Abortion: A medical procedure that is legally available to help all women; or a conspiracy set up by White America in order to “kill” as many black babies as possible in order to maintain a legacy of white supremacy?

Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation would like you to believe the latter. Their recent billboards, which Sarah wrote about last month, have been set up through Atlanta. Their message: “Black children are an endangered species.”

According to them, abortions are “womb lynchings.” From the LA Times reporting on this:

 Catherine Davis, minority outreach director for Georgia Right to Life, visits black  college campuses, bringing the message that abortion is a destructive force for  blacks. She often screens a movie called "Maafa 21," made by Texas antiabortion  group Life Dynamics, alleging that blacks have been targeted for abortions  since the end of slavery by white elites fearful of uncontrolled population  growth.
 (emphasis is mine)
 ------
 "I know for sure that the black community is being targeted by abortionists for  the purpose of ethnic cleansing," said King, a Georgia Right to Life board  member
 (emphasis is mine)

Paranoid, much?

It is true that African-American women have more abortions that women of other races. According to the CDC, “African Americans make up about 13% of the population and have about 37% of all abortions.” Yet, they also have more children than women of other races.

 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.

And, as Vanessa Cullins (an African American physician who is vice president for medical affairs at Planned Parenthood Federation of America) says…

 Most black women who have abortions are already mothers or plan to have  children later.

Further, it’s important to look at why women have abortions.

 abortion rights advocates say that [the higher rate of abortion] is because African  American women have a disproportionate number of unplanned pregnancies, an  enduring problem with complex socioeconomic roots, including inadequate  insurance coverage.

From there, we have to ask why African American women have a disproportionate number of unplanned pregnancies, why their socioeconomic status is generally lower than white women’s, and why they have inadequate insurance coverage.

But those aren’t questions that Georgia Right to Life seem to want to bother with. They’d rather scream about a conspiracy of racism. With these billboards, they are trying to scare women of color into continuing a pregnancy they don’t want by saying that if they have an abortion, they are contributing to their community’s hardships by giving up more power to The White Man. This is low, even for an anti-choice group.

 "The notion that abortion providers are targeting certain groups of people is  absurd,"
  "It's using race to undermine decisions that responsible black women are making  about whether to terminate a pregnancy or not."
 - Vanessa Cullins

Ryan Bloomberg, the founder of the Radiance Foundation (a pro-abstinence, pro-adoption group) says that he hopes the billboards will “begin to wake [people] up.” I hope that Mr. Bloomberg will begin to wake up and realize that abortion is not a black and white issue (no pun intended, I swear). There are valid reasons behind the choices of women to have and to not have an abortion. When a woman chooses to abort a pregnancy, the color of her skin is not a factor, and it shouldn’t be. There is no racial conspiracy when it comes to abortions. STOP making women of color feel that the personal decision they make about when to or not to have a baby affects the level of racism that, as you imply, they will bring upon themselves. No one “asks for it” when they are subjects of racial discrimination. If a women wants to abort her pregnancy, she should be able to do so without guilt.

These billboards help no one. Way to be an alarmist. 

~ Samantha