For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state's largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.
So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.
Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.
The idea resonated, said Nancy Smith, the executive director.[...]
A new documentary, written and directed by Mark Crutcher, a white abortion opponent in Denton, Tex., meticulously traces what it says are connections among slavery, Nazi-style eugenics, birth control and abortion, and is being regularly screened by black organizations.
Lovely.
Of course, to grasp the full depths of the evil involved here, it helps to recall that the religious right got its start fighting to preserve segregation, and they were initially indifferent to abortion, as I discussed in my diary "Shadow Elites And Religion--Part 1",. So my blood was particularly boiling when I read about this. But I've also been working on this welfare reform myth series, and one of the things I've been doing is poking around at various statistics, including birth rates. So it helps to know some basic facts. (All figures are from the CDC's "National Vital Statistics Reports" Vol 56, #15, April 14, 2008.) The statistics make it clear that no one is imposing abortions on black women. They may have more abortions, but this is a matter of their choice. No one is controlling them against their wishes. First note that black women as a whole actually have more babies than they want--snd by a larger percentage than any other women:
Black women have far higher pregnancy rates than whites, especially as teens:
which is part of what contributes to them having higher abortion rates--but as the first chart shows, even with higher abortion rates, they have a larger percentage of children in excess of what they optimally want.
Digby also notes:
It would be nice if these same people didn't also demagogue against "welfare queens" and simultaneously condemn them for having too many children, but that would require an intellectual consistency of which they are incapable.
And, sure enough, even though black teen pregnancy rates are coming down, they are still well above double that of non-Hispanic whites:
Digby also goes on to report [emphasis added for what comes next]:
And they really need to get their talking points straight because, as Mike Stark documents, some of their people are making major errors with this one:
In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?
I really hope that some of the leaders in the black religious community step up here. This is sickening.
Of course, it's a lie that half of black pregnancies end in abortion, much less that "half of all black children" are aborted. Among unmarried blacks--but only among them--there are as many abortions as live births, but both these figures are less than half, because there are also fetal loses, as there are for all groups. What's more, this same ratio was seen for white unmarried women as recently as 1994 (second chart):
Among married black women, the abortion rate is far lower than the live birth rate, although it is significantly higher than for white women. But once again, it is their choice, and they choose to have a larger surplus of babies than they had planned on than any other group, as the shown by the first chart in this diary. Here are the married women's rate compared:
Let this serve to remind one and all once again that it's easy to tell when the "Christian" right is violating the Ninth Commandment: it happens anytime their lips are moving.
STATE BLOGS
