The 43rd anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision showcases what is arguably the greatest failure of black leadership over the past four decades: its unquestioning support for an institution responsible for decimating the black community, namely, abortion on demand.

Regardless of the intent of the abortion industry, by functional standards, abortion is a racist institution. In the United States, black children are aborted at nearly four times the rate of white children.

Among white women, there are 138 abortions for every 1000 live births; among blacks, there are 501 abortions for every 1000 births. This means that blacks are aborted at 3.6 times the rate of whites. Why black leadership does not hold up this fact and decry this injustice is a mystery.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), between 2007 and 2010, nearly 35.4 percent of the deaths by abortion in the United States happened to black babies, despite the fact that blacks represent only 12.8 percent of the population. Conversely, non-Hispanic whites, who make up 63.7% of America’s population, account for only 37.7% of all U.S. abortions.

While black celebrities are devoting their time to protesting the “whiteness” of the Oscars, they simultaneous abet a phenomenon that targets their own numbers for elimination. It is a tragic irony that many black celebrities publicly support abortion and then complain that too few black actors are recognized by the academy.

Although the Republican Party was founded around opposition to the institution of black slavery in America, the black community switched its allegiance during the Great Depression, becoming more and more closely allied to the Democratic Party, and this partnership was galvanized during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Since 1980, African Americans have backed Democratic candidates overwhelmingly in presidential and congressional elections, averaging about 88 percent support.

By their unbreakable alliance with the Democrat Party, however, black leadership continues to uphold an institution responsible for more deaths among its constituency than any other.

The Reverend Clenard H. Childress calls this phenomenon “black genocide,” and has built a national ministry around its exposure. Childress cites an estimate that since 1973 black women in America have had some 16 million abortions, an enormous loss. Without it, America’s black community would now number 52 million persons, he suggests.

It seems only logical that if “black lives” truly mattered to black leadership—beginning with the Commander-in-Chief—they would attack the establishment responsible for the deaths of its members and expend a little effort protecting the lives of unborn black children.

According to an anti-police brutality organization, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 313 blacks were killed by “police, security guards and vigilantes” in 2013. By contrast, in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 138,539 black babies were aborted in America.

The abortion movement, spearheaded by the Planned Parenthood Federation, has been no friend to blacks, despite their rhetoric to the contrary.

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, was a notorious racist and eugenicist, and worked actively to reduce the black population. As part of the eugenics movement in the 1930s, Sanger thought that abortion could effectively cull “inferior races” from the human gene pool.

Sanger chose inner cities as the sites for her first abortion clinics, and still today, 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in black or minority neighborhoods.

Planned Parenthood’s research and propaganda arm, the Guttmacher Institute, was named after former Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher, who was also Vice-President of the American Eugenics Society.

Guttmacher was an advocate of coercive population control, and believed that to achieve a significant and targeted reduction of population while avoiding accusations of black genocide, the involvement of the United Nations was indispensable. “My own feeling,” he said in an interview in 1970, “is that we’ve got to pull out all the stops and involve the United Nations.”

“If you’re going to curb population, it’s extremely important not to have it done by the damned Yankees, but by the UN. Because the thing is, then it’s not considered genocide. If the United States goes to the black man or the yellow man and says slow down your reproduction rate, we’re immediately suspected of having ulterior motives to keep the white man dominant in the world. If you can send in a colorful UN force, you’ve got much better leverage.”

The black community should find nothing here to celebrate.

As a Wall Street Journal article concluded last fall: “[I]f liberal activists and their media allies are going to lecture America about the value of black lives, the staggering disparity in abortion rates ought to be part of the discussion.”

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome