For those who think abortion is about the women...

Abortion was never about women.  It was mandated by male judges when a large majority of women thought it was wrong.  Four out of five women who are planning to get an abortion change their minds when see the child in their womb via ultrasound.  And Planned Parenthood knows this.  Most women don’t leave their offices with a smile on their faces, relieved that they got their abortion and glad to get on with their lives.  They leave depressed.  They didn’t get an abortion because they wanted to kill their child, but because they saw no way to raise the child.  They’re being pressured into it by their boyfriends, who threaten to leave them to raise the child alone.  If pregnant women knew that the father of the child they were carrying would be a good husband to them and a good father to the child, most women would never get an abortion.

Abortion is not about the women, it’s about the men.  It’s about boyfriends who want the perks of sex but don’t want the responsibility of caring for the mother and child.  It’s about pimps who don’t want their prostitutes getting pregnant.  It’s about child abusers, who want sex with their daughters but don’t want to get caught having made them pregnant.  If men didn’t push women to get abortions, but instead supported and cared for them and their child, Planned Parenthood would go out of business in a shot.

And abortion is cruel - puncturing the skull of the child to suck out its brains, cutting off its arms and legs in the womb.  We’ve seen ultrasounds of the process and it’s terrible.

We need to stand up and say that we will no longer allow this cruelty in the name of sexual convenience.  That we will no longer drive women to do what their hearts tell them is wrong just because we refuse to be responsible for our actions.  That people need to have sex responsibly, just like they need to drink responsibly and use a cell phone responsibly.  The lives of others hang on their actions.  We need to tell each other that if we have sex we need to be prepared for the possibility that the woman might become pregnant and that man will need to act responsibly and care for the mother and child.  It will be hard now, because we’ve raised a generation of men who are used to being able to have sex irresponsibly, but it can be done and it must be done for the welfare of the women and for society as a whole.

Addressing systemic racism (or something like it).

I read awhile back about a city - I think it was Baltimore, but it could have been any of a bunch of cities, I'm sure - where the mayor is black and so is the chief of police. As the city had a tight budget (as do many cities these days), they naturally funded the police department in large part from the fines collected from issuing tickets. In order to maintain the needed income stream, the police were given quotas of how many tickets they had to write each day. On slow days when a policeman wasn't writing enough tickets to meet quota, he quickly learned that he could go to the poor part of town (which was predominantly black, as is typical in large cities) and pick up people for any of a bunch of violations, such as jaywalking, loitering, trespassing, and the like. These people weren't rich enough to hire a lawyer to get them off the hook, so the tickets would stand, the money would come in, and the policeman wouldn't get in trouble for not meeting quota.

Though the system resulted in a disproportionate number of blacks getting tickets, I'm not sure if it could be called systemic racism - maybe systemic oppression of poor people would be a better description. Whatever we call it, the system is clearly incentivizing police behavior that results in far too many poor/black people getting tickets. In fact the system depended on there being a certain amount of crime so that the police could write the tickets and generate the income, thus discouraging the police from doing anything that would actually reduce the crime rate and so jeopardize their funding.

It seems then that the police department's income stream should not be dependent upon their writing tickets, and police should be evaluated not on the number of tickets they write but on a reduction in the number of crimes reported by the citizens. This would incentivize good behavior from the police, reduce the pressure on them to write tickets, result in lower crime in the city, attract businesses which would otherwise be fleeing the higher crime rates, create more jobs, reduce the number of poor people, improve the tax base for the city, and make life all around better for black people (and everyone else in the city).

This is easily said, but less easily done, as many of these cities have no other funds with which to pay their police. If Kaepernick and Nike used their social clout to help cash-strapped cities find better ways to fund their police departments and to incentivize their police to really reduce crime levels, I'd jump to support them in any way I could. Whether this would actually be addressing systemic racism or not, it would make life better for blacks and reduce the disparity that is evident in how they are treated (even by other blacks) in many cities.