As anyone reading this paper should know by now, former Reagan administration Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said on September 28 that aborting “every black baby in this country” would make the crime rate “go down.”
This cheerful thought, voiced by a man once entrusted with the education of all American children, went out over the airwaves to approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 million listeners.
Bennett, of course, subsequently claimed that his comments were taken out of context and, therefore, presumably meant something different in context. Well, here are his comments in context.
CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I’ve read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn’t – never touches this at all.
BENNETT: Assuming they’re all productive citizens?
CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.
BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don’t know what the costs would be, too. I think as – abortions disproportionately occur among single women? No.
CALLER: I don’t know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.
BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don’t know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don’t know. I mean, it cuts both – you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well –
CALLER: Well, I don’t think that statistic is accurate.
BENNETT: Well, I don’t think it is either, I don’t think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don’t know. But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could – if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.
The context does not change in any way the meaning of the sentence by Bennett that has been so widely quoted. It is a new thought that hardly bears on the conversation that preceded it, a bolt from the blue of his apparently sick brain. And he is emphatic on the point, saying he “know(s) that it’s true.” You can’t get much clearer than that.
In case you have’t followed the “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” of his comment, Bennett is talking about genocide. If you abort every black baby – if you commit genocide on African Americans – then crime would go down, says a former secretary of education appointed by a Republican president.
It doesn’t get much scarier than that. Only actual genocide would be worse. And don’t think that’s out of the question. There are documented examples of a eugenics movement in the U.S. that forced sterilization upon African Americans and the mentally retarded to block them from having children.
