One of the ways conservative evangelicals regularly derail conversations about the value of black lives in America and the effects of police brutality is by invoking abortion rates among black women. If you’ve spent more than one day on the internet among conservatives, you know this is one of many oft-employed by those who assert they are pro-life, in order to make a racial justice appeal. “The most dangerous place for a black child is in the womb,” they say.
One of the defining characteristics of political evangelicalism is claiming the pro-life mantel, but, as has been said many times, one could make a very strong argument that evangelicals are merely pro-birth. The Republican party as it exists today is fully willing to throw me and anyone who isn’t a white man under the bus (or, in this case, Trump train) in order to stay in power. Respectfully, that’s not pro-life, that’s just power mongering.
Here’s the deal: if you don't care about black lives after they are born, caring before they are born is not only meaningless, it's violent and intellectually dishonest.
Such a stance is literally self-deception.
If you claim to be pro-life but you don’t support black lives once they leave the womb, your pro-life position is functionally meaningless.
If you claim to be pro-life but you’re unaware of or not disturbed by the fact that twice as many black babies die in the first 30 days than white babies, your pro-life position is functionally meaningless.
If you claim to be pro-life but you are either unaware of or have no problem with massive racial and socioeconomic health disparities, your pro-life stance is functionally meaningless.
If you claim to be pro-life but you’re unaware of intergenerational trauma, ACE scores, DNA damage, altered neurotransmission, and its effects in black communities, your pro-life stance is functionally meaningless.
Much like white feminism is exhausting to black women, white pro-life movement is exhausting for black women. Conservatives claim to care about black life in the womb, but their rhetoric, their policies, and their indifference to the quality of black life, in the womb and out of it, tell a completely different story.
When we can see that your words and your actions do not align, when you refuse to listen to us or acknowledge the documented disparities that take our lives on a daily basis, when you dismiss our experiences as irrelevant to your superior insight, it’s clear that “pro-life” means something VERY different to white conservatives and black Americans.
If you support the death penalty, which is disproportionately used on black and brown people, many of whom are discovered after the fact to be innocent, your pro-life position is functionally meaningless.
You can say words “I am pro-life in all circumstances” all day long but just because you say them doesn’t mean they are true.
When you believe that it is moral and just for poor people to die earlier than rich people for lack of access to equitable healthcare, you are demonstrably NOT pro-life.
When you believe that it is moral and just for black people to die younger than white people for lack of access to healthcare, you are demonstrably NOT pro-life.
When you oppose policies that allow low-income and working class white people and minorities access to quality healthcare, how can you claim to be pro-life? Do you want the poor and minorities to live but have severely diminished quality of life? Is that how you justify this untenable position? What’s your end goal for people if this is your belief? For them to suffer in poverty and die without a safety net so that you can put more money in your 401k?
This isn’t about your tax bill, this is about the fact that you claim you want people to live while simultaneously holding the position that their quality of life is irrelevant and that if and when they suffer, it's what they deserve.
I do not understand how you can call yourself pro-life when you believe new mothers should be forced to return to work three days postpartum with engorged breasts and screaming perineal stitches because she has to be able to afford rent and formula and daycare. And don’t start talking about how poor moms with no safety net and no paid maternity leave should just breastfeed to save money. You can’t breastfeed if you’re at work and your employer doesn’t allow you time or privacy to pump and a place to store your milk. God forbid poor and working class moms have access to formula paid for by taxpayers so their children don’t starve to death.
I don’t understand how you can call yourself pro-life when you would find it perfectly acceptable that black babies born to unwed mothers die of starvation while their mothers are at work so that you can keep a couple of cents in your paycheck. Without sufficient maternity leave, the time needed to establish a strong breastfeeding relationship is simply unavailable. Do conservatives and libertarians who want to slash all public assistance truly understand that before these systems were in place there were literal children dying? Is that the end goal here? Children being born so their parents can watch them slowly starve because there just isn’t enough formula for the month?
If your retort is “Private organizations and churches should be responsible for the poor,” then ask yourself why aren't said private organizations taking care of the poor right now? If evangelical churches and their parachurch organizations really did provide sufficient resources to expectant moms, these mothers wouldn’t be going through government agencies. Yet, pregnancy "resource" centers refer women to the same social programs that the conservatives and evangelicals staffing those clinics want to see slashed.
In my limited experience, most evangelicals “love” black people in the same way they “love” Nazis -- because it’s a theological mandate for anyone who claims to follow Jesus not because it changes anything about the way they live, engage with their communities, or their worldview. They do it because loving your neighbor is a theological requirement and scripture is clear that hatred of anyone is a one-way ticket to hell.
But, functionally it changes nothing about the way they live, or their worldview, or the doctrines which they espouse.
To be functionally pro-life is to affirm every person as made in the image of God, full stop. Regardless of how they behave or whether their choices meet our standards. We must recognize that there are times when specific individuals or groups need not only equal treatment, but special treatment when they have endured significant, targeted harms.
I recognize that not everyone can “help” or pitch in with every cause they believe in. That is not my standard of measurement for determining whether or not someone is pro-life. I measure someone’s pro-life position in the arguments they choose to fight and how they choose to fight them. If you claim to be pro-life, but you come and start a fight with me when I say Black Lives Matter, your effort to prove me wrong about the value of black lives tells me far more than any rhetoric that you may espouse about life before birth.
That said, if you really think it’s the responsibility of the church to assist then you should be able to tell me what you’re doing to help your church meet these needs. Giving money to your church doesn’t count since churches spend more than 90% of their income on themselves.
Insisting on making any conversation about black lives to talk about black abortion is a tell -- you do not want to discuss system racism because it doesn’t align with your preferred worldview.
When a black mother knows that pro-life only extends to the end of the birth canal, why would someone in her difficult circumstance have any desire to bring a child into the world?