Catholic Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier
of Durban, South Africa. (AP)
(CNSNews.com) – Looking at the percentage of black babies killed by abortion in the United States each year, which is nearly 37%, in proportion to the overall black population of the United States, which is 13%, Catholic Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of South Africa said the numbers look “like a genocide,” in a tweet posted on July 1.
In three tweets (see below), Cardinal Napier references the Guttmacher Institute’s data on abortions. The Guttmacher Institute is a family planning group established in 1968.
In his first tweet on July 1, Cardinal Napier notes that Guttmacher estimates the number of abortions in the United States since 1973 as 57 million, and asks, “Isn’t this something we should be apologizing for?”
The Guttmacher fact sheet online claims there were 53 million legal abortions between 1973 and 2011. But Guttmacher notes that 1.06 million babies were killed in 2011 alone. If 1 million babies were aborted each year -- on average -- since 2011, then it approximates the 57 million cited by the cardinal.
In his second tweet, Cardinal Sarah says that of the 57 million babies aborted since 1973, “ +/- 31% have been black! Isn’t that something we should be apologizing for?”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and reported by CNSNews.com, the latest data show that 148,971 black babies were killed by abortion in 2012 in the 26 states that reported their abortions by race or ethnicity. The total by race and ethnicity (in 26 states only) was 405,795 abortions.
Thus, the percentage of black babies killed by abortion out of the known total was 36.7% -- 148,971 out of 405,795. That’s pretty close to the cardinal’s number – and that’s only for the data available. Not all states report their abortions to the CDC and not all states break down their abortions by race and ethnicity.
In his third tweet, Cardinal Napier states, “That figure starts looking like a genocide when one factors in that Black women make up only 13% of total number of women in USA.” According to the Census Bureau, black women comprise approximately 13% of the U.S. population.
Overal, Cardinal Napier’s numbers are in line with official data. Also, as CNSNews.com has reported, using CDC and Guttmacher data, 55.4% of all aborted babies in the United States are black or Hispanic.
Combined, blacks and Hispanics make up 30.6% of the population, yet 55.4% of the abortions reported by race were of black and Hispanic babies.
Also, the number of blacks killed by abortion since 1990 alone equals 4.4 million, which is equal to 11% of the U.S. black population.
In addition, in New York City, 76.4% of the babies aborted are black or Hispanic. Blacks make up 25.5% of the NYC population and Hispanics comprise 28.6% of the population.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, defines genocide as the following:
“ … any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
