Another day, another adventure in GOP minority outreach:
Rep. Trent Frank: (R-AZ) In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say “How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can’t believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.” And we’re right, we’re right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America’s soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?
The best part of this is what we all know is going to happen next- the spectacle of Michael Steele defending these remarks.
eastriver
Wow. Speechl
Incertus (Brian)
Just makes me tired all over.
Bubblegum Tate
That’s been a winger talking point for a while now. “Conservative Christians ended slavery, and now these commie nazi marxists want to keep blacks on the liberal plantation!”
I’m not sure if it’s mean to supplant the “slavery helped blacks because it took them out of fucked-up Africa and brought them to the greatest country EVAH” talking point or complement it.
The best part is how much they complain afterward that black people don’t vote Republican for some strange reason.
merl
Half??? why do I doubt that?
Sue
So, how’s his voting record regarding help for black (and other) children AFTER they’re no longer fetuses? Anyone have any info on that?
Answered my own question. Lots of no votes in there:
http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category.php?can_id=28399&type=category&category=31&go.x=12&go.y=12
Zifnab
Does anyone even want to take bets on whether this asshole is lying? That said, it’s touching to see a rich white Arizona Republican finally standing up for the rights of poor African American women by confiscating their uteruses.
famousmonkey
This is excellent news for conservatives!
rikyrah
you are right…the next fun comes when Steele has to defend this…..
though the MSM let him skate on the Tancredo – bring back literacy tests remarks.
but, the bottom line is that they are who we thought they were.
Mike Kay
The ghost of Jimmy the Greek.
Zifnab
@Bubblegum Tate:
They did vote Republican. They voted Republican in droves. Right up until around the 1960s. Memory is kinda foggy. What would have caused black people to switch parties wholesale in the 1960s? Hmmm… well, I’m sure it’ll come back to me eventually.
Ugh
I think we’ve come to the point that quoting an R House member on, well, anything counts as nutpicking.
Mike Kay
In other news, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak says the Jews would be better off if they were still slaves.
ET
Normally I don’t like to cuss in blog posts but I just gotta say
FUCKING ASSHOLE
And Republicans wonder why a significant number of African Americans think they are full of shit? Seriously.
demkat620
If no one brings it up, who will notice? Its not like anybody is holding these freaks accountable. They’ll just toss out Harry Reid’s remarks as equivocal.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
He’s lying. Abortion rates have gone up for minority women (Latina as well as African-American) because their access to contraception has been reduced.
In other words, assholes like Frank cut women off from contraception and are now complaining that they’re getting abortions rather than being grateful that their Great White Fathers decided they didn’t need those dirty birth control pills, diaphragms, and IUDs.
Mike Kay
Trent Frank insists he’s not a bigot, saying he loves basketball and owns bootleg tapes of “Amos and Andy”.
soonergrunt
I’m quite sure that our own BoB will have something to say about this. Odds are good that it will be at least as coherent, and maybe even stronger as a defense than anything Mr. Steele will have.
GambitRF
The best part of this is what we all know is going to happen next- the spectacle of Michael Steele defending these remarks.
Especially since it will no doubt come complete with his really forced, awkward sounding slang.
“Yo, Trent’s my dog, man! He’s a’ight!”
freelancer
WOAH.
The Atlantic redesign just dumped TNC’s last 50 posts in the top of my RSS feed. Nice work fellas!
Joshua Norton
Life was SO much easier when the kids could just be sold. You betcha!
Short Bus Bully
Holy Jesus Zombie Christ…
The power of their stupidity and ignorance is taking over their evilness. Or is it the other way around? I can’t tell anymore.
cleek
unfortunately, his numbers are probably not that far off.
births in US by black mothers 2006: 576,105
abortions in US by black mothers, 2006 219,598
and that’s with 13 states not reporting their abortion numbers.
Xenos
I tried googling this issue and got the usual flood of unsourced assertions. Given the track record of dishonesty by these fundies and frieghties (these are the same people who claim that using the pill = 12 abortions per year), has anyone heard of the source of this claim?
jayjaybear
Michael Steele: Carrying a lantern on the GOP’s lawn since 2008.
SenyorDave
Answered my own question. Lots of no votes in there:
http://www.votesmart.org/votin…..38;go.y=12
Sue,
Thanks for the link. I was looking for the American nazi party’s rating of Franks, I think he would have gotten a 100%. Even if we didn’t have the astonishing quote about how slavery really wasn’t a big deal compared to abortion, looking at this guy’s voting record confirms his status as knuckle-dragger.
A classic modern member of the GOP.
Da Bomb
Well let me respond in my best bug-eyed chiffrobe busting, hanky-wearing voice…
” Well geez Massa Frank, I’s had it hard since I lef’ off that plantation ov’r 135 years ago. Big Mama, PawPaw, and em’ all haf to work hard a’gin and a’gin. I’da though haf my family died in wars and that rights movement that Martin Lutha the Kang did. But I playin’ into that tomfoolery, it was all those aborshuns that kilt haf my family. Come and save us from our killin’ ways massa Frank. Beings free is bad. Real bad.”
Idiot….
Colette
@jayjaybear: Trent Franks: burning a cross on America’s lawn since 2003.
Anne Laurie
@Joshua Norton:
Patriotic Founding Fathers(tm) workin’ hard to increase their property holdings. Why do the commie liberals hate the small businessmen?
licensed to kill time
All the edit/tag buttons have just vanished for me, anybody else?
ETA – ok, edit is still here but no html tag thingys.
jayjaybear
@Colette:
Guster
No African-American children are aborted.
It’s illegal to abort children.
And impossible, far as that goes.
Mike Kay
BREAKING: Marge Schott has just endorsed Trent Franks.
Midnight Marauder
@cleek:
And even more unfortunately, the logic he uses as a supplement to explain these numbers is wholly without merit, not to mention grossly ignorant and degrading.
I know we’re not supposed to be stunned anymore when these assholes say things like this, but still. This one just makes me shake my head in disbelief. To quote another black person I know that I just shared this story with:
jayjaybear
@Colette: That works, too!
(Third try, dammit…)
Linda Featheringill
Okay. Let us look at this nonsense.
Statistics on abortion by race can be found at
http://www.abortionfacts.com/statistics/race.asp
Statistics on live births by race can be found at
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005074.html
Using the information from those two sites for the same year, I determined that about 5 percent of all pregnancies [total of live births plus abortions] among black women ended in abortion.
That is five percent – not fifty percent.
Idiot.
Yutsano
@cleek: Actually no, the rate is around 28 percent (scary how that number keeps re-occurring around here!) since you divide the number of abortions by the total number of conceptions. So uhh yeah he’s lying his ass off. And yes I did just spend five minutes doing the numbers, maybe I’m just bored.
EDIT: My number is due to small sample size (I went with cleek’s thirteen state numbers). I defer to Linda on this one.
Tonal Crow
@cleek: Even assuming those stats are accurate, when did 28% come to be “not that far off” from “half”? Did you overdose on Bobo this morning?
Xenos
Even if you stipulate to Frank’s numbers, what does he want to do in order to minimize abortion? If women can’t get adequate access to contraception you are going to get a partial reduction in abortion and a huge increase in dead black women. A wave of dead women and girls does not seem to bother Franks much at all.
Tax Analyst
@Bubblegum Tate:
Well, that’s easy…I think poor Al Campanis said it: “It’s just that they may not have some of the ‘necessities’…” to vote for Republicans.
I think you all know some of what those ‘necessities’ are.
geg6
Ummmm, there are no children that are aborted. Those would be fetuses.
And of course, rich white men want black women and their uterii under their yoke. Well, they’d like ALL women there, but figure it wouldn’t be hard to just start with the black ones.
cleek
@Yutsano:
you’ll have to take that up with the sources i linked to.
mcc
@cleek: Focusing solely on the math, by those numbers, and assuming we exclude natural miscarriages completely, 27.5% of pregnancies to African-American mothers end in abortion. (219598/(219598+576105)). I’m pretty sure excluding miscarriages would skew the numbers significantly, but still, that is closer to 1/4 than 1/2.
Kryptik
Sadly, he’s hardly the first guy. Remember the billboard proudly proclaiming “Black Children are an Endangered Species.”
Even sadder, Franks seems to just be spouting the common line in Arizona these days.
cleek
everyone doing the math… don’t forget about the 13 states that didn’t report.
you can’t assume they’re all zero – especially since three of those are LA, CA and IL.
Kryptik
@Tax Analyst:
You mean a summer home in the Hamptons?
@cleek:
Even taking into account the other 13 states, I’d find it hard to believe that those 13 states would have abortion numbers for African-Americans that far outpace the number of actual births required to make the 50% number hold up.
Trinity
@freelancer: I just noticed the same thing via Google Reader. I thought for a moment that TNC must be having one hell of a day!
MaximusNYC
My prediction is a little different from yours, John.
I say Steele will first express strong disagreement with Trent Frank’s comment — trying, in his usual way, to ingratiate himself with his interviewer without really thinking about the politics of what he’s saying.
Then, 24 hours later, he will be forced to walk back his remarks.
Tonal Crow
@cleek: The numbers you quoted show a 28% abortion rate. Do the math.
Bulworth
And here I thought the “problem” was welfare encouraging unwed black mothers to have more children and thus the whole nation becoming a bunch of dependents, etc. I wish conservatives would at least keep their hateful narratives straight.
Chat Noir
And teh stupid just keeps on coming…
I smell a “worst person in the world” nomination.
Tonal Crow
@cleek:
No, but you can reasonably assume that their ratios of abortions to births are similar to the states for which you gave the stats. That’s what we’re doing.
numbskull
@cleek:
If those 2006 data are correct, that means about 27% of African American pregnancies in 2006 were terminated by abortion. I do not know if that is high or low compared to other groups. It’s nowhere near the claimed 50%, but it does seem high. It’s not like an abortion is undergone for grins and giggles. Would be nice if the Congressman asked WHY the rate is this high. After all, some of the women might be constituents. Or does he not understand that constituents are ALL citizens, not just the ones likely to vote for him?
Tax Analyst
@Kryptik:
Well, yes. That would be one of them, I think.
r€nato
Trent Franks served for a while in the AZ Legislature, where he was both fanatical and monomaniacal on the subject of abortion.
Frankly, I’m surprised that he’s kept a muzzle on it for this long. I think someone finally beat into his head that he had to seem like someone more reasonable in order to graduate from the short-bus school at the Capitol.
mcc
Also, again just looking at math, I’m not sure that Linda’s numbers are usable. Her abortion statistics are for 1995. Her “births by age” link… I’m not sure I understand how to read this table. It looks like it says 627,230 african americans were born between 1940 and 2007? Which is clearly not correct (probably indicating I’m reading the table incorrectly) but either way it seems like you would want to make sure you were comparing numbers for the same year.
Short Bus Bully
@ all the Quants:
WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE NUMBERS?
It’s the context of what he is saying that is so degrading and insulting. Who really cares if someone forgot to carry the 1 when putting together his “stats”?
DonBoy
Let’s find out if slaveowners allowed their female slaves to choose whether or not to remain pregnant.
slag
@freelancer: Glad they got that fixed. I wasn’t seeing any new posts in my feed before now. Out of curiosity, are you getting anything but post titles in your feed?
As to the slavery/abortion thing: geg is right. We don’t abort children. Unless by “aborting” children, you mean aborting their childhood by throwing them in jail.
Kryptik
@MaximusNYC:
Especially after Limbaugh comes out in support of Franks and wonders why Democrats are trying to holocaust Blacks away.
John Cole
I don’t give a shit how accurate his numbers are, the idea that this asshole thinks slavery is preferable to anything is offensive.
Midnight Marauder
@Short Bus Bully:
Thank you. Really, the due diligence on the math behind all this is nice, but it misses the larger point, which is the inherently disgusting nature of his rhetoric.
cleek
50% of 576,105 = 288,052
we’ve accounted for 219,598
that leaves 68,457
there were 52,200 in NY alone.
you’re telling me you don’t think CA, IL and LA managed come to up with 68,500, combined ?
i do.
feel free to shut me up.
Tonal Crow
@John Cole: I know the guy’s a GOPer, but the quote you provided doesn’t say that slavery is preferable to anything. It appears to be a (faulty) numerical comparison between the number of people subject to slavery and the number of African-American embryos and fetuses aborted.
r€nato
I just don’t understand why blacks don’t vote GOP.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Bulworth:
Snowflake babies aren’t black because everybody knows that snow is white. The nappy headed l’ chillun’ turn black when they are born.
/wingnut
mcc
I am talking about the math because if I attempt to process the substance of Franks’s statement there are no words, only horror.
Kryptik
@John Cole:
It’s only offensive, John, if you don’t consider Blacks to be “people” unless politically convenient. Which many GOP stalwarts seem to do.
Xenos
Cleek – that means a figure of about 1/3, if the number of abortions is half the number of births. You have to add the two together for an approximate number of pregnancies.
Chyron HR
@cleek:
Just out of curiosity, why do you keep ranting about CA, IL, and LA? Do the people there share some attribute that you find especially noxious? If so, I certainly can’t imagine what it is.
cleek
@Xenos:
you’re right. my bad.
Tonybrown74
@GambitRF:
I f*cking swear to FSM, if that idiotic Steppin’ Fetchit defends this prick, I will go to DC and beat the black off him!
scav
mmm. Servitude is better than something you choose to do yourself. Yup! Land of the Free (R), Home of the Whopper\.
Svensker
@Tax Analyst:
Shit for brains?
Da Bomb
@Tonal Crow: That’s because he’s(Frank) speaking wingnutese which is hard to decipher.
But basically Rep. Frank is saying that the systemic killing, and pillaging of black women, separation and tearing apart of the black family, loss of identity, being treated like subhumans and the subsequent 100 years after the slaves were freed of having inadequate housing, inadequate schools, lynchings and other forms of Jim Crow were way better than black children being mysteriously sucked through a tube out of thin air.
That’s what I got from his quote.
Like I stated earlier, he’s an idiot.
Ugh
He’s not ranting, it’s just that they must be among the 13 states that didn’t report their abortion statistics.
Keith
The best part will actually be when Rush Limbaugh doubles down on those comments and says something worse (in addition to claiming that Franks is right), and *then* Michael Steele starts defending Rush.
numbskull
@cleek:
I may have misunderstood the number provided for 2006. I assumed that they represented birth and abortion numbers for the 37 states that report both birth and abortion numbers, not birth numbers for all 50 states. Sorry if I got confused.
Regardless, at a minimum the abortion rate was 27.5% for African Americans in year 2006. Irrespective of what population is being discussed, given how heart-rending the decision can be and how difficult the experience can be, I would think that the Congressman would be able to express his concern in a more, I don’t know, less assholedness manner. Sorry, couldn’t think of a better term.
LindaH
@cleek: Actually he’s way off If you add 575,105 and 219,578 you get the TOTAL number of pregnancies which is 795,703. So really only about 28% of African American pregnancies are terminated.
The American school system fails again. Nobody knows how to set up a simple math problem.
Yutsano
@Tonybrown74: Can I sell tickets for that event? Especially considering there would be a line just itching to get in on that action? Hell that would make a great fundraiser: Punch Michael Steele for only $5!
Tonal Crow
@cleek: Ah, I see. I misread your initial message.
geg6
@cleek:
Why would the numbers even matter? Are you claiming, like this asshole is, that these women didn’t know what they were doing or were coerced into aborting? Is it not their bodies and uterii and brains that make the decision? And is that not their right under the U.S. Constitution according to the SCOTUS? So what if 90% of all pregnancies of Latvian Americans are terminated by abortion? Are you saying women shouldn’t or can’t make up their own minds about what to do with their own bodies?
Numbers. Because only the numbers are important. Fuck.Me.
cleek
@Chyron HR:
fuck you and your idiotic insinuation.
Ugh
The modern GOP doesn’t do less assholedness.
loretta
I just want to know how many unplanned black babies Rep. Frank has adopted in the last 10 years.
freelancer
@slag:
nope, just titles, No change with the appearance of Sully’s feed, though.
daryljfontaine
@cleek: The point regarding the statistical misconception is that even if the three states made up the difference, and there were 288K abortions to 576K births, that’s still a 33% rate, not a 50% rate. To achieve a 50% rate (to quote the odious Rep. Shitheel, “half of all black children are aborted!”), there would need to be 576K abortions and 576K births, since the claim is not that “half as many black pregnancies end in abortion as end in births.”
That being said, the numbers debate is trivial compared to Yet Another Republican Fuckwit spewing his ignorant bile.
EDIT: Never mind the math, you guys post too damn fast.
D
Bulworth
For one thing, the number of births cited is from 2004 and the abortion number is from 2006.
Meanwhile, some of the states also lacking data in the abortion table are Utah, South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming.
I also don’t think it’s the case that California and these other states don’t report their abortion numbers. It looks to me like this state chart just doesn’t have them. One does not equal the other.
Not all pregnancies lead to only births and abortions. There are miscarriages, etc.
Once data for the same year is provided, it would be worth seeing what the rate is for all races.
In any event, while conservatives won’t vote for universal health care because it would lead to more gubmit bureacracy, they will vote for creating a gubmit bureacracy for the purpose of intruding into the most private decision a person or family makes.
Shygetz
@cleek: @Yutsano: Yutsano beat me to it; the actual number is below 1/3. Also, if you consider that some of these abortions are medical and probably would not lead to a live birth, the real number of aborted viable fetuses is even lower.
@Linda Featheringill: I checked out your links and couldn’t figure out how you came up with your number. The number I got based on the 1995 abortion data you linked to and 1995 data on black births was 25.4%…still a damn sight less than 50%.
It’s amazing how they think that blacks get more abortions because there are more abortion clinics in the inner city. It’s analogous to saying that rich people buy more yachts because there are more marinas in rich neighborhoods.
Tonal Crow
@LindaH: Yeah, but the problem is that cleek’s stats showed 576k births for all states, but 219k abortions in 36 states, with some big ones (e.g., California) not reporting abortion stats.
loretta
There are about 4.4 million confirmed pregnancies in the U.S. every year.
900,000 to 1 million of those end in pregnancy losses EVERY year.
More than 500,000 pregnancies each year end in miscarriage (occurring during the first 20 weeks).
Approximately 26,000 end in stillbirth (considered stillbirth after 20 weeks)
Approximately 19,000 end in infant death during the first month.
Approximately 39,000 end in infant death during the first year.
Approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage; some estimates are as high as 1 in 3. If you include loss that occurs before a positive pregnancy test, some estimate that 40% of all conceptions result in loss.
Approximately 75% of all miscarriages occur in the first trimester.
http://www.hopexchange.com/Statistics.htm
scav
‘f course, if he thought his scarey scarey numbers were reall-io reall-io true-lio true-lio, how happy would he be if they all survived to voting age? mm?
muddy
Republicans don’t generally care much about consent.
mcc
So never having heard of Trent Franks, I’ve been trying to look him up. Two pieces of information that turned up in a cursory Google search, which you may or may not find interesting:
– He is an “associate member” of the “Congressional Hispanic Conference”. Apparently in 2003 the Republican members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus split off and formed the “Conference” as an alternative. WIkipedia’s page on the Conference says that “the Conference is open to non-Hispanic ‘associate’ members who represent districts with significant Hispanic populations or generally support its goals with regards to public policy” and gives a member listing indicating that the “associate” members outnumber the full members.
– In 2009, Franks was one of 40 original cosponsors of a bill called the “Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009”, which would strip citizenship from the children born in the United States whose parents are present illegally.
cleek
@geg6:
holy shit. beat that strawman! beat him good!
the numbers matter because, legal or not, right or not, abortion shouldn’t be common – it’s not risk-free and it’s not a walk in the park. it’s far better to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place whenever possible.
if it was as common as 50% (and frankly even 28% is high – that’s a lot of people!), we’re doing something wrong.
no, fuck your attempt to pin Frank’s thinking on me.
Silver
You’ve gotta remember, a fetus is a gift from God, a glorious, beautiful human being.
Until it exits the womb, when it instantly turns into another goddamn nigger welfare mouth screaming for entitlements from cradle to grave, wanting to confiscate my income for their T-bones and Cadillacs.
artem1s
GOP belief system
freedom to determine what to do with your own body is worse than having your living children ripped out of your arms and sold south.
yikes!
gnomedad
@Mnemosyne:
They’re trying to end the black sperm holocaust.
Kryptik
@Silver:
To quote one of our greatest minds of the past:
“If you’re pre-born, you’re fine, if you’re pre-school, you’re fucked.”
mr. whipple
Holy crap!
loretta
I have a simple question for you, cleek. If you are a woman, how many children would you have if you accidentally got pregnant with every lover you’ve had? If you are a man, how many children would you have if you accidentally impregnated every lover?
You may only have had one lover or spouse, that’s cool. But, if you think birth control is foolproof, think again. There are millions of conceptions due to failed b/c methods. Aside from total abstinence, no method is guaranteed. Not even sterilization.
geg6
@cleek:
Well, I’d agree with this. But you never mentioned that at all, just honed in on how his numbers were just exactly right. Even though they aren’t.
Perhaps before you decide to jump in to defend remarks about numbers that anyone can see, on its face, is a complete lie and distortion, you might want to mention that you don’t subscribe to his viewpoint about abortion and women’s reproductive rights. That way no one would misunderstand. Some of us with uterii are rather sensitive to anyone defending people who want to keep me prisoner to their idea of what I should do with my reproductive organs.
jacy
Either it’s an outrage that all the black babies are sucking up all the nice white folks’ tax dollars, or it’s an outrage that some mythical number of black babies are being aborted. Pick a fucking side.
Fucking racist motherfuckers.
slag
@freelancer: Thanks for the info. But crap. That sucks. What kind of feed is that?
Boots Day
It’s interesting that with all the figgerin’ going on in this thread, most people have come up with numbers that show somewhere in the neighborhood of half as many abortions as there are live births among African-American women.
I suspect that Frank saw a statistic like that, and decided that meant that “half of all black children are aborted.” Because I somehow get the sense that his math skills are on a par with his minority-outreach skills.
bob h
They’re so devastated by the policies of today that they have managed to produce a President, an Attorney General, a Republican Party Chairman, etc.
RinaX
Just saw a diary on this over on teh Kos and commented. I do wonder, though, if I would indeed qualify for cotton duty, or if I’m light enough to have been one of the house negroes. My tone is pretty close to a brown paper bag, but maybe that didn’t apply back in slavery (aka, the good times per the GOP).
Tax Analyst
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
fixt.
Shygetz
@loretta: In fairness, the contraception failure rate when properly used is low…much too low to explain the abortion rate. I think a big part of the problem is insufficient access to affordable contraception for many people, as well as insufficient education in the need for and use of contraception. Abortion should be rare, not for moral reasons but for health and economic ones.
r€nato
@mcc:
Look him up on Wikipedia, you will get a pretty good general sense of where he is coming from. That is: Bible-thumping, “Focus On The Family” social conservative who has served on our state’s Right to Life board.
His district was represented by Bob Stump for like, forever. Bob Stump was pretty much the same as Franks, except that Stump leaned a bit more towards fiscal conservative while Franks leans more social conservative.
Martin
@cleek: Actually, the real question:
Is the abortion disparity a social effect or a genetic one?
Frank is hinting toward the fact that it’s a genetic one – that the only real solution is to take the prospect of abortion away from these poor troubled people that can’t help themselves. Or something like that.
Stats are only meaningful to draw conclusions from – those conclusions are what deserve debate. To defend the stats without addressing Franks conclusion came off at least a bit as though you were accepting his conclusion.
Tax Analyst
@Svensker:
Yes, that would be another one.
cleek
@loretta:
that’s totally irrelevant.
if you disagree with my position that abortion is a big deal and something we should try hard to avoid where we can, then we can argue that.
but i’m not saying BC is foolproof, and i’m not saying it should be the only option, and i’m not saying abortion should be restricted or banned or anything like that. so, if that’s what you want to argue, take it somewhere else.
loretta
@ Shygetz
I disagree that contraception is unavailable and/or unaffordable, seeing as Planned Parenthood and other free/sliding scale clinics are plentiful in the urban areas. I can’t speak for the rural areas. I suspect the lack of using contraceptives is a cultural issue or one of denial.
Contraception is very cheap and often free.
Linda Featheringill
Okay. It looks like you guys found some abortion data that is fairly recent. Good.
Still, there doesn’t seem to be much to support the idea that half of all conceptions in black women end in abortion.
I still say that he is an idiot. And tone deaf. And a bunch of other stuff.
Ruckus
@jacy:
This.
Get right to the point of the matter.
Fucking racist motherfuckers.
This can not be said enough.
loretta
@ cleek
I was merely responding to your simplistic and unrealistic assertion that “It’s far better to simply avoid the pregnancy in the first place.”
Well, duh.
I’m saying that’s not realistic *unless* you are promoting total abstinence or sterilization.
Sophist
He’s a Republican. If his numbers are within an order of magnitude of being correct it’s a fucking miracle, and it gets counted as being a hit.
Soft bigotry of etc.
Joshua Norton
Quick. How many code words for “bigot” can you find in this sentence?
cleek
@geg6:
seeing as i’ve been hanging out here for years upon years, i don’t feel like i need to explain to other regulars that i’m not a fucking neanderthal Republican.
i did the math wrong. a forgivable mistake, in my book.
you chose to pin his thinking on me because i didn’t say the magic words.
given the choice between those two courses of action, i’ll go with “math error” any day of the week.
Silver Owl
Today’s conservative man is an awesome campaign to kill sex drives and decrease pregnancy. lol They are too scary and repulsive to want to screw and even scarier due to the risk of passing their mentally defective gene on to an innocent babe.
SiubhanDuinne
@cleek:
FSM knows I am no mathematician, but the way my calculator works, the total number of pregnancies by black mothers in 2006 comes to 795,703. The 219,598 abortions by black mothers in the same period constitute only 27.59%, nowhere close to half.
I’m late to the thread. Quite likely someone else has caught this. It’s a vile statistic for Trent Frank to be throwing around and those of us on the side of All That Is Good need to be careful we have at least basic facts on our side.
(But as I say, I was never very good at math, so if I’m calculating this incorreclty please someone let me know.)
demo woman
Even if MSM covered this, unfortunately, there are many who would think Frank was right.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Hmmm. Apparently I was never very good at typing either :-)
parksideq
@John Cole: It’s actually worse than just saying slavery is better than abortion. By trying be the supreme regulator of women’s (especially black women’s) uteruses, Franks is not only trying to make a false equivalency between abortion and slavery, but going a step further and advocating for holding reproductive rights in bondage.
Coupled with his stance on contraception, his message to black women (and women in general) seems to be, “we can’t force you to work for us pro bono anymore, so I’ll take the next best thing: your reproductive autonomy.” Douchebag is too nice a term; at least it’s useful.
Kryptik
@demo woman:
If/When Limbaugh gets a hold of it, be prepared for public questions about why Democrats are trying to wipe out African-Americans, from the ‘very serious people’.
carlos the dwarf
Has anyone put together a comprehensive listing of all the racist shit that Republican officials have said in the past few years?
loretta
@ SiubhanDuinne
I don’t think you can just add the abortion number and the birth number to come up with total pregnancies, because that excludes the pregnancies that were miscarried, which statistically amounts to about 25% of all pregnancies.
So, extrapolating that:
Births + Aborted pregnancies + average miscarriages ~ approx. 995,000 pregnancies
219,598 into 995,000 = 22%
cleek
@loretta:
simplistic and unrealistic?
it’s something millions of people successfully do every day. and there are giant non-profit organizations, government agencies and health care groups devoted to helping people get it right. is what they do “simplistic and unrealistic” ? should they stop ? better question: if those agencies and orgs had more resources and more people took advantage of what they have to offer, would there be more or less need for abortion ? or is the abortion rate a static and universal constant ?
Tax Analyst
@carlos the dwarf:
Only someone with a whole buncha free time to on their hands and a strong stomach.
I’m just thinking It might be easier to catalogue any non-racist shit instead.
SiubhanDuinne
@loretta:
Not in Utah.
mcc
So let’s say this is honestly someone’s position. From the perspective of someone with this position, it seems like the idea would be that if one group has distinctly higher rates of abortion than the population in general, then that group is being ill-served, say because they are being systematically forced into economic circumstances that make carrying a pregnancy to term nonviable, or because they are not being given access to or education about contraception that would make an unwanted pregnancy avoidable.
It seems like if this is your position, then defending Franks’s comments does not serve this position, as this is plainly not the point Franks was trying to make or anything like it. Franks is not talking about the root causes of higher abortion rates among African Americans or lack of access to contraception*, and nothing in his voting record I can find indicates that he is concerned with either of these things. Franks is concerned with the legality of abortion– whether anyone anywhere can get a legal abortion at all. Franks makes the comparison to express the idea that having legal access to abortion is worse than slavery.
These are not ideas that come from the same place as any earnest desire to understand or address the disparity in abortion rates among african americans, and Franks is not a person that supporting him or defending his comments will get anyone any closer to understanding or addressing that disparity.
ASTERISK This is a little less ambiguous if you go listen to the video. Incidentally it is sort of interesting because if you listen carefully he specifically makes the abortion-slavery comparison specifically in response to a question about whether making nazi comparisons is disrespectful.
boognish
@carlos the dwarf:
It would be easier and faster to compile everything that Republicans have said that isn’t racist shit.
loretta
@ cleek
No, of course there should be better health education and less “abstinence only” campaigns to help prevent unplanned pregnancies. I’m only stating that accidents happen, despite the best planning and preventative efforts.
Mary
By definition, you cannot abort a child.
bemused
I’ve been trying to decide if these ignorant creeps feel more free to just come out & say what’s really decomposing in their pea brains in our current ugly wingnutty climate or they just get caught doing what they normally do so fast on video or both.
cat48
Ok, he beats Rep. Heller–R, who doesn’t want to extend unemployment benefits because “it may bring back the hobo’s of the Great Depression.” Hobos.
carlos the dwarf
@Tax Analyst:
I ask because I’m really tired of pointing out to my conservative friends and colleagues how racist the republican party is, only to have them point to that one reid quote or biden quote and make a false equivalence. I want to have something to point them to the sheer volume of incredibly racist shit emanating from our Oligarchic party.
Mnemosyne
I still think that Lindsay Beyerstein at majikthise had one of the best constructions about abortion I’ve ever seen:
It’s like a root canal. No one wants to get one and you’re better off preventing it in the first place, but sometimes it’s necessary.
cleek
@mcc:
i am not defending his position. never was.
i was defending his numbers because i thought they were right – but i did the math wrong, and admitted it an hour ago. that’s definitely not the same as defending what he was using those numbers to assert.
please note that my very first word on this thread is “unfortunately”.
cleek
@loretta:
thank you
asiangrrlMN
It’s the same as it ever was. A Republican takes a complicated issue and comes up with a very simplistic moral that is based on racism, ignorance, and stupidity.
Putting aside the numbers because that is not what this rant is about, Representative Frank is simply out of his depth here–if he has any depth at all. And, quite frankly, I find it repugnant that he is willing to trot out crocodile tears for all the poor unborn black babies when he is doing everything he can to block any kind of social safety net for our poorest LIVING children, of which there are a few African Americans. Empty, ugly rhetoric is all this is. Nasty, too.
Tax Analyst
@cat48:
Question: Do you know what a “Hobosexual” is?
Answer: A Bum Fuck.
WereBear
@jayjaybear: Man, I love that one.
The Raven
So, when does he get censured for racism?
We corvids think black is the best color, and will wear it until we find something darker.
Mnemosyne
@bemused:
I think it’s both, and I think it’s partly because their old code words don’t work anymore. They talk to younger white people about, say, forced busing or welfare queens and those younger people look at them like they’re speaking Catalan. So they have to be more explicit about what they’re saying to get their point across.
Tonal Crow
@The Raven:
I completely agree.
Tax Analyst
@carlos the dwarf:
“Racism” is something they will deny to their next-to-last dying bigoted breath. In the actual last dying breath they will throw out a false equivalency, thus allowing them the satisfaction of getting in the very last inaccurate or false word.
Your frustration at this is only mollified by the knowledge that you no will no longer have to listen to that particular ass-hat.
loretta
But they know what “hobos” are. My 8th grader and her friends use “hobo” as a derogatory word for someone who is being stupid. They used to use “homo” but that became uncool.
Most young kids I know are pretty color-blind and are not in the least bit prejudice about gay marriage or gays in general. They would have to be indoctrinated by really bigoted parents to become Republicans today.
And they *love* Obama. He probably has more fans under the age of 15 than any president in history.
asiangrrlMN
@Mnemosyne: I also think it’s because they are becoming increasingly desperate because the way they think is becoming obsolete. I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again: We’re waiting for them to die off. Most of the younger generations aren’t fighting the same cultural wars as these old chestnuts are, and that scares the shit out of these guys. They are like the old uncle who rants at the family gatherings about how it used to be and why everything sucks now–except these guys are in Congress.
BruinKid
@Zifnab: I wrote about that before. The “half of all black babies are aborted”? Pure bullshit. I found where that made-up statistic came from: a blatant misreading of the original CDC report.
Hope that clarifies.
SpotWeld
That may be because the polcies of slavery preemted the possibility of a black community… you see slaves, as property, could be disposed of if they appreared to be doing things like thinking for themselves…
Xenos
@loretta:
And total abstinence can fail in cased of [email protected], coercion, incesst, and so on.
Mnemosyne
@loretta:
I’m pretty sure “hobo” doesn’t have a racial connotation, at least not yet. (Though with the way Republicans have been using it lately, I think they’re trying to give it one.)
I’m saying that all of their old racist code words and euphemisms are becoming obsolete. Look at how many people figured out right away that when Lady de Rothschild called Obama “elitist,” what she really meant was “uppity.”
loretta
472 terminated pregnancies + 1,000 live births + average of 250 miscarriages per 1000 pregnancies = 1722 pregnancies.
472/1722 = 27%
That’s the more statistically accurate percentage.
AxelFoley
Trent Frank can kiss my black ass twice.
Svensker
@Kryptik:
Already happened. I’ve heard it from numerous dittoheads and wingtards.
Xenos
Another critical point for an honest analysis is that of class — I would expect that people in the bottom quintile economically have a pretty similar rate of abortion regardless of race. If so, the conclusion could be that black abortion rates are high because black poverty rates are so high. Of course, there is no known solution to that problem, as far as the GOP is concerned.
loretta
@ Mnemosyne
No, it is probably more related to white bums, guys who hop trains. They are amused by the whole “hobo” thing, carrying around a stick with a rag holding your stuff. The earliest homeless people that rode in boxcars. They think it’s funny.
And you’re absolutely right about this:
Kids today are oblivious of dog whistles and anachronisms about race.
daryljfontaine
@Mnemosyne: Considering that the “cleverer” among the fucktarded are using further layers of encoding for their racism, such as “Canadian,” I wouldn’t put anything past them.
D
Citizen_X
@parksideq:
Well, of course, because if we allowed black women any moral agency at all, then they would be worse than slaveowners.
He’s implying that if black chicks could think, they would be, like, the Hitler of black people, or something. It’s a layer cake of ugly.
AxelFoley
@Da Bomb:
LMMFAO!!!
cleek
i’m gonna go ahead and apologize for ever having stepped foot in this thread.
i forgot my long-standing conviction that nothing good ever came from a thread about abortion.
no hard feelings.
Ugh
cleek:
Too late! Cole is moving your blog to the Mock list as we speak. ;-)
Ugh
cleek:
Too late! Cole is moving your blog to the Mock list as we speak. ;-)
Tonal Crow
Question for ethicists: Is it ethical to sell Republicans into slavery, if you use the proceeds solely to reduce abortions by distributing contraceptives and educating people about how to use them?
Darkmoth
Count me as one who’s somewhat uncomfortable with the sub-debate about the exact numbers. My problem isn’t that we should avoid discussing facts and making inferences, but that these particular inferences (are certain women having “too many”/”too few” abortions) are distinctly none of our business – assuming that we believe in a woman’s right to choose.
WereBear
What is amazing, and is passing by the young people because they haven’t known anything else, is that Roe v. Wade was not immediately opposed.
If you peruse this link, from a Southern Baptist history site, no less, a reader can see for themselves that in 1971, two years before the court decision, Southern Baptists were saying:
and it devolves until by 1987, they are saying this:
and have gone full out rabid on the subject.
Which means it is a political football to them, nothing more.
Tonal Crow
@Darkmoth: As someone who supports the right to choose whether to abort, I somewhat disagree. For one, I think lower abortion rates are, in general, a good thing — assuming that we get there by doing things that reduce the (reducible) factors that bring people to choose abortion (e.g., lack of access to or knowledge of contraceptives), and not by simply attempting to coerce the end result, or by using the process as an excuse to inject religion into public policy. Independent of that, differences in abortion rates can indicate disparities (such as in education, or in access to contraceptives) that we should work to correct.
Also, the debate about numbers serves to increase numeracy, which is a good thing.
Tonal Crow
@WereBear: The rape and incest exceptions never made the least bit of sense under the fundies’ “culture of life” rubric. If you’re going to define a fertilized egg as a child, then it’s a child whether it got there via loving intercourse or via violent rape.
Tonal Crow
@Tonal Crow: Moderation? I guess it’s the word “inter course”? We can haz moderation filter fixes?
Mnemosyne
@daryljfontaine:
Oh, they’re trying, but that’s where the internet and video is working against them. The instant it gets out from their own personal computer and onto the intertubes, the “code” is gone because now everyone knows what the code is.
Mnemosyne
@Darkmoth:
I’m with Tonal Crow — I think that as a public health issue, it’s worth discussing reducing the rate of unwanted pregnancies that end in abortion because it’s better to avoid even minor surgery if you can. You do a root canal when necessary, but it’s better for everyone if you can avoid it altogether with preventative care.
Unfortunately, the US sucks ass at addressing public health issues, because the moral scolds immediately start trying to figure out how to blame someone else for the problem at hand rather than, you know, looking at how they themselves are contributing to the problem and changing that.
Malron
Whenever comments like this are put forth it fascinates me how progressive types wade into these absurd attempts to dissect the statements logically when a simple “fuck you AND your mama, Frank!” is all the intellectual content his statements deserve.
b-psycho
For the record, I prefer ribeye.
AJ
@Zifnab:
They did and they didn’t. Where they had “some” voting rights, blacks voted Republican. Until the great floods of 1927 when the south re-enslaved thousands of blacks and the Repukes (Coolidge and Hoover) let them do it. That turned them into (wary) democrats, and also brought Huey Long to power.
In Chicago they were a minority, but a voting minority. Where one party could not govern because it didn’t have a significant majority, the black vote became the swing and black pols took every advantage they could. A good case of the minority holding the real power.
Great book is “Rising Tide” by John Barry. Digs into all this stuff. Sounds like a dull read, but it’s anything but.
Sophist
To be fair, WereBear, in between those quotes the Southern Baptist leadership was taken over by nuts who kicked out anyone who wasn’t a cartoonishly evil asshole.