Race and Abortion

Racism and eugenics fuel Planned Parenthood

Washington DC, Mar 1, 2007 / 05:21 pm (CNA).- Racism surrounding the abortion rate must be recognized and stopped, said Day Gardner, president of National Black Pro-Life Union. “The eugenic policies of the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, appear to be alive and well and still directed at black women,” she charged in a press release.
Gardner was responding to a Feb. 26 press release on Reproductive Rights and African-American Women issued the previous day by abortion advocate Ipas. In addition to discussing the history between blacks and abortion, Ipas listed reasons for black American women to take part in the abortion movement. It claimed the high rate of abortions among black women was reason enough to warrant their greater involvement and support.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, more than 90 percent of all abortion providers are located in metropolitan areas. Planned Parenthood, America’s leading abortion promoter and provider, identifies its core clients as young women, low-income women, and women of color.
According to Gardner: “The abortion industry purposefully targets the African American community. The question is why? The abortion industry places abortion clinics in our minority and poor neighborhoods to “coax us” into thinking abortion is the best answer — the only answer to an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy — and we ask why?
“Black women don’t have to kill our children to have productive, successful lives. Instead of embracing the ‘right to kill’ our children in the name of reproductive choice, we should be working to ensure that each and every African American child is given every opportunity—to experience life—to prove herself/himself—to become part of our rich cultural heritage—to change the world—and maybe also to save it.”
Since 1973, more than 44 million unborn children have been legally killed in this country; of these, almost 15 million of them were black. Abortion is the number one killer of African Americans — killing more black people than all other deaths combined, Gardner states.
African-American women make up only 13 percent of the United States population of women who are of child-bearing age, yet 37 percent of all abortions are performed on black women. The abortion rate among black women is more than three times higher than that of white women. “It is not whether black women have access to reproductive ‘choices’,” said Gardner. “But rather: Why they are fooled into thinking that they have to make a choice to destroy their child at all. Why have so many black women bought into the lie that their children, born in inner cities, are less deserving of life?"

I promise you that I have not placed the above article in this blog to take up space, making me look more productive; instead, it is here because the information contained in it isn't heard. It isn't heard because Planned Parenthood has done a fine job over the years drawing in compassionate people with rhetoric that masks the truth. Who can criticize a group's campaign to make every child wanted? Of course, every child should be wanted and cared for as a fulfilled desire; however, slaughtering roughly 1,500,000 children yearly is a perverse way in which to achieve that goal.
To assert that a woman's poverty is a valid reason for a child to be torn from her mother's womb is a way to say that poor people are not worthy of life. The argument that giving a pregnant woman the choice to slaughter her baby will somehow improve her life is absurd - if she was poor when she walked in an abortion mill, she will be poor as she leaves. She will have gained nothing, but lost much - beginning with the fee for the abortion and ending with the incalculable value of the life lost in the heart wrenching death of the flesh of her flesh. Soul scarred and mind battered, she will return to a life that cannot be left behind.
I come to this subject having been a "liberal" for quite a time. It had seemed to be a no-brainer that everyone has a right to every option in every situation. I mean, who was I to force my opinion onto anyone else? I thought that such a stance was a way to lovingly empower others. That type of thinking is a matter of living life at surface level.
To truly love someone is to dive into the act of living. It is loving to tell a person that they can't always do what seems right in a moment. It is loving to help someone to see beyond herself. It is loving to let a frightened girl know that she, and the life within her are of great value. It is loving to educate women so that they may experience the joy of life rather than avoid that reality out of ignorance and fear. It is loving to support pregnancy centers, along with other community initiatives.
It is a crying shame that "liberating" a woman from her pregnancy is often the result of societally imposed self-loathing that an abortion will only acerbate.
I'm not sure that I've communicated what I wanted to say. Hopefully the article will speak to you. Killing an innocent being should never be an option. To prey upon people by telling them that you only wish to help them is beyond disturbing - to do so to individual groups because they don't fit your perception of what is "good" is despicable and beyond all reasoning. To profit from it is unconscionable. Peace.