A 2023 podcast clip of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, claiming that a Black baby is “probably safer” on the streets of Chicago than in a Black mother’s womb circulated widely online Monday, drawing sharp criticism five months before the general election.
The remark came during a 2023 episode of Ramaswamy’s podcast, recorded while he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, in a conversation with Adam Coleman, author of “Black Victim to Black Victor.”
“One of the points that came out of my dialogue with her was that actually a Black baby is probably safer in the inner street of Chicago in the inner city of Chicago than in the womb of his own Black mother, and I think that that’s actually a problem, and it’s directly the product of what Margaret Sanger envisioned,” Ramaswamy said.
In the same conversation, Ramaswamy asserted that Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, launched the organization with the goal of reducing the Black population. Fact-checkers, including NPR, have found no basis for the claim that Planned Parenthood was created to suppress Black births. Sanger was a prominent birth-control advocate whose views aligned with the eugenics movement of her era, but her push to expand access to contraception also drew support from some Black leaders and organizations at the time.
The clip is not new. It resurfaced Monday after national Democratic organizations, including the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association, shared it, theGrio reported.
Ohio has among the worst infant mortality records in the country. In 2022, Black infants in the state died at a rate of 13.4 per 1,000 live births, compared with 5.7 for white infants — about 2.4 times the rate — according to a Groundwork Ohio report analyzing a decade of data. The report found Ohio ranked near the bottom nationally and that the racial gap had widened over the previous 10 years. Black women in Ohio are also more than twice as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women, state health data show.
Reaction to the clip on TiffinOhio.net’s Facebook page was swift and largely critical. Many readers questioned what Chicago had to do with the Ohio governor’s race and pointed to the state’s own infant and maternal mortality rates. Several wrote that the remark would shape their vote in November. A number said they had fact-checked the clip themselves before accepting it was authentic. Some commenters defended the statement on anti-abortion grounds.
Ramaswamy won the Republican primary on May 5 and faces Democrat Amy Acton, a physician and former director of the Ohio Department of Health, in the Nov. 3 general election. Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, is term-limited and cannot seek re-election.
