What We Do Know, What We Don’t

Kanye West raised eyebrows during an interview with Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson this week when he made sensational claims about abortion in the black community.

Ye—the rapper legally changed his name last year—made an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight after a week full of high-profile incidents including wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt at his Yeezy label’s Paris Fashion Week show and slamming the Black Lives Matter movement as a “scam” on Instagram.

He sat down with Carlson in the extended interview during which he suggested thatdiscussions of the singer Lizzo’s weight and the issue of abortion were examples of “Black death” and “genocide.”

Ye also discussed ex-wife Kim Kardashian, his friendship with Elon Musk and the death threats he received over his support for former President Donald Trump.

Carlson quizzed the rapper and fashion designer about a lanyard he wore around his neck that featured a photo of an ultrasound from a pregnant person.

“It represents life. I’m pro-life,” Ye explained and doubled down on his anti-abortion views. “I don’t care about people’s responses. I care about the fact that there’s more Black babies being aborted than born in New York City at this point. That 50 percent of Black death in America is abortion.”

Social media responded to Ye’s claims with some describing the statistics as “fact” and others such as attorney Michael Corona saying abortion was “a form of eugenics to keep down the black population.”

“Abortion is the silent genocide of black Americans and the Democrats protect it, fund it, and will do anything to force it to continue,” tweeted Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

But others argued it was “not even an accurate statistic” and pointed to research to give greater context as to why Black women have abortions at higher rates than other ethnic groups in the U.S.

“Activists are exploiting and distorting the facts to serve their antiabortion agenda,” wrote Susan A. Cohen of the Guttmacher Institute. “They ignore the fundamental reason women have abortions and the underlying problem of racial and ethnic disparities across an array of health indicators.”

So are Ye’s comments about abortion in New York and black mortality across the United States correct? Newsweek Fact Check looks at the evidence.

What We Do Know

Ye was most likely referring to what is known as an induced abortion, which is the termination of a pregnancy with medication or a medical procedure.

An induced abortion differs from spontaneous abortion, more commonly referred to as a miscarriage, which is a pregnancy loss at less than 20 weeks’ gestation.

In New York State, abortion is legal until 24 weeks’ gestation, and then the procedure is still available to pregnant women if their health or pregnancy is at risk.

According to 2019 data from the New York City Health Department, 20,053 (see page 74) Black women gave birth to babies that year, while 17,665 (see page 71) had induced abortions. The data was gathered by the city’s Summary of Vital Statistics.

Newsweek also checked previous years’ data and found that more Black women gave birth than had terminations in 2017 and 2018.

But that trend was the opposite in 2016 with a little more than 23,000 women having abortions compared to 22,465 births.

The same applied in the years 2013 to 2015, with more induced terminations occurring in Black patients than births in the same demographic.

So Ye was referring to outdated information when making his comments. Additionally, some experts have argued those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Data shows Black women have more unintended pregnancies than any other ethnic group in the U.S. and are therefore more likely to seek out abortions, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute.

The institute also found that Black women’s access to—and effective use of—contraceptives was also a critical reason for the group’s high rate of unintended pregnancies.

“Factoring together the method choices and the real-life challenges to effective use over long periods of time, women of color as well as those who are young, unmarried or poor have a lower level of contraceptive protection than their counterparts,” the Institute concluded in a 2008 study.

Dr. Bria Peacock, a Black gynecologist, also rejected the idea that abortion statistics point to a “black genocide.”

She slammed it as building a “false narrative” and described “the young women of my community whose lives are forever changed by a lack of choice.”

Peacock pointed to the history of “Black reproductive exploitation,” which could be traced back for centuries and which relied on “the policing of Black bodies and reproduction.”

“The institution of slavery allowed for intrusion into nearly every realm of Black women’s lives, including the birthing of babies for profit and labor,” Peacock wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Meanwhile, according to Dr. James Studnicki from pro-life lobby group the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where he serves as the vice president and director of data analytics, the issue was a serious public health matter.

“Hopefully, Kanye’s comments spark an honest discussion about the significant and long-term racial disparities in abortion in the United States,” he told Newsweek. “Over the past 50 years, the Black abortion rate has consistently been 3 to 4 times higher than the white abortion rate, yet Black women also have a maternal mortality rate that is more than 3 times higher than that of white women.

“Clearly, higher rates of abortion are not protecting Black women from maternal mortality, yet this is an issue that many in Washington and the media choose to ignore. Instead, they are vitally important matters of public health which should lead to serious study and discussion.”

What We Don’t Know

We don’t know what specific data sets—if any—Ye based his claim on, but it is framed in a somewhat arbitrary set of conditions that don’t necessarily reflect the big picture.

That includes the historical and demographic factors driving this disparity, as well as other variables.

Data could also vary across different ethnic groups and subgroups, such as Hispanic and non-Hispanic Blacks.

And geographic factors could influence the comparison, with some data sets focused on New York City and others encompassing statistics for the whole state.

Arguably, looking at very specific subgroup or location numbers outside the wider context that includes other groups limits the analysis.

Political elements, not fully represented in his reductionist phrasing, also influence the final assessment of his claims.

With that in mind, Ye goes on to make an even more dubious claim, saying that “50 percent of Black death in America is abortion.”

In this case it is difficult to decipher the exact meaning of the statement, let alone establish its validity. One—literal—interpretation would involve a pregnant person who has died from the direct result of an abortion.

But data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows that since 1990, from two to 12 women have died annually from abortions.

In 2017 and 2018, two women died from induced abortions, and in 2016, eight died, including one from an illegal abortion and one unknown cause.

The data does not account for trans men or non-binary people who are able to become pregnant.

CDC mortality data for 2018 does not account for race, but the data showed that 2,839,205 deaths were reported in that year, making Ye’s claim incorrect.

His comment could be interpreted to mean that a major cause of death for Black people in the U.S. is abortion, but the underlying premise of the statement is then misleading, because it would mean defining a fetus as a living person and an abortion as death of it.

While this wades into a highly politically charged ground in the U.S., the CDC defines induced abortion as an intervention performed by a licensed clinician.

It therefore does not include it in its data on causes of death. The proportion of fetuses with inherent disorders and other issues, which would have meant they would not survive even if an abortion was avoided, is also unknown, further undermining Ye’s claim.

According to the government body, heart disease was the leading cause of death for Black men and women in 2018. Rounding out the top 50 percent of causes for Black women’s death were cancer and stroke.

Diabetes and death from unintentional injuries were among the top five main causes of death for Black women. Other than heart disease, in 2018, Black men died mainly of cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and homicide by assault.

Ye’s secondary claim appears to be a variation on a recurring narrative that has been addressed by fact checkers in the past, and deemed mostly false.