Report Proves Planned Parenthood Targets Blacks, Hispanics

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Aug 29, 2011   |   11:23AM   |   Washington, DC

A new reported issued by the pro-life group Life Dynamics proves that Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry in the United States target black and Hispanic Americans by placing abortion facilities in communities with high minority populations.

Titled, “Racial Targeting and Population Control,” the new report validates the claims pro-life advocates have made for years — and that Life Dynamics made in its groundbreaking Maafa21 video released two years ago — showing that abortion advocates have purposefully placed abortion centers in urban areas with high percentages of black and Hispanic residents.

Mark Crutcher and Carole Novielli conducted the research in the 24-page report and they say the location of abortion centers is the modern equivalent of the population control policies against minorities, especially African-Americans, that Planned Parenthood has supported since Margaret Sanger founded it. The researchers say they prepared the new report to respond to the criticism of the claims abortion advocates have made to the racial charges — and to point out a hypocrisy.

“The initial response to this documentary from people defending these organizations was to claim that they focus their facilities on minority neighborhoods because that is where the need is,” they write. “Almost immediately, however, they saw that this argument was creating a problem for them. Simply put, it is incompatible with one of their other arguments.”

Abortion advocates have always claimed that their main goal is to reduce unintended pregnancies and, by placing abortion centers and Planned Parenthood clinics in minority communities, abortion backers claimed their focus wasn’t promoting abortions to blacks and Hispanics but to help them reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies by promoting birth control and contraception.

“If that is true, in light of their concession that they have focused these things on the minority community, the obvious result should be that black women have the lowest pregnancy and abortion rates in the country,” they researchers write. Yet, a new study released by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, a former Planned Parenthood research affiliate, shows birth control and contraception are not reducing abortions and unplanned pregnancies, especially in lower income minority areas.

“But to the contrary, in contemporary America, the rate of pregnancy among black women is almost three times as high as it is for white women and, though they make up less than 13% of the female population, black women have about 37% of the abortions,” the researchers write.

With that statistic in mind, the researchers set forth with the goal of mapping every abortion facility and Planned Parenthood center in the nation against population and racial demographic data sorted by zip code. They wanted to determine not only whether abortion centers were located in zip codes with high black and Hispanic populations but whether the black and Hispanic populations in the zip codes where abortion businesses were located exceeded the total percentage of the population of the particular state as a whole in terms of its minority population.

“We began by creating a database of the ZIP codes for every Planned Parenthood facility in the United States. This list was generated from Planned Parenthood’s website. We then used United States Census Bureau figures to establish the percentage of black and Hispanic people residing within each of these ZIP codes as well as within each state,” they write. “In reviewing this data, there are several things to keep in mind. The first is that the issue is not whether a ZIP code is predominately black or Hispanic but whether it is disproportionately black or Hispanic.”

The results were startling.

In Texas alone, 94 zip codes show either an abortion facility or a Planned parenthood abortion-referral clinic located there and 72 percent of the zip codes have populations that are disproportionately black and/or Hispanic.

The report also found multiple abortion centers in many super-minority populated areas. The New Jersey zip code 07631 has a black population 286.7% of the state’s overall percentage and a Hispanic population 163.9% of the state, they noted, and it has four abortion or abortion-referral centers. Minnesota zip code 55404 has a black population that is 797.1% of the overall state percentage and a Hispanic population 537.9% of the state and there are three abortion or abortion-referral clinics there.

The racial targeting is not limited to certain regions of the country. In Connecticut – a state thoroughly dissimilar from Texas in size, culture and geography – there are 21 zip codes where abortion centers or Planned Parenthood abortion-referral clinics are located and 15 of them have disproportionately black and/or Hispanic populations.

“Again, this pattern is repeated in state after state,” the researchers noted. “We identified 116 ZIP codes with more than one [abortion or abortion-referral facility]. Of those, 84 were disproportionately black and/or Hispanic. What this means is that, when the American family planning industry places multiple facilities in a ZIP code, that ZIP code is more than two-and-a-half times as likely to be disproportionately minority as not.”

“What we now know – and have documented – is that there is not one state in the union without [abortion] centers located in ZIP codes with higher percentages of blacks and/or Hispanics than the state’s overall percentage. In fact, Hawaii is the only state that does not have facilities located in ZIP codes exceeding 125% of their overall percentage,” they write. “Not only is this racial targeting widespread, it’s scale is often enormous. We found 42 states with family planning facilities in ZIP codes where the black and/or Hispanic populations exceeds 200% of the state’s overall percentage. More telling is that these percentages routinely go far beyond even this level. Numerous states have facilities in ZIP codes that range from 250% to well over 1,000% and it is not uncommon for them to have facilities located in many such ZIP codes.”

“In the end, this data speaks for itself and does not require a lot of analysis. The numbers make it clear that the African-American and Hispanic communities have been targeted and logic makes it clear that this did not happen coincidentally or unintentionally,” they concluded.