Walter Hoye: Abortion Is the #1 Crisis Facing Black America Today

According to Noah Webster’s 1828 “American Dictionary of the English Language,” “irreversible” defines “that which cannot be reversed, recalled, repealed or annulled; as an irreversible decree or sentence.” In other words, “irreversibility” describes that which cannot be repaired, regained, or undone. As such, an irreversible reality cannot be changed because it is a reality that is impossible to be returned to a previous condition.

Many years ago, as a Black American pro-lifer, while researching the Black American population, I came across a very rare resource and bought the only copy of it I could find for sale. I bought the United States Department of Commerce (Bureau of the Census) report entitled, “The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View 1790-1978.”

According to this report, a statistical reconstructed estimate of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Black women in the 1850s was 7.9 births per woman. Personally, I thought this was a very low figure. As a Black American born in 1956, my grandmother was one of 14 children. Nevertheless, I was about to be shocked.

As my research continued, I learned that 100 years later, in 1950, the total fertility rate for Black women was 3.6. That’s a 54% decline.

As a young man in the 1960s, I marched with my family, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Detroit and in Chicago. In the 1960’s, Black Americans distrusted government and any attempt to limit our population. We feared the motivation behind taxpayer-funded birth control clinics was nothing more than a malevolent effort to “limit” Black political power.

In 1965, at a meeting of the Council of Philadelphia Anti-Poverty Action Committee, Cecil Moore, president of the local NAACP chapter, condemned a Planned Parenthood program in northern Philadelphia because 70% of the population was Black. Moore labeled the plan as “replete with everything to help the Negroes commit race suicide.” In the 1960s, Black Americans knew what Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA) was all about.

Even in a June 2020 letter, regarding the former CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, Laura McQuade, current and former staffers of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York admit, “Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist, white woman. That is a part of history that cannot be changed.”

Nevertheless, on Monday, January 22, 1973, abortion on demand became legal nationwide. Sixty days later in a Thursday, March 22, 1973, Jet Magazine article entitled “Legal Abortion: Is It Genocide Or Blessing In Disguise?” Jesse Jackson warned, “Abortion is genocide.” Jesse went on to say, “Anything growing is living. If you got the thrill to set the baby in motion and you don’t have the will to protect it, you’re dishonest.”

Nevertheless, today, the Democratic Party and Black American leadership in the highest places, including Jesse Jackson, boldly endorse abortion on demand through all nine months of pregnancy and then some. It is more than abundantly clear that Black Americans are diabolically being targeted by the abortion industry.

By 1975, two years after the legalization of abortion in 1973, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) for Black women fell to 2.3 births per woman. That’s a 36% decline from 1950. I can clearly see that Black America is going in the wrong direction.

According to our government’s “National Vital Statistics Reports,” here is the TFR for Black Americans over the following years:

• In 2017 it was 1.824.
• In 2019 it was 1.774.
• In 2021 it was 1.675.
• In 2022 it was 1.460.*

As I continued to do my research, I learned that in order for a culture to maintain itself for more than 25 years, there must be a fertility rate of 2.11 children per family. A TFR of 2.11 represents replacement-level fertility, or in other words, the average number of children per woman that is needed for each demographic to exactly replace itself, generation after generation, naturally. With anything less than a 2.11 TFR, a culture will decline.

Historically, no culture has reversed a 1.9 fertility rate. A fertility rate of 1.3 is impossible to reverse, because it would take 80 to 100 years to correct itself, and there is no economic model that can sustain a culture during that time. In other words, if two sets of parents each had one child, there are half as many children as parents. If those children had one child, then there are one-fourth as many grandchildren as grandparents. As writer Mark Steyn argued, “If only a million babies are born in 2006 it’s hard to have two million adults enter the work force in 2026.”

To make this plain, as a population shrinks, so does the culture.

At this point, I was almost in tears as my research continued, because the news kept getting worse and worse. According to the Population Reference Bureau, which is dedicated to informing people around the world about population, health, and the environment, “Lengthy periods of low fertility have an irreversible consequence. With greatly decreased numbers of young people, there will simply not be enough parents in the future to make a serious difference in a country’s demographic prospects even if there are some modest increases in birth rates. And the prospects for that now appear very dim. Although governments scramble to encourage childbearing, the demographic futures of their countries have been, for all practical purposes, already decided.”

The linear projection above reveals that the Black American population’s TFR is projected to go below 1.3 by 2036. At that point, Black America will be facing “irreversibility.”

As president and founder of the Issues4Life Foundation, I have been quoted as saying, “There is such a thing as ‘Too Late.’ History has written ‘Too Late’ on the tombstones of many.”

As I write this, I am lamenting that it is clear that Cecil Moore was right. “Planned Parenthood’s plan is ‘replete with everything to help the Negroes commit race suicide.”

This is the #1 crisis facing Black America today! As such, it is also clearer than ever before, that there is no way Black Americans can vote for a Democrat in the coming November 2024 presidential election.

*Note: The federal government no longer publishes the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) like they used to, so we were forced to use the data from Pew Research Center using the formula from the National Population and Talent Division’s December 31, 2019 article, “How Is The Total Fertility Rate calculated?” to calculate the TFR for Black Americans in 2022.

This article originally appeared on The Washington Strand.