Which black lives matter?

Having asked such a provocative question, I’m going to answer it unequivocally. Yes, of course all black lives matter. They matter not because they are black but because they are human. It is in the dignity of the human person, every human person, each of whom is made in the image of God, that all lives matter, irrespective of color or creed. For a Christian, this is nonnegotiable, which is why Christians oppose the killing of babies in the womb, or the killing of the old and infirm. If every person possesses, in his very being, this God-given dignity, we have absolutely no right to treat any person in an inhumane manner, whether they are black, white or any shade in between.

The problem is not whether black lives matter in this unequivocal, objective sense but in the fact that black lives don’t seem to matter to some people. Apart from the controversy surrounding the killing of young black men by the police, we might think of the shooting of nine black Christians in Charleston by Dylann Roof. It is, however, unlikely that we would think about the horrific abortion rate among blacks in the United States. Do these black lives matter?

They matter to South African Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, who referred to the number of black lives snubbed out in the womb as “genocide.” Quoting statistics from Planned Parenthood’s own Guttmacher Institute, Napier noted that since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision more than 57 million babies have been legally aborted in the United States. He then went on to lament that some 31% of those 57 million babies have been black. In other words, to put the matter bluntly, 18 million black lives didn’t matter. Cardinal Napier observed that such a figure “starts looking like a genocide when one factors in that Black women make up only 13% of the total number of women in the USA.”

Let’s look at the figures a little more closely before we discuss whether it is fair to label this horrific state of affairs as “genocide,” i.e., racist.

Currently in the United States, black children are aborted at nearly four times the rate of white children. Among white women, there are 138 abortions for every 1000 live births; among blacks, there are 501 abortions for every 1000 births. This means that blacks are aborted at 3.6 times the rate of whites. This is the raw data which Cardinal Napier employs to make his claim that the abortion industry represents a genocidal attack upon the black population.

And yet who is ultimately responsible for these horrific figures? Did anyone force the black women to kill their own babies? Can we really believe that those who support Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry, the so-called pro-choice movement, are racists? Do Hillary Clinton and others of her ilk rejoice that black babies are being killed in disproportionate numbers? Clearly not. It’s not genocide because it’s not racist. The fact is that the lives of the 18 million black babies didn’t matter to their parents, nor did they matter to those who support abortion. Their lives didn’t matter, not because they were black but because their humanity didn’t matter. Their parents didn’t care about their dignity as human persons, nor did their human dignity matter to those in the abortion industry who made the killing of the babies so easy and convenient for those black women wishing to “choose” infanticide.

On a related theme, what are we to make of recent figures which show that 75% of those murdered in Chicago are black and that 71% of murderers are also black? Don’t such figures indicate that the black lives of murder victims don’t seem to matter to the black thugs who murdered them? Once again, the problem is not one of racism but of inhumanity.

And yet there is a link between the inhumanity of racism and the inhumanity of abortion in the roots of the abortion industry. Margaret Sanger, as a leading member of the American Eugenics Society and a founding member of the American Birth Control League, forerunner of Planned Parenthood, preached and sought to practice the same sort of racial purification programs as those practiced by the Nazis. As editor of Birth Control Review, Sanger published headlines such as “More Children for the Fit. Less for the Unfit.” As for whom she considered to be the unfit, she was happy to proclaim it from the housetops with brazen chutzpah: “Hebrews, Slavs, Catholics, and Negroes.” She deliberately set up her first birth control clinics in immigrant neighborhoods and openly advocated that those considered “unfit” should be made to apply to the government for permission to have children “as immigrants have to apply for visas.” Considering Sanger’s position, it is not surprising that Nazi scientists from Germany were invited to publish articles in the Birth Control Review that she edited, nor that members of Sanger’s American Birth Control League visited Nazi Germany and sat in on sessions of the Supreme Eugenics Court, returning to the United States with glowing reports of how the Sterilization Law was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

Is it any wonder that Planned Parenthood, having its roots in such racist barbarism, should be happy to sell the body parts of butchered babies?

Regardless of whether today’s supporters of Planned Parenthood would endorse the views of Margaret Sanger and her Nazi allies, the fact is that Nazis and Feminazis share the same contempt for human life and the same willingness to butcher millions on the altar of political ideology. It is also ironic that black lives don’t matter to either the racist founder of Planned Parenthood or to her anti-racist heirs. As today’s sisters of death sacrifice black babies on the altar erected to “choice,” one might be tempted to imagine Margaret Sanger smiling sadistically from whichever circle of hell she finds herself. Since, however, we should not presume God’s judgment, any more than we should presume His mercy, we should not desire to pass sentence on Sanger’s immortal soul. We can, however, pass judgment on the living legacy of death she has helped to put in place. Today, exercising their rights as women to kill their own children, millions of black women have freely chosen to illustrate that, for them at least, black lives don’t matter.