Aborting the underclass - racial and demographic aspects of abortion

National Review, Sept 1, 1989

THE HOUSE has voted narrowly, 219 to 206, to rescind last year's restrictions on the use of District of Columbia funds to pay for abortions. Though the President has pledged to veto any D.C. spending bill that allows tax-financed abortion, pro-abortion forces celebrated the vote as a major victory for "choice."

The measure may also have another meaning. The bill would largely affect the chief rhetorical object of liberal concern, the black urban underclass. One might think that "choice" would mean something consistently libertarian, including the right of the taxpayer not to subsidize the abortionist. But the urgency of providing elective abortion for the poor seems to trump such considerations.

Support for legal abortion is not confined to feminists and liberals. Much of it comes from people with demographic anxieties, some publicly expressed in decorous ta"overpopulation," some privately expressed in the rude language of race. Molly Yard of NOW openly admires the Chinese population-control policy, which includes forced abortion. Faye Wattleton of Planned Parenthood acknowledges that her organization frequently hears from whites who are alarmed by the black population explosion.

Such people don't often vent their concerns in front of the TV cameras, but it's safe to say they are gratified by measures, like the D.C. spending bill, that facilitate visits to the abortion clinic by young black women. Liberal opinion ordinarily insists that racism is omnipresent in America. Here is an issue on which the liberal and the racist is united, but the liberal prefers not to talk about it.