The recent national debate about violence and race points us to the important work of two of Family Research Council's lead researchers, Dr. Patrick Fagan and Christina Hadford.  Their report is titled "The State of the Black Family in America."  Fagan and Hadford work for MARRI, the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, a division of FRC.

This MARRI report is essential to our understanding of the current political conflict in Washington.  It leads us to ask: should we continue to fund Planned Parenthood?

This outfit gets more than $500 million annually from our tax dollars.  They killed more than 300,000 unborn children last year.

The drive to take away their federal monies was sparked by the undercover investigation done by David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress.  Daleiden and CMP provided compelling video evidence of Planned Parenthood operatives scavenging hearts, lungs, and livers from their little victims.  Planned Parenthood is not directly funded for these killings, but it profits from them.  It profits as well from selling the organs of its victims to the highest bidder.  One of its greedy exploiters is caught on camera grasping for more money because "I want a Lamborghini."  And she laughs.  This horrific story provides an occasion for a searching examination of our consciences and public policy.

President Obama has threatened to veto any congressional appropriations bill that takes away even one dollar from Planned Parenthood.  He is willing to close down the federal government over this, yet his apologists in the media call his opponents extreme on this issue.

The great hope of many in 2008 was that the election of Barack Obama would arrest the alarming decline of the black family.  His own exemplary family offered grounds for that hope.

But President Obama has fully embraced the lethal logic of Roe v. Wade for unlimited abortion.  He became the first U.S. president to address a gathering of abortionists with these words: "Thank you, Planned Parenthood, and God bless you."

President Obama gave the Medal of Freedom to feminist zealot Gloria Steinem.  Steinem infamously said: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  And "if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

Mr. Obama's approval of Planned Parenthood shows that the wild radicalism of Steinem in the '60s has become liberal orthodoxy today.

In 1965, liberal scholar Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed alarm at an out-of-wedlock birthrate of 22% among fragile black families.  That rate today is 71%.  This year's MARRI report by Fagan and Hadford notes that nationally, "only 17% of black teenagers reach age 17 in a family with both their biological parents married. In no state does his percentage exceed 30 percent."

Lest Fagan and Hadford, and we at FRC, be accused of "blaming the victims," we hasten to add that many, many Americans who are raised in what former Education Secretary Bill Bennett calls The Broken Hearth do very well in society.  Bill Bennett himself was raised by a single parent.  So was Dr. Ben Carson, the world-renowned neurosurgeon.  Both of these leading Americans, however, are eloquent champions of marriage and family.

MARRI's work provides powerful evidence to support the American ideal that the family united by marriage of mother and father that worships regularly provides the best home for children.  This family model, all too often the subject of ridicule by media and cultural elites, affords us the best haven in a heartless world.  If we truly seek an end to fatherless young men shooting each other, and too much conflict between police and the communities they serve, we need to address the violence of abortion and the breakdown of family.

One of the best studies that could be done by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would be a national investigation of the prevalence of abortion.  We need to know whether it is correlated with the incidence of homicide for adults in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Such a study will never be done under this administration, but it should be high on the "to do" list of any pro-life administration.  Federal funds would better be spent on this study than on continued largesse to Planned Parenthood's shedders of innocent blood.

Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are senior fellows at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.