Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
Essence Magazine has made it no secret that the nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, is its ally. The black media outlet has been given the Margaret Sanger Award multiple times for promoting abortion. Back in 2010-2011, Planned Parenthood was desperate to defend its territory in urban America after we launched our TooManyAborted.com campaigns and other urban pro-life/pro-adoption efforts emerged to expose the abortion giant. Coming to Big Abortion’s rescue, Essence co-sponsored a Bloggers and Journalists Conference, held at Planned Parenthood’s own offices. They met to strategize how to combat the truth about abortion’s impact in the black community.
And the latest Essence propaganda ad, masquerading as a news article, bears that rotten fruit. Pro-abortion “journalists” know they can’t win on the statistics or actually talking about the violence that is abortion, so they retreat to empty rhetoric and distortions. In her article, What We Stand to Lose, Essence writer Maya Rhodan repeats Planned Parenthood and Guttmacher Institute false talking points like a plagiarist. She carefully avoids establishing any statistical reality. I won’t. Over 363,000 black babies are aborted every year in this country. That’s 30% of all 1.21 million abortions nationwide even though blacks comprise less than 12.9% of the U.S. population. In New York, more black babies are aborted than are born alive (1,223 aborted for every 1,000 that are born alive). I’m certain that was never discussed in that misinformative Bloggers Conference in Planned Parenthood’s NY headquarters!
Essence and Big Abortion would love to shift the conversation from bodily equality to bodily autonomy. For a people who faced dehumanization for centuries at the bloody hands of the slave trade, how are thought-leaders in the black community so quick to reduce the humanity of another group of humans at the bloody hands of the abortion trade? Are they really content with saying “you’re less equal than I am”? It’s tragically remarkable how, through all kinds of rhetorical acrobatics, the once oppressed (of any race or people group) can quickly become the oppressors. Both men and women have become the subjective arbiters of whose life is human enough. If the argument is bodily autonomy, then who is to say that any (born) infant has the “right” to use his mother’s body? Infancy is synonymous with complete dependency. Young children are dependent, too, on their parents to provide food, shelter, protection and so much more. What about these parents’ bodily autonomy! How dare a child require what nature has put into place!
Everyone has bodily autonomy when it comes to choosing to engage in a sexual act that often naturally leads to pregnancy. (I’m not referring, of course, to the less than 1% of pregnancies that are the result of the horrific crimes of rape and incest. I am that one percent, by the way, that is used to justify 100% of abortions.) Once a woman is pregnant she is no longer in, as the definition of autonomy conveys, “the state of existing separately from others”. She and the child co-exist. There are two bodies of equal value, and we want to protect them both.
Pro-abortion activists may try to shift the focus from the act of mutilation (of both child and mother) to acts of manipulation all they want. But they cannot alter the reality historically and presently, that the black community continues to be targeted. Black babies are aborted at rates five times higher, as in New York, than white babies. (All abortions, no matter the race, are a tragedy.) Normally disparities like this are exposed, discussed and even protested. Race is always factored into many other healthcare disparities, but somehow the one disparity—ending in death every time—is to be celebrated as “reproductive justice”.
Rhodan predictably uses a rabidly pro-abortion “survey” to bolster her assertion that “80% of black women agree that abortion should be legal.” This survey was conducted by an abortion advocacy agency, Belden Russonello Stategists, whose clientele are a Who’s Who among radical leftist organizations. BSR was paid by The Ford Foundation, the world’s largest population control entity which funneled hundreds of millions to eugenics efforts throughout the 20th century, to help SisterSong’s Trust Black Women partnership “counter claims that abortion in the black community was genocide.“ (Please see the UN’s definition of genocide to understand why Jesse Jackson, when he was prolife, was completely on target by using this phrase). The Trust Black Women partnership was created by the Atlanta-based SisterSong which came out swinging when we launched TooManyAborted.com. They tried desperately to remove our billboards across the country. They failed every time. SisterSong WOC (Women of Color) Collective was created by an initial grant from the Ford Foundation and funded numerous times by the very organization that continues to seek the reduction of certain populations via birth control, sterilizations and abortion worldwide.
Essence also claims, to justify higher abortion rates, that blacks are 55% less likely to have health insurance. That, like many other assertions in the article, is blatantly false. According to the CDC, Hispanics have the highest uninsured rate of 30.4%, blacks at 17% and whites at 9.9%. It all feeds into the lie of the favorite ‘lack of access’ mantra. Women are obviously accessing these abortion clinics. Aren’t these the same facilities that offer “reproductive health care”? Of course, the author doesn’t mention that there are 4,400 Title X (taxpayer-funded) medical clinics nationwide (around 3,700-3,800 if you exclude any Planned Parenthood abortion centers) according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The lack of access to the truth is simply appalling. Clearly, Essence doesn’t trust black women with the facts.
Essence would rather side with the abortion industry that kills for a living. The essence of ignorance is promoting death in urban America, especially through the violence of abortion, where it is already rampant. Indeed, what we stand to lose in the black community is almost incalculable: 16 million and counting. We’ve lost mothers. We’ve lost fathers. We’ve lost millions of beautiful possibilities ripped apart by a billion dollar business birthed in eugenic racism and elitism. And black media outlets like Essence Magazine prove to the American public that they’re willing to sell their very soul to crush equality and promote a false and fatal “reproductive” freedom.
Ryan Bomberger is the co-founder and chief creative officer of the Radiance Foundation.
