During her Monday speech to the 113th NAACP national convention, Vice President Kamala Harris stooped to a new low: comparing restrictions on abortion to slavery.
“You know, NAACP, that our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies,” she said.
As Democrats’ advantage with nonwhite voters shrinks and their lead among white college graduates grows, a subset of black voters’ more conservative views on social issues such as abortion pose a problem for the party. Zolan Kanno-Youngs points this out in a Monday New York Times article titled “Democrats Navigate Nuanced Views on Abortion Among Black Voters.”
“While Black voters remain overwhelmingly allied with the Democratic Party, some, especially older churchgoers, have a conservative streak when it comes to social issues like abortion,” Kanno-Youngs writes.
In the recent Times/Siena survey, 77% of black voters said abortion should be always or mostly legal, 13% said it should be always or mostly illegal, and 11% weren’t sure. By contrast, 88% of Democrats believe abortion should be always or mostly legal.
Fear not, Democrats have a solution to these inconvenient numbers: marketing abortion access as a civil rights issue. The New York Times quotes Los Angeles pastor Rev. Najuma Smith-Pollard, one of the faith leaders Harris spoke to about abortion in June, who believes the best way to reach black voters is “without the word abortion.” Instead, Smith-Pollard says to frame the abortion issue “as part of a broader movement to restrict individual rights, including voting, marriage and control over one’s own body.”
The comparison is insulting, at best. At worst, it trivializes the historic suffering of victims and the hard work of advocates for equal rights. Civil rights and abortion access are built on two very different foundations. Civil rights are founded on the view that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. Abortion relies on the affirmation of radical autonomy, wherein the pursuit of personal desire trumps the rights of others.
Pro-life advocates and slavery abolitionists share the former view of rights. They have much more in common with each other than Democrats can comfortably admit.
History is simply not on the side of the Democrats’ appeal. Margret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s founder, was connected to white supremacist groups and the eugenics movement. Even Planned Parenthood has not been able to escape this legacy. Last year, CEO Alexis McGill Johnson published a column in the New York Times arguing the organization must honestly “reckon” with Sanger’s beliefs.
While it’s correct that black Americans, who account for nearly 40% of all abortions, are disproportionately affected by bans, abortion is killing a disproportionate number of black babies. Restrictions on abortion represent a step forward for protecting rights, not backward. Yet Democrats want to compare polices that spare hundreds of thousands of unborn children from death to voting restrictions and slavery.
If systemic racism exists anywhere, it undoubtedly exists in the abortion industry’s disproportionate killing of black babies. For those black Americans who already oppose the party’s position of abortion on demand, this insulting attempt to win their support by packaging abortion as a civil right will likely backfire.
