A Harvard University professor linked pro-life advocates to white supremacy Sunday on Twitter, drawing a massive backlash.
Ignoring the eugenic history of the pro-abortion movement and the high abortion rates in minority communities, law professor Laurence Tribe claimed racism and opposition to abortion “are linked.”
“White Supremacists oppose abortion because they fear it’ll reduce the number of white infants and thus contribute to what they fear as non-white ‘replacement,’” Tribe wrote Sunday. “Never underestimate the way these issues and agendas are linked.”
White Supremacists oppose abortion because they fear it’ll reduce the number of white infants and thus contribute to what they fear as non-white “replacement.” Never underestimate the way these issues and agendas are linked. This turns “intersectionality” on its head.
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) August 11, 2019
Faced with an overwhelming backlash, he followed up on Monday with this clarification:
Some have misread this to say that all those who oppose abortion are White Supremacists! Learn to read, folks! I neither said nor implied nor believe any such thing. Some X are Y doesn’t translate to all Y are X. Duh. https://t.co/HIsY9TyDxF
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) August 12, 2019
Though he did not say all pro-lifers are racists, the implication was there.
But Tribe’s claims are not supported by history, data or white supremacists themselves.
PRO-LIFE COLLEGE STUDENT? LifeNews is looking for interns interested in writing, social media, or video creation. Contact us today.
While abortions hurt every race and culture, they hurts African Americans more than any other racial group in the U.S. Black Americans have a disproportionately high number of abortions. According to census data, African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but have about 30 percent of abortions.
African-American teenage abortion rates are more than twice as high as the national average. The African American abortion rate is 41 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19, according to a study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute. The national average abortion rate is 18 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19.
Additionally, statistics from the New York City health department show that more black babies are aborted than are born in the city.
Many pro-life advocates, including Dr. Alveda King and Ben Watson, believe this is because the abortion movement is rooted in racism and eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a well-known eugenicist. She described immigrants and minorities as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders” and “spawning … human beings who never should have been born” in her book “Pivot of Civilization.” Sanger also wrote about getting rid of people with diseases and disabilities through sterilization and segregation, describing these “morons” as “a dead weight of human waste.”
Today, abortion rates are astronomically high in the black community, and 79 percent of Planned Parenthood surgical abortion facilities are located within walking distance of black and Latino neighborhoods, according to research by Protecting Black Life.
Prominent white supremacists also have said they support abortion, further refuting Tribe’s claim.
Richard Spencer, who is the best that sad little “movement” has, had this to say in 2017 about abortion and minorities:
“In a way, contraception has been terribly dysgenic in the sense that it is only the smart people that really use it. Smart people are not using abortion as birth control. Smart people are using abortion when you have a situation like Down Syndrome or you have a situation where the health of the mother is at risk. I would say that it is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control, as a kind of late-term birth control.”
And:
“We should recognize that the pro-life movement—this is not the alt-right, this has nothing in common with identitarians, and I think we should be genuinely suspicious of people who think in terms of human rights and who are interested in adopting African children and bringing them to this country and who get caught up on this issue.”
If that wasn’t quite clear enough, Spencer concluded by saying, “Pro-lifers want to be radically dysgenic, egalitarian, multi-racial human rights thumpers— and they’re not us.”
The pro-life movement is made up of people of all races and cultures. We believe in equality and human rights for all, not just for some. Every human being, not matter what their age or race or sex or abilities, is valuable and deserving of basic human rights. That is what pro-life advocates fight for every day.
Fighting to ensure that every baby, born and unborn, has a right to life is not linked to white supremacy. We are fighting for the opposite. Ours is a fight about the value and rights of all human beings.
