FiveThirtyEight is a website that claims to “use data and evidence to advance public knowledge.” Apparently, that mission must be put aside when it comes time to smear the pro-life movement as a collection of racists.
Politics “reporters” Alex Samuels and Monica Potts did exactly that, publishing a piece explaining “how the fight to ban abortion is rooted in the ‘great replacement’ theory.” After all, what better data-driven way to defend abortion than to tie those who oppose it to the Buffalo shooter?
But Samuels and Potts are engaged in projection, and the data and history they refused to use show exactly that.
Quoting the executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, a professor of “cultural sociology, sex and gender,” and two professors of 19th-century and 20th-century women’s health, Samuels and Potts try to argue that abortion was always a racial issue. White men were afraid of immigrants from Ireland and Italy taking over the population, so they wanted to prevent white women from getting abortions. According to their tale, this has continued through to the modern pro-life movement — if our reporters and their experts are to be believed.
Yet at no point do they address the racist history of the pro-abortion movement. Planned Parenthood dominates that side of the debate, and the abortion mill has an increasingly large share of the abortion market. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a eugenicist and racist whose first clinics “were aimed at poor immigrant women,” according to the Washington Post. She then sought to bring abortion to black women in a campaign called “The Negro Project.” Sanger being racist is a fact acknowledged by Planned Parenthood itself, which denounced her “association with white supremacist groups and eugenics” last year.
When it comes to racist history, it’s the pro-abortion movement whose past is more visible in the present. The pro-choice Guttmacher Institute (named after the eugenicist who succeeded Sanger as the president of Planned Parenthood) confirms that the abortion rate for black women is “almost five times that for white women.” If your goal is to avoid having white people replaced, this would be a pretty satisfying statistic and a sign that legal abortion is the white replacement theorist’s best friend.
In contrast, the supposed white supremacists of the pro-life movement want to allow more minority babies to be born, if Samuels and Potts are to be believed. No worries, though, because these two “reporters” have an explanation: “Logic is not the point in many of the mainstream racist arguments around restricting abortion access.”
So in other words, the entire pro-life movement is racist, but they are all such incredible simpletons that they haven’t noticed that they are increasing the share of the minority population. Pro-life pregnancy help centers are taking hundreds of millions in donations from pro-lifers, and they don’t realize they are helping millions of black and brown babies survive, in great disproportion to the number of white babies saved.
Yes, someone really did argue this, and some numbskull editor actually let it through.
No handpicked historian of women’s empowerment or male supremacy can dispute the racist past of Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement, nor can they deny what the data show and what pro-lifers have known for years: Abortion is keeping the country more white than it would be otherwise, and the work of the pro-life movement is helping minority communities grow faster than they would otherwise.
Pro-abortion liberals can’t defend abortion on the merits, so they are reduced to using projection, bad-faith arguments, and implausible, impossible rationalizations that don’t make any sense at all. This is what passes for “reporting” at FiveThirtyEight, at least when they are trying to justify the killing of unborn, mostly nonwhite children.
