Opposition To Late Term Abortion Racist??

On a news talk show on MSNBC the other day, Salamishah Tillet, an African-American woman who is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says if you're white and you oppose late term abortion, that opposition to late term abortion is based in white supremacy and that it’s all based on President Obama being black.  Apparently she believes that prohibiting late term abortions somehow allows white women to have more babies, thus allowing the white population in the United States to grow.  Her statements would be laughable if she wasn’t serious about it.

According to recent statistics the abortion rate by race/ethnicity is as follows:

Non-Hispanic white women have abortions at a rate of 13 per 1000 women.

Hispanic women abortion rate is 33 per 1000.

The abortion rate for black women is 49 per 1000.

So even with my poor math skills, (and I’m no college professor) I can deduce that the prevention of any abortion would actually allow more black babies to be born than white.  Late term is no different.  If white women only had late term abortions it still wouldn’t make up the difference between the rate of white abortions versus black.

So the other thing one can easily conclude is that if white supremacists wanted to grow the white population through abortion they would simply encourage more black women to have abortions.  By current abortion statistics, whites would obviously flourish more than blacks because they abort less babies. 

Some people will say anything to turn a subject into racism.  Abortion is not about race.  There are racial statistics that show the lopsidedness of it but that’s not about racism either.  It’s about actions, consequences and the choices made to deal with those consequences.  The interesting thing about the news show was that the four other people on the panel, plus the host, were all white and none of them refuted Professor Tillet's statements.  Either they agreed with her or they were simply afraid to disagree.

Abortion is certainly not about white supremacy.  Any fifth grader can do the math based on the statistics and come to that conclusion.  That’s what makes Professor Tillet’s statements so blatantly ridiculous.  It’s sad that she’s teaching impressionable young college students.