Rapper and presidential candidate Kanye West called out abortion in the Black community and blasted his critics for getting so “concerned” about him crying over potentially aborting his first-born child.
“I cried at the thought of aborting my first born and everyone was so concerned about me… I’m concerned for the world that feels you shouldn’t cry about this subject,” he tweeted on Friday.
His comments came after a viral campaign stop in which he cried while discussing how he and his wife apparently considered abortion. The emotional display prompted speculation about his psychological health while his wife, reality television star Kim Kardashian West, posted a video discussing his struggle with bipolar disorder.
Mostly known for his career as an artist, West delved further into politics during the Trump administration. He initially supported Trump but later distanced himself from the president. This month, he filed a statement of candidacy with the Federal Election Commission. While he submitted paperwork to appear on the ballots of multiple states, he tweeted that he could beat former Vice President Joe Biden “off of write ins.”
In another tweet, the 43-year-old producer relayed criticism of Planned Parenthood after it attempted to distance itself from its eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger.
360aproko News previously reported on a spate of Black anti-abortion leaders who blasted the nation’s largest abortion provider after it removed Sanger’s name from one of its clinics. “For me, this was kind of like changing the name of Auschwitz,” said Roland Warren, the CEO of Care Net. Planned Parenthood has vehmently denied claims it’s engaging in genocide.
As anti-abortion activists repeatedly have noted, Black babies have long been disproportionately aborted in comparison to their share of the population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed this trend last November when it released its most recent report, which covered abortion trends in 2016.
Despite their lower population levels, non-Hispanic Black women accounted for the largest percentage of abortions (38 percent), while non-Hispanic white women accounted for 35 percent. And out of 1,000 live Black births, 390 Black children were aborted in 2016, according to the CDC.
The abortion rights group Guttmacher Institute, which previously functioned as the research arm of Planned Parenthood, similarly reported that Black, non-Hispanic women saw the highest abortion rate (27.1 per 1,000 women aged 15-44) in 2014, compared to other racial groups. That was nearly three times the rate of white abortions (10 per 1,000 women aged 15-44).
“Over 22,500,000 black babies have been aborted over the past 50 years,” West tweeted on Friday.
It’s unclear exactly how many abortions have occurred in the Black community since the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. In 2015, the Center for Urban Renewal submitted congressional testimony claiming that 19 million Black babies had been aborted in the intervening years.
Abortion in the U.S. has lopped millions of potential years off Black life, according to a study from the Charlotte Lozier Institure, an anti-abortion think tank. The 2016 report found that induced abortion siphoned 25,431,750 years of potential life from Black people compared to 22,721,475 from Whites and 15,479,100 from Hispanics
