Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

SPAKOVSKY And PERRY: Kamala Harris Is Conveniently Overlooking A Glaring Fact About Abortion

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In a speech at the NAACP’s annual convention in Atlantic City on July 18, Vice President Kamala Harris compared pro-lifers and the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, to the slave owners of the old South.

“Our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies,” she said. Harris has the historical reference correct, but has the analogy completely reversed.

It is abortion supporters like Harris who deny the humanity of developing babies, just as slave owners denied the humanity of the men, women and children they owned. It is abortion supporters like Harris who believe that developing babies are property that can be disposed of based on, as she says, “the personal decision” of a woman, one that is “her right to make.”

How is that any different than the attitude of slave owners who treated their slaves like chattel and claimed that it was their right to dispose of them as they willed?

Answer: It’s not.

What is also astonishing is the reverence with which liberals like Harris treat Roe v. Wade, a decision that resulted in the deaths of literally millions of babies, a disproportion number of which were African American and Latino. In fact, Roe v. Wade should really be regarded as the modern equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1857 that denied Dred Scott his freedom.

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African-Americans, said Taney, were “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens” protected by the Constitution. And Roe v. Wade said much the same thing: that the life developing in a mother’s womb deserved no protection under the Constitution.

It is also no small thing that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization that evolved into abortion giant Planned Parenthood — an organization that made palatable the slaughter of innocents by characterizing this activity as nothing more than an expression of one’s bodily autonomy — was a eugenicist of some renown.

New York University’s Margaret Sanger Papers Project acknowledges that Sanger was a supporter of eugenics, a now-discredited practice of selective breeding with specific characteristics, and described her “Negro Project” as controversial from the onset and “constructed in terms and with perceptions that today smack of racism.”

It is also no small coincidence that 79% of Planned Parenthood’s abortion mills are located in areas generally classified as “inner city,” within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.

After all, in the November 1933 edition of “Birth Control Review,” Planned Parenthood’s founder referred to blacks and Jews as “bad stock,” and to her Master Race as a “race of thoroughbreds.”

The NAACP’s historical mission was to “to promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or race prejudice among citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for…complete equality before the law.”

Such equality before the law begins with an equal right to be born and not discarded as waste, which is what literally happens at abortion clinics throughout this nation. The horror of that is indefensible, no matter how much someone like Harris tries to dress it up in noble-sounding language about a nonexistent “constitutional” right.

Contrary to what she says, the “extremists” are not today’s concerned citizens who are trying to protect the unborn, it is those like the vice president who see nothing wrong with killing the innocent.

At the NAACP’s convention, Harris, the first woman and first person of color to serve as vice president, spoke of economic inequities that still fall disproportionately on black communities and women.

What she failed to acknowledge is that, without the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe, many future female and African-American leaders might never have been born in the first place.

Hans von Spakovsky and Sarah Parshall Perry are senior legal fellows in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. von Spakovsky is the coauthor of the new book “Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.