Roe v. Dred Scot

Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Day and National Abortion Commemoration Day are almost the same day. Isn’t that odd?

No, it isn’t. The Freakenomics guys pointed out a curious trend. Crime rates started to fall dramatically precisely one generation after abortion became wide-spread and legal in the United States.

Who is it that gets aborted? Or should I be politically correct, and say “what” is it? Mostly minorities. Minority babies. Or should I say minority “fetuses”.

What does such a factoid mean? That the socially conservative policies enacted during the Eighties -- three strikes and zero tolerance and suchlike -- were effective? Or that the criminals who would have been committing those absent crimes had been proactively executed, in the womb.

My vast conservative readership will already know it, but for the growing throng of liberals who flock to these pages out of their great craving for lucidity and gentleness, I will observe that the driving force behind the legalization of abortion was Margaret Sanger. And her major impetus, the reason for her social conscience, was eugenics. Eugenics, for my younger readers, is that school of social thought that would improve the general tone of mankind by killing its inferior representatives. Popular in the early Twentieth Century, reaching its highest expression during the Third Reich. Jews, Gypsies, criminals, homosexuals, mental defectives, syphilitics, Africans. You know, inferiors. This, per Hitler and Sanger.

There was a time when I had the statistics at my finger tips. Another decade. But it’s mostly black babies who get aborted. I have several times made the connection, here. Between abortion and slavery. Fetuses and blacks -- the two groups who aren’t human. Not fully human, if human at all. The Dred Scot decision formulated the idea: a black man has no rights that a white man is bound to honor. Roe v. Wade reiterated it. I don’t actually have a quote for it. It’s just that it’s okay to kill babies. You won’t remember Chief Justice Taney. Or even Chief Justice Warren. The two moral giants behind these two equivalent pieces of judicial legislation. But isn’t it funny, how it’s the blacks, again, who enjoy the full benefit of such decisions?

We might speculate what old time heroes JFK and King would make of what happened to their movements and parties. Kennedy would be a mainstream conservative Republican today. Lower taxes, strong national defense, compassion from government. King would not recognize the torchbearers of his legacy. The hideous reverend jesse jackson, with his extortions and self-seeking and policies of division, would have been an abomination to King. King was a Bible-based preacher, who viewed abortion as the killing of a baby. I suggest that if the great issue of his day were not civil rights -- let’s suppose equality had been achieved -- King would have marched for the unborn.

Whom did he side with, after all? The powerful? The privileged? Or with those who have no voice? Dogs and firehoses are bad enough. It is an affront to every honorable man to benefit from such conditions, silently. We must stand up and speak out and put ourselves in harms way if need be, to stop grotesque injustice. I speak as a hypocrite now. But King was not a hypocrite -- not so that we’d know it. He had his human failings and all, but we do not require perfection. We need courage. And he had that.

Where is our courage? Where is our hero? There are only victims. We stand, silently watching.

As for all those dead black babies who aren’t committing their crimes, Sanger was obviously correct. Society is better off. Who else can we kill early?

On the other hand, maybe if black families were actually families, like with a father, the way it used to be before government social programs destroyed the black community, maybe love rather than death would prove to be an effective preventative measure against crime.

But that's just too simplistic -- an unthinking, unsophisticated conservative answer that requires sacrifice and commitment. I must be wrong.

On an entirely unrelated note, famed liberal actor Heath Ledger was found today dead in his Manhattan apartment amid a scatter of pills. He had a tattoo on his back -- "Fuck the World."


J