Does the Context Matter? William Bennett, Secretary of Education under Reagan and drug czar under the elder President Bush, has apologized not for his recent controversial remarks but for media's distorting his remarks. He said plainly, in the first instance:

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Bennett, who is an abortion opponent, went on to say that such abortions would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Black leaders have been furiously indignant, but not necessarily about the right thing. Bennett, for whom I have no fond feelings whatsoever, was not suggesting that black babies should be aborted. He is a foe of abortion-on-demand (as am I and every other decent person), and said plainly that aborting all blacks would be "morally reprehensible".
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But he did say that aborting all blacks would bring the crime rate down. It is that assertion that should be examined to see if context matters. I suggest it does not, but that we need to examine the assertion in itself, not in any "context".
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Would, in all likelihood, the crime rate go down if no black babies were born in this country? And if it would, why would it?
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To think it likely that the crime rate would go down is not necessarily to say that blacks have a special predisposition to commit crime.
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Race and poverty are linked. Poverty and crime are linked. Ergo, to reduce the burden of children on black people would reduce poverty and thus reduce crime. Wouldn't it?
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That reduction in crime would come at the cost of the genetic elimination of the black race from this country (if the 100% abortion rate continued very long and black immigration were not stepped up sharply), and that would entail huge losses to the Nation's cultural vitality; impoverish its music and performing arts; massively adversely impact sports; and change not just the face but also the 'soul' of the United States in myriad ways, some of which we can't even imagine. But black poverty and crime also cost us hugely in terms of economic outlays to the dependent poor, economic losses from theft, and from injury and death to productive citizens (of all races), and the terrible predations upon our civilization by the culture of poverty and violence that ghetto blacks have inflicted upon us.
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I live in a preponderantly black neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, but it is a middle-class and working-class neighborhood free of most of the pathologies of the urban black poor, tho drugs are too easily available in parts of the wider community some distance from my house. My city's mayor is black, the majority on the city council are black, as are many other high local officials, and my Congressman is black. Most things run like clockwork, and the neighborhood is very safe. If you want to be really safe, move to a middle-class black neighborhood, because the neighbors know what to watch for and are intent on protecting what they've got, because they have worked much too hard, to lose it.
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There are, however, vast swaths of the inner cities of this country devastated by the pathologies of the ghetto, and there's no getting over that truth.
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Much of the poverty that drives all the other problems is due to there being too many children for the parental income available to support them. Teenage mothers drop out of school and consign themselves to decades, if not an entire lifetime, of badly paid employment or governmental dependency while they raise their kids. The kids feel deprived, and aggrieved, and strike out to snatch some of the good things in life that other people seem to have but they don't. They're hurting, and they don't care whom else they have to hurt to make their own hurt go away. If they can't change the economic, social, and educational conditions that make them miserable, they can at least dull the pain or forget it, temporarily, by zonking out on drugs. But of course using drugs just makes everything worse when they emerge from their fog.
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If the babies that are dragging down the poor were never born, would the lives of their parents — and especially their mothers — be better, in economic terms? Surely. But economics isn't the only consideration for teenage mothers who choose to become pregnant and choose to bear the child rather than get an abortion. They want security; they want love. They want somebody they can take care of the way they wish someone had taken care of them — whether they can actually take care of anyone, including themselves, or not. They want someone who has to love them and has to stay with them no matter what. And a baby seems the perfect plug for the hole in their heart. So they have babies, and find that they can't support them, can't take full-time employment with a future, can't finish their education, and can't even take the crying and dirty diapers and whining and acting-out of what they hoped would be their little darlings. So they lash out and brutalize their children, who then lash out at others around them in a cascading series of displacements.
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If even one generation of black girls would break the chain and hold off to have children until age 30 — hopefully thru contraception, not abortion — so they could finish their education, find well-paid employment, and achieve the maturity to prepare for motherhood emotionally and by investigating the best in parenting literature and practice, wouldn't everything change for the better?
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One thing is plain. The fierce reaction to Bennett's remarks reveals the truth about abortion: it is a crime against the people aborted. Blacks are reacting to Bennett's remarks as tho he called for killing black babies but leaving white babies alone. That's not what he said, but that's how it was felt.
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So opponents of abortion should use this same argument to clarify the most basic issue in abortion. If the law forbade white women to have abortions but permitted blacks, mixed-race Latinos, and Asians to have as many abortions as they wanted, would that be regarded as an unfair benefit given to nonwhites that discriminates against whites, or an attack upon nonwhites that discriminates against them? What do you think?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,954.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:42 AM