The slogan, which started as an internet meme following the release of several highly-publicized videos of the killing of unarmed Black men by police officers, soon became an anti-police brutality slogan and later evolved into the rallying cry of a national political movement.
The mantra reiterates a timeless truth and undeniable reality — that the lives of Black people are important. And yet, the political movement associated with these words seems narrow-mindedly focused on the lives of only a discrete minority of Blacks: those who are killed by law enforcement or who are killed by those whose racism is obvious.
Disappointingly, it fails to address a very real violence that targets Black lives — the systemic killing of the Black population through abortion.
Violence and brutality towards Black people has been a sad part of our history. It is one of the badges wrought by life in a culture that tolerated slavery and segregation. Although civil rights efforts have resolved certain injustices against the Black community, there remains work to be done.
According to statistics from the CDC, Black people represent only 12 to 13 percent of the population in the United States, but Blacks account for 40 percent of the babies killed through abortion.
In Massachusetts, Blacks make up 8 percent of the population, and yet the Guttmacher Institute reports that 30 percent of Massachusetts abortions are of Black (non-Hispanic) babies. Although Planned Parenthood claims that its agenda is to make reproductive services and woman’s health clinics available to inner-city, indigent populations, in reality Planned Parenthood facilities are “factories of Black death.”
One does not need a master’s degree in statistics to realize that when it comes to babies in the womb, some Black lives are invisible to the political elite. Black lives don’t matter, and will not matter, until we pay attention to this threat to our existence.
There is a particular moral repulsion that we ought to feel when we think of violent acts that have happened to Black people in places that should be safe. The senseless murders of nine Black people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina were tragic not only because they targeted a group of innocent African-Americans. They were morally reprehensible because they happened in a church, a sacred place, recognized everywhere as a safe haven. Churchgoers expect to find not only internal peace but also a very real physical safety and solace around them.
But the atrocities that occur within the womb are likewise morally reprehensible because they happen in what should be the safest of places. In a womb there is the safety and nurturing necessary so that when life emerges into the world the baby can be healthy. It is in the safety of a mother’s womb where the child’s tiny heart begins to beat, its stomach beings churning food, and its brain waves begin to send signals. It is a deliberate and unacceptable evil to bring violence and brutality upon that innocence. And worse yet this is a government sanctioned legal practice. This is an insidious and hateful practice, and the statistics show that it disproportionately targets Black lives.
We need only watch a documentary on television to revisit scenes of slavery and segregation, where Blacks were targets of violence. A quick glance at our history books will remind us of the 90s when riots in Los Angeles gripped the country as Blacks were nearly at war with law enforcement. We need only browse the headlines on the internet to find another personal video recording of a Black man being brutalized by a police officer.
And we need only pull back the curtains of these mainstream abortion facilities to realize that there is an intentional and targeted violence against Black lives occurring just under our noses. Sadly, unlike violence perpetrated by police or by racist criminals, this violence is defended by the mainstream media and federally funded by taxpayers.
The Black Lives Matter movement rightly seeks to stop violence committed by public law enforcement and the racist attacks of lone gunmen. But should Black lives matter any less in other contexts?
If “Black Lives Matter” is to mean anything, it must include a rallying cry against the likes of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who said in 1939 a letter to a Milton, Massachusetts doctor “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” Black lives matter where Black lives first begin – in the womb.
Jonathan Alexandre is Legal Counsel to the Massachusetts Family Institute.
(Adobe stock photo) 
