Twenty years after they first detonated across American political life, comments made by conservative commentator William J. Bennett on his nationally syndicated radio programme, in which he said aborting every Black baby in the United States would reduce crime, are back in circulation, prompted by his continued proximity to theTrump White House.

The original remarks weretranscribed and published by Media Matters for America, which flagged the broadcast at the time. A caller had suggested that because abortion had reduced the number of future taxpayers since Roe v. Wade, Social Security was now underfunded.

Bennett cautioned against utilitarian arguments on abortion, then volunteered his own hypothetical: 'I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.'

The full transcript of the 28 September 2005 broadcast, as published by Media Matters, confirms that Bennett called the proposition 'morally reprehensible' within the same breath. His defenders at the time argued he was explicitly rejecting the idea, not endorsing it.

Bennett told ABC News he was extrapolating from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's bookFreakonomics, which had proposed a hypothesis linking abortion access to falling crime rates decades later. However, Levitt himself later stated publicly that his own analysis was never race-based: in the original Slate debate Bennettcited, Levitt had written 'None of our analysis is race-based because the crime data by race is generally not deemed reliable.'

The political response was swift.Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid demanded an apology. Senator Ted Kennedy called the remarks racist. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said they were shameful. In a letter to the Salem Radio Network,Representative John Conyers Jr. and 56 fellow members of Congressdemanded the suspension of Bennett's programme, writing that his statement was 'insulting to all of us and has no place on the nation's public airwaves.'

The White House, then under President George W. Bush, also issued a rebuke, calling the comments 'not appropriate.'

Within days, Bennett resigned from the board of K12 Inc., the education technology company he had co-founded in 1999. According toEducation Week's reporting at the time, K12's executive committee convened an emergency board meeting to discuss his position, though he stepped down before any formal decision was reached.

In his resignation statement, he said: 'Given the controversy surrounding the remarks I made on my radio show, I am stepping down from my positions at K12, so that neither the mission of the company, nor its children, are affected, distracted, or harmed in any way.' He maintained throughout that his comments had been distorted and taken out of context.

Despite the furore, Bennett never issued an apology. When CNN asked him whether he owed one, he replied, asreported by Slate, that 'I don't think I do. I think people who misrepresented my view owe me an apology.' CNN nonetheless hired him as a political analyst months later, in early 2006.

Source: International Business Times UK