Abortion Advocates Target Texas Billboards on Black Abortions

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Mar 22, 2011   |   5:14PM   |   Austin, TX

Unhappy that pro-life groups are raising the issue of the inordinately high percentage of abortions done on African-American women and unborn children, abortion advocates are starting a campaign of their own.

Co-sponsored by the Texas chapter of NARAL and the pro-abortion black group SisterSong, based in Atlanta, are focusing on billboards put up by Heroic Media and the Radiance Foundation.

Last August, the latter group launched the “Black and Unwanted” public awareness initiative in Bryan and College Station — two southeast Texas cities where Texas A&M University is located. On the heels of massive national and international media coverage of the “Endangered Species” campaign that brought billboards to other states, the group said its new campaign “continues to reveal abortion’s destruction in the black community while highlighting the need for more adoptions,” sponsors informed LifeNews.com.

TooManyAborted.com is the campaign’s online resource that provides what sponsors say is “irrefutable federal and state abortion statistics and the largely unknown history of the racism and eugenics of Planned Parenthood.”

Now, NARAL Texas director Sara Cleveland told the liberal American Independent web site the pro-abortion groups are working to figure out “what we’re up against in Texas” and have identified four billboards they’re placing on maps using mapping software that will be updated as more precise locations for additional billboards are found. Cleveland said the group’s decision to take action was motivated in part by an unnamed University of Texas at Austin student who was tired of seeing the pro-life billboards as she drove around the city.

Once abortion advocates have identified the billboards, Cleveland told the Independent the groups will launch a campaign to bombard CBS Outdoor Corporate and Dinosaur Outdoor Advertising, two companies that lease signs for billboard advertising, to remove them. The group will also promote its petition campaign to Heroic Media founder Brian Follett to end the efforts to highlight the racial components of abortion — only 200 people have signed the petition so far.

NARAL hopes adding SisterSong to its efforts will help, since the group raised strong opposition to a bill in the Georgia legislature that would ban race-based abortions.

Bomberger responded to the attacks with a comment to LifeNews.com, saying: “NARAL has shown, tragically, that it fails women continually just as the butchery of Philly abortionist Gosnell revealed. NARAL could have stopped him years ago; they chose to do nothing. They’re so blinded by their ‘prochoice’ fascism that they will do anything to keep others from seeing and knowing the truth.”

Cleveland told the liberal publication the effort to quash the pro-life billboards is part of a larger campaign to attack pregnancy centers — which provide women with pregnancy support and abortion alternatives.

“CPCs exist to emotionally manipulate women,” Cleveland claimed. “They distribute medically inaccurate information. Instead we should fund family planning centers that actually prevent unwanted pregnancies.”

NARAL has also targeted any company that works with sponsors of the billboards and it is aggressively attacking Dillards for supporting a Heroic Media fashion show to raise funds for its pro-life projects. The company says it sponsors all sorts of events and is not showing any favoritism.

The latest pro-life billboard campaign started in Wisconsin with the Radiance Foundation working in partnership with Pro-Life Wisconsin. The first billboard is located in Madison, Wisconsin, just down the street from a Planned Parenthood clinic recently opened in a black and Hispanic neighborhood. The billboard/web campaign exposes how the nation’s largest abortion chain proves its staunch pro-abortion position to the near exclusion of any other choice, Ryan Bomberger of the Radiance Foundation told LifeNews.com.

He notes that in its own 2009 Services Report, Planned Parenthood did 332,278 abortions, continuing an annual upward trend while only providing prenatal care to 7,021 women and making a mere 977 adoption referrals — or 340 abortions for every one adoption referral.

Bomberger, a transracial adoptee and an adoptive father who promotes life-affirming alternatives to abortion, said, ““Choice is a sham. What other nonprofit taxpayer-funded organization can publicly demonize more than half of Americans, fail to improve the reproductive health conditions they claim to address, yet escape any government oversight, media scrutiny, or financial repercussions because of their ineptness.”

“But it’s all intentional. They create a revolving door client base while profiting in the millions from the destruction of innocent lives. Ironically, abortion is their lifeblood,” she said of Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood received $363.2 million in taxpayers’ money, a third of its annual budget, regardless of its continued failure to affect the national “unintended” pregnancy rate,” Bomberger complains. According to the CDC, this rate has remained unchanged since 1995.