Pro-Life Forces Court Blacks in Fight Against Abortion

Look, I've never even heard of Representative Trent Franks. But leftists are all over the Arizona congressman for his intemperate remarks on slavery. David Weigel, not surprisingly, is on the case: "Trent Franks: Abortion Is Worse for Blacks Than Slavery Was." And Think Progress, where out-of-context hack-job smears are de rigueur, has it as well: "Rep. Trent Franks: African-Americans Were Better Off Under Slavery." (Via Memeorandum.) The key passage is at about 6:15 minutes:

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 policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

That is not an outrageous statement. He's comparing the incidence of pregnancy termination then and now, not the quality of life under slavery. But politics being what it is, the guy will be pilloried for even making the historical comparison.

In any case, the New York Times has a report on the big picture. See, "To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case":

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.

“We were shocked when we spent less money and had more phone calls” to the hot line, Ms. Smith said.

This month, the group expanded its reach, making national news with 80 billboards around Atlanta that proclaim, “Black children are an endangered species,” and a Web site, http://www.toomanyaborted.com/.

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.

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.

Black abortion opponents, who sometimes refer to abortions as “womb lynchings,” have mounted a sustained attack on the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, spurred by a sting operation by young white conservatives who taped Planned Parenthood employees welcoming donations specifically for aborting black children.

“What’s giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what’s going down,” said Johnny M. Hunter, a black pastor and longtime abortion opponent 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.

RTWT at the link.

Echidne comments on this article, side-stepping the Planned Parenthood holocaust:

I'm not qualified to discuss the assertions it makes about Planned Parenthood, for example, and neither am I qualified to judge the history of racial oppression in this country and how it affects the present.

But my impression is that the writer too easily accepted the conservative framing which offers the removal of women's reproductive rights as the solution to cutting abortion rates within the African-American community, without looking at the economic support people need to have children in the first place or how much the conservatives have been willing to offer such support in the past (not much) or the availability of contraception to young people in general and so on.

I'm most intrigued by this comment about how much economic support "conservatives have been willing to offer in the past."

That's perfect. Government takes care of you. Conservatives are bad because they don't develop a dependent racial class that's pinned down by government patronism. Sometimes I'm just astonished by the logical contortions leftists have to make to sustain their culture of death. I don't want to remove "women's reproductive rights." I want people to protect and cherish human life. There are better ways to care for women than by guaranteeing the right to abortion on demand at the age of 10 years old. If leftists tolerate pregnancy at that age, you know they're not serious on the question of women's economic development.