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“Black Children Are an Endangered Species”
So claim more than 60 billboards in Atlanta, GA.
Black women apparently have more abortions than women of other races. From 1997-2006, the CDC reports that approximately 36.4% of abortions were performed on Black women. However, the fertility rate for Black women is still higher than the fertility rate for White women, 69 live births per 1,000 Black women versus 63 live births per 1,000 White women in 2005.
The ads are about gathering support for a law that would ban soliciting abortions for race or gender selection. The group Georgia Right to Life argues that abortion practitioners solicit Black women for abortions. The law would prohibit anyone from performing an abortion based on the race, color, or gender of the fetus/baby. But, abortion practitioners don’t solicit Black women for abortions. Although the Right to Life group claims that all of the abortion clinics are in Black areas, only 4 of the 15 clinics are in areas where more than 50% of the population is Black. Passing this law would essentially make it incredibly difficult for Black women and other women of color to obtain otherwise legal abortions.
So, basically, White people can have abortions, but no one else.
The group SisterSong has been fighting the ads and the bill they support. Their fact sheet is, for me, being a White woman who’s never had to worry about any of this, extremely thought provoking. Miriam Perez at Racialicious offers more insight to the battles women of color fight for reproductive justice.
I actually found out about this campaign via a Black, female friend of mine, who linked her blog post to an article on the site feministing.com. The article is so-so (in my opinion), but the comments are educational. That article links to an article at the Guttmacher Institute about access to health care.
…[B]lack women’s higher abortion rates are directly related to their higher rates of unintended pregnancy. Disproportionately high rates of both unintended pregnancy and abortion are symptoms of the broader health disparities faced by the black community. Fundamentally, the question we should be asking is what can be done to help black women have fewer unintended pregnancies and achieve better health outcomes in general.
The poverty rate is highest among Black people in the US – 33.2% in 2008. I don’t see any billboards about providing education to Black Americans, or lamenting that the educated Black person is endangered. Perhaps more appropriately, ads should be created for birth control (even abstinence would be fine) and then funds appropriated to make sure that women who choose not to have children don’t have them, and to make sure that the women who do want children have the ability to care for them in a stable, financially secure environment.
And while we’re talking about the “species” – Black babies aren’t a species unto themselves. We’re all the same species people! The word “species” just brings me back to the Great Monkey Debate.
It seems to me that you can be an anti-abortion advocate without bringing race or color into the equation. That’s all.
(Note: The title of this post is paraphrased from a quote in The Treehouse of Horror episode “Citizen Kang” of The Simpsons.)
