Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Monday 1 March 2010

"Understandable, understandable..."

What is "understandable," you ask? Apparently, to some, that the fewer minority babies born,the better.
Across the country, the anti-abortion movement, long viewed as almost exclusively white and Republican, is turning its attention to African-Americans and encouraging black abortion opponents across the country to become more active....

“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said ... a black pastor ... in Fayetteville, N.C. “The game changes when blacks get involved. And in the pro-life movement, a lot of the groups that have been ignored for years, they’re now getting galvanized.”

The factors fueling the focus on black women — an abortion rate far higher than that of other races and the ties between the effort to legalize and popularize birth control and eugenics — are, at heart, old news. But they have been given exaggerated new life by the Internet, slick repackaging, high production values and money, like the more than $20,000 that Georgia Right to Life invested in the billboards.

Whyis that momentum "an exaggerated new life", I wonder?
Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that black women get almost 40 percent of the country’s abortions, even though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population. Nearly 40 percent of black pregnancies end in induced abortion, a rate far higher than for white or Hispanic women....


Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the Super Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina...

Black opponents of abortion are fond of saying that black people were anti-abortion and anti-birth control early on, pointing to Marcus Garvey’s conviction that blacks could overcome white supremacy through reproduction, and black militants who protested family planning clinics....

In 2008, Lila Rose, a college student at U.C.L.A. and the founder of an anti-abortion group called Live Action, released four audio recordings of a man trying to make donations to Planned Parenthood clinics to pay for black women’s abortions. In one, the caller, played by James O’Keefe III, the provocateur recently arrested on charges that he tried to tamper with the telephones of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said, “You know, we just think, the less black kids out there, the better,” to which the Planned Parenthood employee replies, “Understandable, understandable.”

Planned Parenthood has apologized for the employees’ statements and says they do not reflect the organization’s values or policies.

The recordings led to calls by black leaders to withdraw financing of Planned Parenthood, which receives about $350 million a year in government money for education and medical services. They reinvigorated old claims that the organization was a front for racial genocide and that Sanger viewed blacks as undesirable.

Scholars acknowledge that Sanger did ally herself with eugenics, at the time a mainstream movement
Oh, well, as long as it was mainstream...

Lila Rose is a remarkable young woman, no?

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