Coming Home

My article in today’s Headline Bistro.

Legislation pending in the New York City Council will go a long way toward turning away women from the doors of Crisis Pregnancy Centers and Pregnancy Resource Centers. More on that in a moment. Given the abortion statistics in New York City, that means the majority of the CPCs and PRCs’ lost clientele will be minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, adding to what is a stunningly frightful demographic winter in the minority community.

New York City is the abortion capital of the nation, with over 90,000 abortions performed here each year, fully one-tenth of all abortions nationwide. According to Summary of Vital Statistics, The City of New York, Table 29a:

Between 1999-2008 there were 922,272 abortions in New York City. Of these:

50,382 (5.5%) were Asian

101, 856 (11%) were White

296,330 (32.1%) were Hispanic

430,515 (46.7%) were Black

These data tell us of 726,845 black and Hispanic babies, fully 79 percent of those aborted in a ten-year period, having been eliminated from the population of New York City.

Since 1970, there have been over 4.3 million abortions in New York City. With 79 percent of those being blacks and Hispanics, that means 3.3 million black and Hispanic citizens are missing from the population. It is a number that is roughly half the present population of New York City.

Looking deeper into the numbers for blacks, nationwide they represent 12.3 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s down from 14 percent ten years ago. In other words, in the past ten years, the black community has experienced a nationwide contraction of 12 percent. That shouldn’t be surprising when one considers that blacks have 37 percent of abortions nationwide and 47 percent of abortions in New York City.

Additionally, the growth of other racial groups and the contraction of the black community can be derived from the Vital Statistics Data on ratio of abortions to live births in New York City.

• Whites have 512 induced abortions per 1,000 live births.
• Hispanics have 686.9 abortions per 1,000 live births.
• Blacks have 1,260 abortions per 1,000 live births.

It is simply an impossibility to maintain a race’s viability when a people are not even replacing themselves in the broader population, and this brings us back to the battle between the CPCs and the Planned Parenthood and NARAL-sponsored legislation before the New York City Council. Planned Parenthood was begun as The Birth Control League by the great eugenicist Margaret Sanger to eliminate what she considered to be “certain dysgenic types.” Chief among these, and the only ones to be targeted as a group, were blacks. Sanger developed what she called The Negro Project. Here is Sanger’s pitch to fellow eugenicist, Dr. Clarence Gamble:

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the 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.

— Margaret Sanger’s Dec. 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. (Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976).

It should come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood operates 78 percent of its “clinics” in inner-city neighborhoods. The demographics of abortion speak for themselves. It should also come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood faces an existential threat by the more than 2,300 CPCs and PRCs nationwide, many equipped with sonogram machines furnished by the Knights of Columbus. When women see the sonogram of their baby, 90 percent decide to keep the child. Hence the push for this legislation.

New York’s proposed law would require CPCs to post signs on their doors and waiting rooms stating that they do not perform abortions, provide FDA-approved contraceptives, or have a doctor on premises when one is not there. This is intended to drive away the many who come to the centers unaware that they provide the alternative to abortion, and who are eventually grateful for having come there first.

The law would impose a five-day shutdown penalty for three violations in a two-year period, and impose stiff fines and jail for up to six months for anyone who would defy the closure order. Meanwhile, abortion clinics will not have to post signs stating when a doctor is present, or any of the dozens of gynecological, obstetrical, infectious, oncological, psychological or psychiatric sequellae documented in the medical literature that follow surgical and chemical abortions.

All of this as the Christian community readies itself for the celebration of a birth long ago to a teenage mother who was also poor, and whose prospects for the future seemed bleak, given her marital status at the time she became pregnant. That birth opened the way to salvation for a world weary from sin.

The greatest sin of our time is this slow-motion genocide that is taking place in our nation. For many of us, this Advent is taken up with full-time opposition to this modern day slaughter of the innocents. We’ll eventually prevail, for as Jesus promises, “With God, all things are possible.”