Northam: Once More With Feeling

It looked for a few minutes last night that Gov. Ralph Northam might resign during the Super Bowl, which would be even better than a late Friday afternoon for burying bad news. It was reported that he was huddling with top aides, but so far nothing has come of it.

Meanwhile, quite a number of people have said that conservatives should stay on the sidelines on this whole matter, because the racism spectacle detracts from Northam’s appalling stance on infanticide. I’ll go further, and say that if taking a photo doing something stupid and offensive 35 years ago now disqualifies someone from public office, then by all means we should find some old photo of Robert Byrd in his (real) Klan robes, and begin taking Byrd’s name off of everything he named for himself in West Virginia. We can store all of those old Byrd highway signs in the same scrapyard with statues of Robert E. Lee that the left is removing from our public squares.

On the other hand, maybe we should work harder at connecting Northam’s abortion-uber-alles position with his racial “insensitivity.” Recall the infamous quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” It may be the case that this isn’t Ginsburg’s actual view (this is what her apologists claim), but that she was merely reporting a wider climate of opinion. I’ll be happy to give her that, so long as it is understood that in fact that view was widespread on the left. Ginsburg in fact later tried to clarify, and tacit admits exactly this point:

“At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth. In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”

And which groups have the highest birth rates?

I went and looked up the data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which serves as the census bureau for the abortion industry. They pointed to data published in the American Journal of Public Health on the demographics of abortions. Here are the numbers of abortions by ethnicity for 2014:

Whites:          358,810

Blacks:           255,630

Hispanic:       229,790

You’d expect the raw numbers of abortions by whites to be higher because the white population is much larger. But black, hispanic, and “non-hispanic ‘other'” (Asian?) total abortions come in at 567,380—about one third more than the white total.

The white abortion rate is 10.0 per 1,000 women; the black abortion rate is 27.1, and for hispanic women, 18.1.

This is probably why Northam likes abortion absolutism so much.

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