Thirty-nine years after Roe v. Wade created
an unrestricted abortion license in the United States, and during the
week when hundreds of thousands of Americans pray and march for life,
all Americans ought to ponder these words—and the kind of country to
which Roe v. Wade led.
It was supposed to be a country
in which women were liberated; it became a country in which women were
ever more the victims of predatory and sexually irresponsible men, left
alone with their “rights” to find a technological “fix” to the dilemma
of unwanted pregnancy. It was supposed to become a more humane country;
it became a country in which morally coarsened pundits can describe as
“extreme” and “weird” the faith-filled response of the Santorum family
to the loss of a newborn shortly after birth. It was supposed to be a
country of greater equality; it became a country in which the fantasies
of those who believed that America was for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants
only, with emphasis on “white,” were realized beyond the wildest
imaginings of the most crazed racists and eugenicists of the 1920s.
These hard truths have too often
been hidden, especially where abortion is widely prevalent. Thus it is
to the immense credit of the New York-based Chiaroscuro Foundation that
it has compelled the New York City Department of Health to itemize
separately abortion and pregnancy statistics in its annual reports. The
2010 numbers, just released:
Of the 208,541 pregnancies in
New York City in 2010, 83,750 were terminated by abortion: 4 in 10.
Among non-Hispanic blacks, there were 38,574 abortions and 26,635 live
births: thus for every 1,000 African-American babies born, 1,448 were
aborted. Those numbers were even more chilling among non-Hispanic black
teenagers: for every 1,000 African-American babies born to teenagers, 2,630 were aborted. The overall teenage abortion rate was 63 percent in a
city where 16 percent of all pregnancies were teen pregnancies.
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