Speaking with the Sun Sentinel, Baxley was recently asked to clarify an incredibly racist comment he made last week, when he used white supremacist talking points to argue that abortion bans are essentially good because the country needs more white people.
“The pro-life movement is multicultural, multiracial,” said Baxley to the paper. “All I am saying is civilizations do die if they have a low birthrate and don’t replace themselves. A new society replaces them. That’s just what happens.”
To be clear, there is zero evidence linking our country’s current low birthrates with abortions. None. Zero.
According to the most recent data from the Guttmacher Institute the U.S. is witnessing roughly 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women, which is actually the lowest rate observed in the U.S. since 1973, which is when abortion became legal.
As the Sentinel points out, there are many reasons fewer babies being born in the U.S., like for example greater access to contraception, and more women in the workforce.
Also, people are just having fewer kids because it’s incredibly expensive to feed and shelter another human. The United States broke the Baby Boomer record for childbirths in 2007, but has seen a steady decline in birthrates since the Great Recession. Kids are expensive.
Also, if Baxley actually cared about reversing birthrates then he would advocate for reasons to have a kid in the first place, like affordable healthcare, increased funding to our state’s crippled public school systems, affordable housing, state-funded daycare, etc.
But this isn’t about facts or reasonable ideas for Baxley, this is about doubling down on racist ideology. As Jerry Iannelli of Miami New Times pointed out, Baxley’s comments last week, to Miami’s WLRN, are straight from the “Replacement Theory” playbook, which is rooted in white supremacy and often echoed in the most far-right circles.
“When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing,” he said of Western Europe. “And it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children. So you see that there are long range impacts to your society when the answer is to exterminate.”
Of course, this is from the same Confederate-loving lawmaker who authored our incredibly racist Stand Your Ground law, and also tried to block a statue from being erected in Florida that was dedicated to the history of slaves, so we shouldn’t expect anything different.
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This article appears in May 23-30, 2019.