Planned Parenthood did something remarkable this week. You might call it appalling—not necessarily for the substance of the message—but for the context in which it was made. Yesterday, of course, was #blackouttuesday. Anyone with an active Instagram presence already knows as much. And while there was some confusion as to what the precise message was—even at the highest levels—the gist of it was fairly simple. Violence against black lives—specifically, police violence—will not be tolerated. 

In light of the sweeping wave of blackout posts, I got to wondering about Planned Parenthood. Would the largest abortion business in America dare to join the angry and grieving masses by posting that simple black square? As it turns out, they did and they didn’t. Planned Parenthood doesn’t have a corporate Instagram account, but many of their affiliates do. The Instagram account for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund did not post a black square; the IG account for Planned Parenthood Minnesota did. More significantly, Planned Parenthood’s corporate Twitter account issued the following statement on Monday:

We're devastated, grieving, and outraged by violence against Black lives. We must continue to demand accountability, justice, and an end to the inequity that continues to define every moment of life for Black America from the racist institutions that uphold white supremacy.

Whether you agree with that statement or not—which asserts that U.S. police departments are “racist institutions that uphold white supremacy,”  it’s who’s making the statement that makes it so damned duplicitous. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Last year, police officers in the United States killed nine unarmed black persons—and 19 unarmed white persons. By comparison, Planned Parenthood killed approximately 131,000 unarmed black babies (in 2018) and 121,000 unarmed white babies. Think about those numbers for a moment.

Planned Parenthood doesn’t break out their abortion totals by race. They would never be so foolish. But the Centers for Disease Control does. According to Planned Parenthood’s most-recent annual report (2018-2019), they aborted the lives of 345,672 unborn human beings in fiscal 2018. In the CDC’s 2016 “Abortion Surveillance,” which is their most current, they report that 38% of U.S. abortions are performed on black mothers; 35% are performed on white. The race of the fathers is unknown. Based on those percentages, we can deduce that approximately 131,355 of Planned Parenthood’s 2018 abortions were performed on babies with a black mom. An unknown number of additional abortions were performed on babies with a black father.

To put things in perspective, Planned Parenthood kills 14,555 black babies for every one unarmed black adult killed by the police. And while police officers killed more than two unarmed white persons for every one unarmed black, Planned Parenthood kills more black babies than white. Here’s another way to look at it. The police are morally culpable for approximately .1% of all black shooting deaths in America. Planned Parenthood is morally culpable for approximately 41% of all black abortion deaths in America. And while it’s been estimated that police officers are almost 20 times more likely to be killed by a black man than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a police officer, abortionists are never killed by unborn children. Never. They have nothing to fear from the victims they so casually eliminate.

So here’s the question that begs to be answered. Why? Why is our nation outraged by the cruel and calloused killing of George Floyd but largely indifferent to the cruel and calloused killing of nameless black children in the womb? Many will argue that it’s a completely unfair comparison, and maybe they’re right. After all, the tiny black babies who are daily killed by Planned Parenthood are drastically smaller and more helpless than the adult victims of police brutality. They also give up a much larger proportion of their born lives—all of it, in fact. 

Ironically, it is the utter helplessness of abortion victims—their complete inability to speak for themselves or provide for themselves—that fuels our national nonchalance to abortion violence. These are two entirely separate issues, the pundits assure us. Apples and oranges. George Floyd was an actual person, with a family. Embryos and fetuses are just potential people, with no rights of their own. But this is an entirely bogus classification that basic biology knows nothing of. It is only the perpetrators of mass decimation who insist that there is such a thing as a “human non-person.” In fact, the architects of such violence always dehumanize their victims. And such efforts are always reprehensible.

Planned Parenthood can say whatever it likes, but actions speak louder than words. What we do is infinitely more telling than what we say. This is true at all levels, in all realms of life. Talk is cheap; it’s deeds that matter. And lest there be any confusion, none of this is meant to imply that the killing of George Floyd is not a big deal. It is. It’s a HUGE deal. Killing an innocent and helpless victim is appalling—no matter how or when it occurs. But in the struggle to protect all black lives against fatal injustice, we must first realize who the real enemy is.