Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In the last episode, we discussed the setting for the rise of the anti abortion movement among evangelicals. We took a look at how evangelicalism has not always held as tightly as it does to abortion as a single determining issue in politics. In fact, there was quite a bit of disagreement as to when abortions were permissible, and some even coming out of Dallas Theological Seminary who said that, you know, it always seemed that kids were not valuable. Fetuses were not valuable until they were born.

They didn't become human persons. We spoke about Christianity Today and some of the the, like, Southern Baptist Convention and and all kinds of different different, things that just painted a picture that is very different than we see today, where it seems like the Christian right is univocal in in their stance against abortion and in their determination of how important abortion is in the sense that it is able to drown out any other significant issue whatsoever, whether that's race, poverty, whatever abortion trumps everything. And we looked at some of the motivating factors for what was able to pull this contingency together, this religious right, and why abortion became so important. And one of the influencers was the fact that during this time in our history, the many institutions who were trying to avoid desegregation had created their own schools and were starting to lose government funding and government kickbacks because they refused to integrate. So we took a look at the influence that race had in this pushback against the government and how abortion was able to be a unifying factor for both churches in the North and South as race would not be able to unify the two.

In this episode then, I want to continue that discussion a little bit by looking at the demographics of abortion, especially the racial demographics. If we're going to talk about the influence of race, I think it would be good to start taking a look at also how races are affected differently in terms of how abortion plays out in the real world. So, let's dive in. In what seems to me to be a a great irony, Jerry Falwell recently denied the racist history of a good portion of the Republican party and evangelicalism. And after he did this, at some point, he ended up also recently donning a mask depicting the Virginia governor in blackface and said that it's the liberals who are actually racists, not the conservatives.

Now, Falwell, I imagine, like most evangelicals, views abortion as a prime example of how Republicans are fighting racial injustice, while Liberals are perpetuating it. And that's because, statistically speaking, minorities are at higher risk for having abortions, and so fighting abortion to people like Falwell and other evangelicals is seen as actually fighting racial injustice, which is targeting minorities. Ignoring all of the things that we could say about Falwell and the evangelical community and its racism, which, just a side note, I'd recommend reading The Color of Compromise, which does a really good job of of kind of looking through racism, specifically in the church. And this is written, I believe it's by somebody in the in the PCA, which is my denomination, a very conservative denomination, that that would be a good resource for you to take a look at. But, yeah, Falwell's wrong.

We've been racist and still support racist policies or just ignore racism, but that's beside the point. Today we're going to look at some of the statistics of abortion and of talk about some of those implications specifically for the church. Just one little side note before I do go in. This episode is one where I feel like I am out of my ken more so than others because while researching, like, abortion and adoptions and and other types of things, it's you can get so many different sources and so many different numbers that all seem to say about the same thing, but numbers change from year to year and some data only goes up to 2010 and some will go up to twenty sixteen. And it it's very difficult, like, with my with my science brain to to get things where it's all all equivalent, all of the data equivalent.

So rather this episode as something where I am just giving you what I feel is something set in stone, this information that is exactly as it is, consider this a moving target because data does change from year to year. And this will be a good jump start for you to kind of look into where to research in the future. So as you want to look up more statistics, as you want to, fine tune your understanding of this issue, I hope that I give you good talking points and research points, but but know that this is a moving target with with a lot of complexity. And so there's a lot of legwork that you're going to have to do. I'm just giving you kind of a broad overview of what I think are some of the major ideas.

Alright, so in 1980 there were a total of one million three hundred and one thousand legal abortions reported to the CDC from 50 states and the District Of Columbia. Actually, I think that was 1981, actually. Now, this is less than a 1% increase over the number reported for 1980. So in 1980 and 1981, that means that there were about 24 to 25 abortions per 1,000 women in The United States aged 15 to 44. Now compare that number to 2016 where you've got about 11.5 abortions per woman in The United States.

And we see that we have a vastly different landscape than we did in 1980 and 1981. So I want to take a look at what I think are some really important statistics from 1981 to about twenty fifteen-twenty sixteen. I want to highlight some other really important statistics, because not only have abortions decreased by over half, but we've got a huge demographic shift as well. First, women who abort are getting older. So we had sixty three percent of women were 25 in 1980, '80 '1, and now the 25 group is about forty one percent.

If we would go back to the nineteen seventies, the early nineteen seventies, it's even more dramatic, going from about thirty three percent of women getting abortions who are 20 to only ten percent who are 20 today. So abortion today is not the teenage escape hatch that usually depicted by a lot of conservatives. It's not this conservative escape hatch, it's something that is happening as women get older and older. And we can certainly talk about the potential reasons for that, but right now we just want to observe. Women who had abortions used to be primarily white, going from seventy percent thirty years ago, forty years ago, to forty percent today who are non Hispanic white.

And that is a change that is not substantiated by or not explained by a cultural demographic shift because we haven't had a decrease in the white population of 30% in the last forty years. So here's what I would pull out of these these statistics so far. It seems clear that the women getting abortions aren't scared white teenagers with the prospect of their bright futures disappearing, but an older group, largely above 25, a group of minorities. And since sexual activity hasn't really decreased over the decades, although the amount of partners has, we've got something that needs to be explained here as to why this is largely affecting minorities when it didn't used to. Now the conservative explanation is going to be that the rise in minority abortions is malicious, and it's it's malicious on the part of liberals.

C, they say, those liberals claim that they they love diversity and they are for minorities, but they're the ones pushing this agenda that seeks to kill minority children. And they often point to, like, Margaret Sanger back in the day and her desire to I think she was on board with Eugenics and such, and her desire to get rid of minorities as as far as the claim goes. And so they they say that this is the current modern day liberal agenda. There there are a number of problems with this, and I want to to point those out. So first of all, this this narrative does not account for the significant decrease in white abortions.

Right? So the total abortions per 1,000 live births in the seventies was as high as three hundred and sixty. Three hundred sixty abortions per 1,000 live births, and seventy percent of those were white. Whereas today, I believe it's only like a 80 abortions per live birth, and the vast majority are not white. So not only has the number been cut by about half the number of abortions, but while the number of abortions has stayed the same, the percentage of white people has has dropped.

So this this narrative that they've it's always been the liberals who are out to get minorities just doesn't make sense because that's not that's not how it was set up. Second, this doesn't fit the the information doesn't fit the conservative narrative of liberals catering to the poor because liberals, if they cared about the vote and were just trying to get the vote, they would want more poor babies, not less. Right? They'd want more minorities, not less. It reminds me of Jesus' Jesus', you know, house divided cannot stand against itself.

You really think that that it's in the the Liberals' best interest to cut their voting base? Third, the narrative fails to align with the fact that most liberals are trying to curb abortion via health care and birth control expansion, which tends to be blocked by conservatives. So it seems like the increase in abortions among minorities as a percentage is less about a targeting of minorities and more about a decrease in whites having abortions. Let me explain what I mean by that, and let's look at some data to show this. So in 1980, when you had three hundred sixty abortions per 1,000 live births, and thirty percent of those were non white, the minority ratio of abortions was about one hundred and eight per one thousand.

In 2015, with 188 abortions per 1,000, and now sixty three percent which were non white, The ratio of minority abortions is 118 per 1,000. And so what it seems like we're seeing is that, we don't have an increase in minorities seeking abortions. What we have is we have a decrease in whites seeking abortions because the minority abortion rate is still largely the same. It's it's almost static from the nineteen seventies to today. Considering that minority groups have grown and that the a little bit, and that the white abortions per 1,000 live births fell from two hundred and fifty two per 1,000 live births down to seventy.

There's something else going on. Right? It's not Democrats seeking, seeking to exterminate the minorities. What the non conservatives are going to argue is that a lack of access to birth control is really a huge part of this. Over half of those who abort are impoverished or low income, despite the fact that a lack of access and prohibitive costs make this number lower than it otherwise would be.

The US has a larger share of abortions due to unplanned pregnancies than do many other countries. What I mean by that, because you might say, For what other reason would you have an abortion than an unplanned pregnancy? If a child has birth defects or if their mother's health is in danger and those sorts of things, those are reasons that people have abortions as well. And what some of the information seems to indicate is that there are a lot of other countries, particularly countries like in Europe, that might be on a similar standard of living, where you don't have as many unplanned pregnancies. It's more abortions as a result of unexpected events in pregnancy.

Anyway, so that's what we mean by by unplanned pregnancies. So if that's true, abortions then, at least as liberals would argue, and it seems as the data would play out, is tied in large part to an access to health care, which in The States at least is generally linked to income. And this might explain why a lot of Western European countries with socialized healthcare, despite being less religious, right, they're more pro sex and they're less concerned about a fetus and abortion stigma, they they tend to have lower abortion rates, which seems antithetical to the conservative evangelical argument that, you know, we're a godless people if we accept abortion, yet we're a Christian nation, while at the same time, the lesser Christian nations are having less abortions. That just seems a little bit odd to me, especially considering that those nations are socialistic, which is definitely antithetical to God. Right?

But yet they have lower abortion rates. Why is that? Because when you're in a socialistic country, everybody has access to health care. So most Democrats, most liberals are going to argue that abortion is not ideal and desirable. They don't want people to have abortions either.

And access to birth control and reduced costs are free, especially to the poor, is linked in some studies and data to significantly reduced rates of abortion. In that sense, abortion may be seen as a measure of social justice. Where you see a higher abortion rate, you likely see a less educated populace and a poorer one with limited access to health care. And that's why rates for whites have declined, while not for minorities. The standard of living for minorities and the systemic racism and oppression has had a larger impact on them and their maintaining of their tendency toward poverty.

So in all of this, well, I'm not necessarily advocating birth control as a moral choice for Christians, which which would be a completely separate discussion. And I can recognize the the disparities and its correlation with abortion, and that it's not as simple as just saying don't abort. There's a lot that's going on here in this data that isn't as conservatives want to think it is. These assessments are correct, if we couple this with the tendency of conservatives to be dismissive of racial issues, or at least unwilling to move beyond the surface of the issue to the root, and if we also look at our racially unjust history, again, recommend The Color of Compromise as a great starting point to look at this, then I think conservative Christians, we've got a significant problem here. Minorities are getting more abortions than whites, but that's because whites are wealthier and have better access to birth control, and white people tend to have a bigger cushion.

But conservative policy seeks to limit health care, It attacks education which is an abstinence only education. It pulls kids out of public schools which is where all of the poor kids have to go and largely minority kids are are stuck there. It reduces welfare. The the conservative platform tends to reduce welfare and social benefits for families, and the list just goes on. So from fiscal policy and social policy to moral posturing and a failure to support racial reconciliation and hear out the complaints of people who feel oppressed, conservatives end up fostering and perpetuating an environment where abortions among minorities significantly outnumber proportionally those of whites.

We claim that we have a problem with abortion, but we foster the environment that makes abortion exist. Of course, abortion will always exist when it's legal. That's, I think, that's an inevitability. But, certainly, we foster its existence to the extent that it exists. So what should we do about it then?

Conservatives encourage adoption as an option, but, nope, such a solution is really only a pseudo solution much much of the time. See, the majority of adoptive parents, though it's changing, have been white, and the majority of children adopted is white. National adoption, not foreign adoption, of course. While the trends are changing and always shifting, it's much harder for minority women to find adoptive parents. Now for as big of a problem as Christians say that we have with abortion, and for as laudable as it is that Christians adopt at twice the rate of others in The States, that adoption rate among practicing Christians is only five percent.

So five percent of Christians adopt. Now I was talking with a friend, and and he kind of tried to me and said, hey. Look. Be a little bit more realistic because I think that that number would be higher if it didn't cost so much. And he he explained to me the cost of of even local adoption.

And so I think that is I'm sure there would be more that would that would adopt. But my pushback to that would be, okay, then if it if this is really the Holocaust, we say it's the Holocaust, conservative evangelical Christians say that this is even worse than the Holocaust because we've had sixty million babies killed so far, then why wouldn't churches be pumping as much money as they could into adoption? Why would that not be one of the biggest priorities? It's the biggest priority in terms of our politics and how we vote, but it's not the biggest in terms of how we spend our money in the church. Now if that doesn't strike you as ironic slash hypocritical, I think it should, we give lip service to its importance, but but we're not funding it by and large.

So, yeah, funding might deter families, individual families, but at the same time, it seems like if this is such a big Christian priority, it shouldn't be difficult to scrape up the funding. Now with our standards of living and all the things that we could cut from our lives and the different ways that our churches could spend money, we could easily get money for all of the parents who wanted to adopt. And that number of practicing Christians who adopt out of the holocaust, the modern day holocaust, should be more than 5%. And talking to myself here because we've been convicted that that we need to adopt. I mean, we say that it's important.

We need to do it. We've started an adoption fund, and we're we're putting money into it each month. But I know how easy it is to shift money around and stuff. So I I hope that I can come back in five or ten years from now and say that we we have adopted. But at the moment, I'm one of the ninety five percent of of people who haven't adopted, and I'm I'm one of the hypocrites who calls it out and hasn't done it.

But just to even show how reasonable I think this is, we have had a group come into our church called the one hundred eleven Initiative. And they did this wonderful presentation where they said that, look, with the number of kids in foster care who are eligible for adoption and the number of churches, we have more churches than we have kids needing adoption. If every one church would have one family adopt one kid in The United States, there would be no children in need of adoption. They'd all be adopted. Now if that isn't convicting to the church to consider that we have I don't remember the number, like a 50,000 kids in adoption in foster care or whatnot.

I don't I don't remember the number. But, I mean, good gracious. If we could if we could take care of it that easily, why don't we? And, that just shows you the feasibility. It's not like your church would have to adopt 50 kids.

It's every one church adopt one kid. That's manageable. No excuse. Keeping all of these things in mind, it makes me think back to one of our season one episodes. I think it was the second episode of Romans 13.

And I defended the idea that government is not the ethic for the world, but the church is. And I stole that from Stanley Howard was Howard was would say that. And this I I think it shows the importance of spending our resources on the kingdom, big K kingdom, rather than wasting it on on vying for power, trying to legislate abortion versus trying to set a tangible example to our community that shows them their loving parents who are willing to adopt and that the the end of the line for their kid is wouldn't be an orphanage or foster care, but it would be a family. I think that would say more than vitriol each election cycle. And would certainly do more, not only to change the landscape, but also to change hearts because we'd be putting our money where our mouth is.

Now you probably disagree with me on that conclusion, which is fine. Most people, most conservative evangelicals do. But if you do think that the political sphere is a reasonable way to spend your social, temporal, and financial capital, then let's take a look at what a pragmatism in that sphere might entail. You wanna be pragmatic. Great.

I dis or consequentialist. Great. You do that. I disagree with you, and we've got a whole season on it. But let's talk about what that would look like for you, what I think it should look like.

It seems like access to health care, including and especially birth control and sex education, has a significant impact on the number of abortions. If Republicans would fight for better health care, what might that do to abortion numbers? And what might that do to their respectability and camaraderie across the aisle? If they would work with their democratic friends on health care, And if they would say, the lives of poor people matter to us, and we're gonna show that through health care, what might that do to bipartisanship and the ability to pass meaningful legislation while at the same time reducing abortions. Poverty is linked also with less education, beyond just less access to health care.

But it's also linked to more broken families and broken structures, which leads to higher rates of unplanned pregnancies, children out of wedlock, children with mothers who feel that they can't take care of them, etcetera. If Republicans would fight against poverty, what might that do to abortion numbers? And what might that do to their respectability and camaraderie across the aisle? Republicans seriously addressed poverty. What might that do?

What about, like, zones and structures? Because poverty, violence, and instability are often regional. You can point out zones and cities or regions and states where where these things exist, and many times, they exist as a result of structural or systemic injustice, like redlining or oppressive and opportunistic zoning laws and gerrymandering. What would it look like if Republicans acknowledged systemic injustice and sought to fix the structures which are in place that oppress and perpetuate poverty as well as create it. Republicans are also fighting to keep homosexuals from adopting while only 5% of practicing Christians adopt.

Do Christians really think that the foster system is better for a kid than a gay household? Why don't they say this about most other things they deem sins, like smoking in a household or households of a second marriage? Why are they qualified to adopt while a homosexual isn't? Or what about a non Christian household? Should non Christians be able to adopt?

They're living in atheism, in antagonism against God. Should they not be able to adopt? So all of this is just to say that while I understand the desire to outright ban abortion, legislation is multifaceted. Most conservative Christians are fighting against a variety of legislations, which we are confident would lead to a significant decrease in abortions. It seems to me that we should be pursuing every avenue available to decrease abortions, which would include fighting for health care against poverty and doing the hard work of adopting adoption and community work ourselves.

So again, while my political stance might be a bit different in that I'm more convinced of abstention from the political system. If you are going to claim that politics is necessary, to use here against abortion, I think you need to consider what that looks like because it's not just picking a party who fosters the environment which creates abortions. It's it's calling that party to be wholly pro life because by fostering a truly pro life country, that's going to do a lot more for people's hearts and for minimizing abortions than than it is to just try to slap legislation on it. You know, and one of the the great ironies of this is that conservatives are gonna say that while they can't change the heart, they can fight for injustice by protecting the victim. Right?

The the baby. We can't make the mother love the baby, but we can at least create a legislation that will protect the victim. Yet, why don't they wanna embrace higher taxes then? Social programs. Why don't they wanna embrace those as conservatives?

Because they say you can't legislate generosity. That's a hard issue. You can't legislate the hard. Clearly, by that double standard, justice is only applicable if it doesn't cost us anything. We can't change the mother's heart yet recognize that we're protecting a baby through legislation.

But at the same time, we can't legislate generosity because who legislating generosity can't fix the heart. Right? We can't legislate generosity. But it this isn't about generosity. This isn't about who deserves what what money that they make.

This is about justice. Right? We're talking about the poor, the oppressed, those who have been the the recipients of systemic injustice. If you can legislate abortion, you can legislate taxation and, and giving for the cause of justice. You know, we say that we want to stop abortion, but there's something that we want even more.

We want to avoid looking at systemic and structural racism baked into our society, and we wanna avoid giving up our power. That's why we'll fight tooth and claw to mandate that others what others do with their bodies while fighting with the same vigor to prevent those in need from touching our money. Abortion is way more complicated than they're bad and we're good. It highlights the evil and selfishness in us all as I think the last episode and this episode just begin to show. But most sadly, it highlights that we don't really love justice, mercy, and humility.

We want to give to the Lord that which costs us nothing.