The Greatest Violence

February is almost over. We've spent the month asking what black history is, what it isn't, and who profits from the confusion between the two. But there's one question I've been saving for last — not because it's the least important, but because it's the most uncomfortable.

What is the single greatest act of violence being committed against the black community right now? Not in the pages of a textbook, not in the grainy footage of fire hoses and attack dogs, but today, this week, while you're reading this?

It isn't what most people think.

The Numbers Few Dare to Name

Black Americans make up roughly thirteen percent of the population. They account for nearly forty percent of all abortions performed in the United States. Let that disproportion settle for a moment. The black abortion rate — approximately twenty-four per thousand women of reproductive age — runs nearly four times the rate among white women. In states like Alabama and Georgia, where black residents comprise a quarter to a third of the population, black women account for roughly two-thirds of all abortions performed.

These aren't obscure figures buried in academic journals. The CDC publishes them. The Guttmacher Institute confirms them. And yet they generate almost no public outrage — no marches, no hashtags, no cultural reckoning. The abortionist has taken more black lives than any shooter, any lynch mob, any slave ship ever did. That isn't hyperbole; it's arithmetic.

And here's what tends to happen whenever someone raises these numbers in conversation with those who claim the banner of racial justice: the response, almost reflexively, pivots to the children who are born. What about providing for them? What about healthcare and housing and education? It's a fair question on its face — until you notice that it boomerangs right back to the same origin point. A disproportionate number of those children arrive into single-parent households, a crisis manufactured in large part by the very government programs that were supposed to help. Coming or going, the problem rests squarely on failed social policies: on the one hand, funding entities that end black lives before they begin; on the other, subsidizing family structures that ensure the survivors start at a deficit. The cycle is self-perpetuating, and it is a form of enslavement — not to chains, but to dependency.

I should be candid about something. While I frame this in ethnic terms because the data demands it — and because Black History Month is the occasion — my conviction isn't ultimately racial. I care about abortion because every child in the womb bears the image of GOD, and that image does not vary by pigmentation. The horror isn't that these are black children, as though their blackness makes the killing worse. The horror is that these are children, period — and the racial targeting merely compounds an evil that was already absolute.

The Altar Hasn't Changed

Baby sacrifice is not a modern invention. It's one of the oldest evils in the human record. The ancient world had Molech — the idol to which entire civilizations fed their infants, believing that the destruction of their young would purchase prosperity, military victory, divine favor. Scripture doesn't flinch from the grotesqueness of it: "They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination" (Jeremiah 32:35).

The altar has been sanitized since then. The fire replaced with pills, stirrups, and forceps. The idol's name has been swapped for more palatable language: "choice," "reproductive freedom," "women's healthcare." But the mechanism is identical: sacrificing children for what we consider a greater thing to attain. For the ancients, it was harvest and conquest. For the modern woman told she cannot succeed while pregnant, it's independence, career advancement, equality with men — all seeming good desires twisted into a justification for ending a life that GOD alone started.

This isn't conspiracy. I have no interest in painting some grand, orchestrated plot. What I see is a confluence of destructive social policies, ideological drift, and spiritual blindness that has produced an outcome indistinguishable from what deliberate malice would have engineered. And the spiritual dimension is real. Satan doesn't care about the distinction between black and white; he cares about maximizing damage. He prowls like a lion, seeking whom he may devour — and the womb has proven to be extraordinarily productive hunting grounds.

That the infrastructure for this destruction was built, in part, on explicitly eugenic foundations makes it worse. Margaret Sanger, the woman who founded what became Planned Parenthood, was an unapologetic eugenicist who launched the "Negro Project" in 1939, an initiative to bring birth control specifically to black communities in the South. Her own organization has since denounced her beliefs. But the clinics she seeded remain, disproportionately planted in lower-income — predominantly black neighborhoods — commercially accessible to those who ride the bus but conspicuously absent from Beverly Hills and the like. The ghetto, once again, promises care while delivering containment.

What Black History Month Should Mourn

If this series has argued anything, it's that genuine dignity, the kind not dependent on government programs, cultural mythologies, or "progressives'" approval, flows from one source: the imago Dei — the Image of GOD. Every human being is made in His Image. Every human being. Including the ones yet to be born.

A culture claiming to care about black lives while averting its eyes from the single greatest cause of black death isn't serious. It's performative. It's doing exactly what this series has diagnosed from the start: ghettoizing concern into the categories that are comfortable and politically useful while ignoring the ones that demand actual moral courage.

Caring about black lives starts with the womb. Not because black lives matter more than others (they matter neither more nor less) but because you cannot credibly claim to honor a people whose children you are willing to discard. If every black life bears the image of GOD, then the greatest violence isn't the historical injustice we've spent this month examining. It's the present-tense slaughter that not enough folks have the nerve to name.

This is the hill. And it is worth dying on.