A campaign launched in Los Angeles this week seeks to raise awareness to what is becoming known as “black genocide” — the devastation occurring in black America as result of abortion.
It’s modeled after a highly successful similar campaign conducted in Atlanta earlier this year by Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation.
According to just released data from the Guttmacher Institute, 1.21 million abortions were performed in the United States in 2008. Some 30 percent of these abortions were performed on black women. With blacks accounting for about 12 percent of the U.S. population, the tragic disproportionate rate of abortion in this community is clear.
Seventy billboards will be posted around Los Angeles, with focus on neighborhoods with high percentage black population. The billboards show the face of a beautiful black child with a headline that says: “Black Children are an Endangered Species.”
The campaign is timed to coincide with March for Life, which notes the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion, and with black history month in February.
Abortion, of course, is a plague on the whole nation. But, as with all problems, the most vulnerable communities get hit the hardest.
A widely held assumption in our national discourse today is that there is “economic issues” and “social issues” that are separate, unrelated concerns. The fact that many actually believe that our nation’s economic vitality has nothing to do with the condition of the American family or our general attitudes toward life and personal responsibility is a symptom of rather than an answer to our problems.
Realities in black America speak to this issue. The 25 percent of this population in which poverty is entrenched and passed on from generation to generation is the portion of the population in which traditional family structure has been most broken and lost.
Study after study, for instance, shows that the biggest factor in earning power is education and the biggest factor in educational success is family background and the values prevailing in the home of the child.
A Rand study concluded that $500 billion would be added annually to our GDP if test scores of black and Latino children reached national averages.
Anyone that has overcome a personal background of a broken and dysfunctional family can testify to how important family is in a child’s life. Often those who dismiss its central importance take for granted the values transmitted to them from their families and arrogantly take complete personal credit for their success.
Personal responsibility is central to a functioning free society. The Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion, enshrining sex for amusement and the illusion of sex without consequences, was a frontal assault on our culture of personal responsibility.
In 1969, three years before Roe v Wade, 68 percent of Americans said premarital sex is wrong. Today 32 percent say it is wrong.
Removing marriage as the framework for sex and children has produced results that don’t surprise. There have been 50 million abortions since 1973. And we’ve gone from 10 percent of American babies born to unwed mothers in 1970 to 40 percent today.
A black child has a 50-percent chance of being aborted and, if born, a 70-percent chance of living in a single parent home.
Planned Parenthood, who provides a third of our nation’s abortions, gets $300 million annually from the federal government that they use to set up in black neighborhoods to perpetuate this dismal reality.
The Issues4Life Foundation and the Radiance foundation are fighting back. The idea is that the beginning of solving any problem is building awareness.
The goal for the billboard campaign is to plant seeds in the minds of blacks and all Americans that the future for all of us can only be in a culture of life, family, and personal responsibility.
LifeNews.com Note: Star Parker is the founder and president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) and is a leading pro-life advocate within the African-American community. She is also a former candidate for Congress in California.
