WASHINGTON, June 6 /Christian Newswire/ — Dr. Alveda King, Pastoral Associate of Priests for Life and niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., today responded to the remarks of Senator Barack Obama, who said that “quiet riots” take place in black neighborhoods every day because of hopelessness.
“Senator Obama may know of the ‘quiet riots’ coming from the black community,” said Dr. King, “but he doesn’t understand their source. Seventeen million black babies have been killed by abortion and the cries of those children, their mothers, and their families are what Senator Obama is hearing. I invite him to listen to those cries more clearly and compassionately. I pray he will realize that hopelessness and despair are only deepened by aborting those who are the future.”
Priests for Life is the nation’s largest Catholic pro-life organization dedicated to ending abortion and euthanasia. For more information, visit www.priestsforlife.org.
Dr. King has it backwards. The despair in the African American community isn’t the result of abortion – abortion in the African American community is the result of despair.
A number of social research studies have disclosed an inverse relationship between abortion rates and income level, that is as income levels fall, abortion rates per capita increase. Intuitively we know this makes sense. Men without jobs are less likely to marry. Expectant mothers without husbands are less likely to feel economically secure. Economically insecure women are less likely to feel capable of caring for a child.
Abortion and Barack Obama’s “quiet riots” both originate in the same sense of hopelessness.
Link
However, Dean, consider the possibility that abortion also contributes to this hopelessness, causing a downward spiral? Dean Scourtes, do you think money is the only motivating factor for people? As for the birth of the babies in the first place, why are these women sleeping around?
Dean – Actually you are posing a fascinating social research question.
No, income isn’t the only explanatory variable related to rates of abortion, but the fact that there are differences betwen income groups tells us that it is certainly one of the strongest.
The fact that abortion occurs in all income levels, however, tells us that there are other variables which also drive abortion rates. There is some sort of ANOVA or Multi-Variate statistical analysis which would employed to emprically study this. I’ll get more information and provide an additional response later.
Note 2. JBL writes:
JBL, you probably know this but for the benefit of those who don’t: The Allan Guttmacher Institute is the ostensible “research” arm of Planned Parenthood. It reality it’s their market research arm. As a result, most PP abortuaries are located in or near black neighborhoods. More money there. PP aborted the 10 million mentioned in the quote above.
Father: I suspect you are correct. I’m increasingly coming to believe that truly “objective” research is a rare commodity indeed. Research grants are a lucrative source of income for academic researchers, and too often researchers are reluctant to generate findings that may displease the organization funding their work. For this reason the relationship between Guttmacher and Planned Parenthood raises all sorts of red flags.
The other Dean got me thinking about how you would set up a study to identify the variables correlated a woman’s liklihood to have an abortion. The ANOVA test compares variation between groups, to variation within the individual groups. For example if you divided voters between blondes, redheads and brunettes and measured voting preference you would find there is more variation within each hair color group then between the hair color groups and you would conclude that hair color is a poor predictor of voting preference.
Similarly if you divided women between high-, middle- and low-income groups I suspect there would be variation between the groups, but there would also be variation within the groups. It’s important to know what variables drive the likelihood to have an abortion within each group. These “within-group” variables could include frequency of church attendence, number of sexual partners, exposure to information on contraception, pressure to devote oneself to a career, the woman’s relationship with her own parents, etc.
It seems logical that income has at least a moderate association with a woman’s likelihood to have an abortion, but that it is also one of multiple variables.
Note 1. Dean writes:
Another white liberal telling blacks what’s best for them. Does the condescension ever stop?
In the 1950’s before Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”, nearly 75% of black families were intact, two parent, households. A generation later it’s reversed.
Meanwhile, the black middle class has prospered at the same rate as the white middle class. What’s the difference? A two parent household. This data is so certain that the most reliable indicator of poverty in our day is single motherhood.
You’d do better to break the death grip of the unions on the schools, get the criminals off the streets, strengthen the churches and other stabilizing institutions, to name just a few ideas to give these single mothers and their children a fighting chance.
One should not under estimate the power of Margaret Sanger’s original ideas on abortion (to cleanse the United States of the undesirables). While despair and poverty have a role, the targeting of the poor and black by Planned Parenthood should not be discounted.
In effect, Planned Parenthood is fulfilling Sanger’s dream of the decimation of the black population.
Hoodwinked: Margaret Sanger’s nation of ‘morons’
The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black Americans