Cynthia Tucker wrote a good article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution countering the Pro-Life campaign that abortion is Black genocide. Here are some excepts.
Perhaps members of the anti-abortion movement are growing a bit desperate. Though they’ve managed to crimp women’s reproductive rights through decades of legislative maneuvering and extra-legal harassment, they still cannot overturn Roe v. Wade, the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision. Nor have they moved public opinion much: A majority of Americans still believe that current law should stand.
Perhaps that’s why some factions in the “pro-life” crusade are professing a newfound concern for the well-being of black children. Perhaps that’s why “racism” has become the battle cry of anti-abortion groups whose members — overwhelmingly white, conservative and Republican — like to think that racism no longer exists.
Georgia’s largest anti-abortion group, Georgia Right to Life, is presenting itself as the last line of defense against a widespread plot to wipe out black people — a pogram of sorts. The group has mounted billboards throughout black Atlanta neighborhoods, claiming that “Black children are an endangered species” because of abortions.
Well, paranoid theories are usually impervious to facts, but let’s try some facts, anyway. Despite the obstacles many black children face on the road to a successful adulthood — poverty, crime, poor schools — their numbers are not threatened. Black women have a higher birth rate than the national average.
But it is also true that black women use abortion services disproportionately. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit that advocates for reproductive health, the abortion rate for black American women is almost five times that for white women. About one-third of all abortions are obtained by white women and about 37 percent by black women (who account for less than seven percent of the population), according to Susan Cohen of the non-profit Alan Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for reproductive health.
Those numbers are certainly troubling. But are racists persuading black women to have abortions? Is there some group of grim executioners looking to carry out a shadowy genocide?
That’s not only nutty; it’s also insulting. It’s both sexist and racist to suggest that black women don’t have the intellectual and emotional firepower to make their own decisions.
For an opposing viewpoint check out Oretha Winston’s Piece at Elev8: Abortion Is Killing The Future
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