You can only be racist against born people – at least according to some abortion activists.
Angered by pro-life advocates’ outreach to the African American community, several abortion activists slammed pro-lifers as racists in a recent article at the pro-abortion Vice News. They claimed pro-lifers are just using the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement to boost their anti-abortion agenda and make themselves feel better about “their own role in oppression.”
Particularly upsetting to Renee Bracey Sherman, executive director of the pro-abortion group We Testify, has been the “Black Preborn Lives Matter” campaign, a project of Students for Life, the Frederick Douglass Foundation, Human Coalition Action and other pro-life groups.
Through billboards, street paintings and other events, the organizations are exposing how the abortion industry targets unborn black babies for abortions.
The Rev. Dean Nelson, chairman of The Frederick Douglass Foundation and executive director of Human Coalition Action, recently told One News Now that they want to challenge Planned Parenthood “to own up to their racist past, particularly its founder, Margaret Sanger.”
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Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion chain in the U.S., and research has found that nearly 80 percent of its surgical abortion facilities are within walking distance of minority neighborhoods.
African Americans have a disproportionately high number of abortions compared to other racial groups – something even Vice acknowledged to be true. But Sherman claimed pro-lifers are disingenuous.
“They use this, to co-opt this messaging, so that they can sound like they are the social justice warriors,” she told the news outlet. “They are just trying to copy whatever it is that the Black Lives Matter are doing, what Black people are doing, and perverting it and gentrifying it to focus on their issue.”
Here’s more from the article:
Public health experts say the overrepresentation of Black women among abortion patients isn’t proof of a vast racist conspiracy. Instead, they point to the innumerable ways that U.S. society disadvantages people of color and low-income communities; Black people in those demographics often have less access to health care as well as job and educational opportunities, to name just a few.
For Bracey Sherman, these types of billboards perpetuate racist, sexist stereotypes against Black women.
“Especially the one [where] they said the most dangerous place for a Black child is in the womb. If you think about that, whose womb? It’s inherently saying that Black women are inherently dangerous to their own children, which is playing off of so many tropes, like the welfare queen, that Black women talk back, they’re violent,” she said.
Jennifer Holland, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, suggested pro-lifers are trying to cast themselves as champions for the oppressed when they really are the oppressors.
“… you have an almost entirely white movement that is co-opting Black struggles in order to put the fetus into—to cast it in this light of this oppressed, murdered minorities,” Holland said. “They wanted to feel grounded as moral human beings who were a part of a justice movement.”
Pamela Merritt, co-founder of Reproaction, said much the same, claiming white conservatives are just trying to feel better about themselves by claiming “Baby Lives Matter” or “Black Preborn Lives Matter.”
“Any time the opposition is developing messaging to try and keep their people from feeling guilty about the policies—and the lack of policy—to address Black lives, then you are winning,” Merritt said.
In essence, they doubt pro-life advocates’ sincerity and reject the fact that unborn babies are valuable human beings who deserve a right to life.
But pro-life advocates are on the side of compassion and truth. Human life begins at conception, and abortions kill unique, irreplaceable unborn babies.
While abortions harm families of every race and culture, they disproportionately harm black families. Statistics show that while black Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population, they have 36 percent of all abortions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the abortion rate among black women is almost five times higher than it is among white women. And in New York City, health data indicates that more black babies are aborted than are born alive annually.
Through awareness campaigns, pregnancy centers, legislation and more, pro-lifers are working to end the oppression of abortion against unborn babies – not just among African Americans but in every community — so that every human being has the rights and freedoms that they deserve.
