a trope among evangelical Christians that has it that abortion is the equivalent of slavery. Interestingly, it has been almost exclusively white conservatives who make that claim or use that analogy; the GOP is now testing it out on black constituents.

The “genocide” claim is:

Recent statistics indicate that since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25%. Because abortion has been aggressively peddled to inner city black communities, black babies today are three times more likely to be killed in the womb than white babies. Abortion kills twice as many black babies as AIDs, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined. Although it is possible that Planned Parenthood and its ilk are racially blind, 80% of planned parenthood facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. What’s the point of all these gruesome statistics, and what do they have in common with the Dred Scott case of 1856? Plenty.

The result of Dred Scott was to strip African Americans of their standing under the law and thereby prevent them from ever exercising political power for the good of their people. Roe v. Wade subtly accomplishes the same ends by a different means. The black population is curbed by convincing black mothers that their unborn children are only property which will financially destroy them so it is in their interests and the interest of society to kill them. African Americans can thank the Democratic Party and its unyielding support for Roe v. Wade as well as its insidious influence in our public school system for today’s veritable black genocide.

This claim, of course, implictly holds that black women have been conducting genocide on the black community. Of course, they were misled by those wily Democratic genocide planners, who “convinced [them] that their unborn children are only property”. Necessarily, this suggests also that black women – misled as they are – have not correctly understood their own interests, and that they have reduced their own decisions over abortion to financial calculations about “property”. This seems both offensively condescending and, likely, rather out of touch with the lived experiences of many black women; it remains to be seen whether these women will reject the “deluded, incompetent victim” role assigned to them.

The language pushes several other, highly calculated buttons as well: “aggressively peddling abortion” plays to a theme common in the anti-choice community, namely that Planned Parenthood somehow acts to increase abortions in order to make money off them (its support for contraception is actually support for abortion, because contraception fails, thereby leading to more abortions by all those women who would never have had sex at all if Planned Parenthood hadn’t given them contraception); that Planned Parenthood preys on minorities (its clinics are in low-income neighborhoods not because low-income persons need low-cost health services, but because that’s the way to kill all those black babies); public schools are somehow to blame for unplanned pregnancies (playing off widespread dissatisfaction with public schools, while indirectly pitching for religious schools and an end to sex-ed). And, finally, of course, it uses the – true, and shameful – history of the Democratic party prior to the Civil Rights Movement to hang a “racist” label on Democrats today (carefully not using the words “Southern strategy”, “affirmative action”, “Civil Rights movement” or “Trent Lott”).

As a piece of propaganda, it’s bold and likely provocative. Presumably the GOP in Chicago – traditionally a rough town politically – thought it could get away with language of this kind, at least as an opening shot (I suspect we’ll see some backpedaling when the inevitable complaints roll in). In the sense of “all PR is good PR”, it may be an effective move. But as a contribution to understanding either the politics or morality of abortion, it is despicable. To use this most personal and heated of issues in such a dishonest fashion for nothing more than a partisan power grab makes a mockery of this issue and the feelings both of those who care about abortion and of the black constituents they claim to be concerned for.

To begin with, the “genocide” charge is nonsense on its face. I presume it goes without saying that the existence of abortion is not a coordinated campaign of genocide; the idiocy of the charge is its own refutation. Similarly, too, with claims that abortion clinics are selectively placed in minority neighborhoods (they are selectively placed where healthcare services are lacking – if that happens to correspond to minority neighborhoods, perhaps the GOP should give some though to public health funding). But even the pretended factual claim at the heart of this charge is false. Here are the white and black population trends, from the Census Bureau’s 2000 data (race definitions were changed in 2000, so later data are not comparable):

The thick lines represent population overall (in thousands) for whites (dotted blue line) and blacks (black line); the thin lines are annual growth rate (%) for each. The white population grows faster in overall numbers, because it is larger to begin with, but notice that both white and black show no visible change in growth rates after 1973. In fact, the slope from 1975-2000 for blacks actually increases by 14% compared with 1960-1972: the long-term black population growth rate is higher after abortion was legalized than it was in the 12 years previously (it declines by a similar percentage for whites). [Census Bureau data for blacks as a distinct category do not go back beyond 1960.] In other words, the “effect” of legalization of abortion on population growth is . . . that there is no discernible effect at best, or possibly that it actually increases the birth rate for blacks! So much for “black genocide”!

Notice, too, on the above graph that year-to-year changes in annual population growth rate for blacks and whites almost exactly parallel one another, and the black growth rate is consistently higher than that of whites (0.69% per year higher, on average 1960-2000). If there is a “black genocide” going on, it involves the black population growing almost two-thirds faster, proportionately, than the white population, and both groups being “wiped out”, in response to the same environmental factors, in almost exactly the same way! Note also that both groups show extended simultaneous increases, not just in total population, but population growth rate for periods of 6-8 years following the legalization of abortion. Again, it is a strange “genocide” that results in its “victims” possessing a consistently increasing population, the highest population growth rate of any major ethnic group in the society in question, and extended periods of accelerating population growth during the period of the “genocide” – while exactly the same factors influence the growth rate of the majority population in exactly the same way! (Note: the overall population growth rate trend is downward for both groups, but it always remains positive – both populations are growing, and sometimes increase their rates of growth as well.)

The following graph superimposes the growth rate lines from the one above for comparative purposes. (That is, the graph below is the same as the thin lines from the graph above, with the line for blacks moved downward 0.69% – the average difference between black and white growth rates on the graph above – to superimpose them. The units are on a relative scale, because the absolute numbers have been adjusted in that way.)

As you can see, black and white annual population growth rates changes are virtually indistinguishable (though, remember, the black rate is significantly higher in absolute terms); even the year-to-year change does not differ between them more than about 0.2% in any year. So whatever causes year-to-year changes in birth rates – and thus would tend to depress birth rates for a population undergoing genocide – affects blacks and whites almost identically. Again, it is absurd to imagine this is some sort of campaign of “genocide” by whites against blacks that affects them both the same way (and leaves blacks with a much higher overall birth rate)!

The reasons for these results are simple enough (aside from the fact that abortion is not “genocide”): abortion does not “reduce the population” in the simplistic way these claims make it out. The 25% figure is, obviously, the proportion of pregnancies among black women that have been ended by abortion over the years since Roe v. Wade – a proportion that is virtually identical to that of the national average. But it is the grossest statistical error to claim that this results in a 24% reduction in the total black population that would otherwise exist. (The same error is made by “Freakonometrician” Steven Levitt, with his “abortion eliminates black criminals” theory.) Most women who undergo abortion also have – either before, after, or both – full-term pregnancies from which they raise children. Abortion does not “eliminate” births as much as it spaces them out into appropriate times in the women’s lives. (A theoretical aside: this may provide some empirical plausibility for Peter Singer’s “replacability thesis”.) Whether women who have had any abortions have significantly lower total lifetime fertility than women who have never had one is not clear, but it is mindless to claim that one abortion = one less in the population. It is likely that abortion plays a role in the overall decline in fertility rates in industrialized countries, but even then it is not clear that that role would not be taken up by more-stringent birth control, voluntary sterilization, and other methods of birth spacing, if abortion were not available. So there are few or no grounds for concluding that population growth is impeded by abortion – especially in the face of well-documented trends toward lower fertility arising from other causes – and still less reason to claim that the ethnic group with the highest rate of population growth is facing an “abortion genocide”.

There is much more to be said about this offensive argument: the manipulativeness of it, the open race-baiting, the propaganda and the code words, and on and on. But when the simple factual data underlying the argument are so badly used, and so disingenuously, we can easily know what to think about the moral rhetoric it employs as well.

Suffice it to say this is, if not a new low, at least a particularly shameless low in abortion politics. And that the issue addressed is not even abortion – but mere partisan positioning for vote strength – is only one more outrage in the context of an issue that deserves far more mature and sincere treatment.

UPDATE: I overlooked at first the charming fact that the Cook County Republicans chose to date and issue this press release on the day of Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Very classy.