— It’s a campaign designed to shock: Dozens of newly installed
billboards in
feature the cherubic face of a black baby and a stark claim: “Black
children are an endangered species.”
A joint effort of
Life and the pro-adoption, pro-abstinence Radiance Foundation, the
campaign ostensibly calls attention to the fact that black women have a
disproportionately high number of abortions. But there is a deeper, more
disturbing claim at work as well.
An increasingly vocal segment of the anti-abortion
community has embraced the idea that black women are targeted for
abortion in an effort to keep the black population down.
The billboards direct people to a Web site called
toomanyaborted.com, which claims that “Under the false liberty of
‘reproductive freedom’ we are killing our very future.”
Some black anti-abortion activists call the
phenomenon “womb lynching.” One prominent black cleric, the Rev.
Childress Jr.
Jersey
child is the womb.
No one disputes that black women have more abortions,
proportionately, than women of other races. Nationally,
African-Americans make up about 13 percent of the population and have
about 37 percent of all abortions, according to the federal Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
But abortion rights advocates say that is because
African-American women have a disproportionate number of unplanned
pregnancies, an enduring problem with complex socioeconomic roots,
including inadequate insurance coverage.
“The notion that abortion providers are targeting
certain groups of people is absurd,” said
an African-American physician who is vice president for medical affairs
at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “It’s using race to
undermine decisions that responsible black women are making about
whether to terminate a pregnancy or not.”
Radiance Foundation founder
a 38-year-old former ad man, came up with the idea for the billboards.
Adopted as a baby, he said he was conceived when his white biological
mother was raped by a black man.
“I am definitely not a white Southern bigot,” he
said, alluding to an accusation hurled his way since the ads went up. “I
am as black as
He has also been accused of shaming black women who
seek abortions. Not so, Bomberger said: “It’s about exposing an industry
that is stealing potential from our community.”
Many African-American women who support abortion
rights find that message patronizing and offensive.
“Ryan is a young advertising executive who has
stepped into a food fight that he doesn’t quite understand,” said
Ross
coalition of 80 women’s groups that work on reproductive health issues
for minorities.
“To be honest, black women aren’t fooled by zealots
or the church or even the individual men in our lives,” Ross said. “We
know that the bottom line is you don’t have much control over your life
when you don’t control your body. Should a rapist have the right to
choose the mother of his child? That’s what Ryan is saying.”
But many abortion foes focus on the sheer numbers
involved.
Right
message that abortion is a destructive force for blacks. She often
screens a movie called “Maafa 21,” made by
alleging that blacks have been targeted for abortions since the end of
slavery by white elites fearful of uncontrolled population growth.
“Let me put it this way: 18,870,000 black babies have
been aborted since Roe versus Wade,” Davis said. “If those babies
hadn’t been aborted, we would be 59 million strong—over 19 percent of
the population.”
While the abortion rate among black women is higher
than average, so is the birth rate. According to the National Center for
Health Statistics, in 2006 the black birth rate was 16.5 per 1,000
women of childbearing age compared with 14.2 per 1,000 for all women.
Most black women who have abortions are already
mothers or plan to have children later, Cullins said.
The statistics are not persuasive for
King
“I know for sure that the black community is being
targeted by abortionists for the purpose of ethnic cleansing,” said
King, a
abortions before a religious conversion in 1983. “How can the dream
survive if we are willing to sacrifice the futures of our children?”
In a scenario popularized by abortion foes, the
culprit is Planned Parenthood, whose clinics are often located in poor
communities where the need for subsidized health care is greatest.
The roots of the antipathy toward Planned Parenthood
come not just from its role as the nation’s largest provider of
abortions and other reproductive health care, but also from questionable
social policies embraced by its founder,
the mother of the American birth control movement.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Sanger was an advocate of
eugenics, a movement that posited the human species could be improved
with selective breeding and the forced sterilization of the poor and
“feeble-minded.” That often was believed to include blacks.
She was not alone, however. In 1927 the Supreme Court
upheld forced sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles are
enough,” Justice
about the case’s plaintiff, a young white woman who was later found to
be of normal intelligence.
Abortion foes use Sanger’s own words (often out of
context, say abortion rights supporters) to prove that Sanger founded an
organization rooted in racism.
“It’s a very complicated picture,” said Ross of
SisterSong. “There was a eugenics movement, and it did target black
people. But when
black women who came to her” for help.
Black leaders of the day — including
Du Bois
Sanger. “All these people wanted her to put clinics in African-American
communities because we then, as now, see fertility control as part of
the racial uplift strategy,” Ross said.
Historian
Parenthood board member and Sanger biographer, said that Sanger’s
eugenics views were applicable to sterilization, not abortion, which she
generally opposed.
In 1920, Sanger wrote, “While there are cases where
even the law recognizes an abortion is justifiable if recommended by a
physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions
performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
“To say she is racist is counterfactual; it’s
inventing history,” said Chesler, a professor at
Also, Chesler noted, eugenics is still with us: “Its
most enduring legacy is IQ testing,” she said. “Every woman who has
amniocentesis is a eugenicist.”
In
up through March. “We are really drawing people into the history of
abortion and the birth control movement,” Bomberger said. “My hope is
that people begin to wake up.”
—
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