Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
The silence is deafening. Few, if any, are talking about the effect of late-term abortion on women. Yet there are effects – and they can be deadly. Here is a small sampling of those known to have died at the hand of an abortionist during a second-trimester abortion: Semika Shaw, five months; Tamiia Russell, six months; Denise Crowe, four months; Edrica Goode, five months; Sherika Mayo, five months; Tonya Reaves, five months; Karnamaya Mongar, five months; Jennifer Morbelli, eight months; Cree Erwin, five months; Ying Chen, four months; LaKisha Wilson, five months; Jaime Morales, six months; and Keisha Atkins, six months.
According to their website, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “is the U.S. Government’s principal agency for protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves. HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, from conception.” But, despite its rhetoric that Americans should be served and protected from harm, it does not appear that this department has invested in the wellbeing of pregnant women, who are not being told of the risks of abortion and the alternatives available to them. Consequently, their children’s lives are not being protected “from conception.”
HHS needs to make women aware of the risks associated with abortion and family planning options. For example, abortions can be botched so badly that the woman requires a hysterectomy to save her life. HHS does little or nothing to educate women about the flawed studies of long acting reversible contraceptives that are strongly pushed on low-income women through federal population control programs like Title X. These things can negatively impact low-income women — especially Black women.
The Title X law has since 1970 specifically excluded organizations that use abortion as a family planning method from receiving Title X funds. Yet, Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, received tens of millions in Title X funding year over year — and this is just now being addressed with the recently-announced rule change. Meanwhile, on the heels of Planned Parenthood’s decades of targeting women of color, the CDC now reports a rapidly declining fertility rate that is in fact below replacement level. Yet there is no mention of Planned Parenthood’s growth in Black and Latino communities where abortion is the number one cause of death. There is certainly no mention of the deaths of mothers that occur as a result of their visiting Planned Parenthood’s facilities.
One of HHS’s offices — the Office of Population Affairs, which controls Title X — is particularly out of step with the stated mission of Health and Human Services. They are not “protecting the health of all Americans.” Instead, they are abiding the deaths of many low-income Black and Latino women and babies. The growing list of women known to have died as a result of a botched late term abortion and their children are crying out, asking for America to end the government funding of abortion by abolishing the Office of Population Affairs.
As the nation is wrestling with New York’s draconian abortion law and Virginia’s rush to join New York, it is time we wrestle with the idea of why the United States government is in the population control business. The flow of taxpayer money should be cut off, immediately, so organizations like Planned Parenthood can no longer wage their genocidal war against Black and Latino women bolstered by the aid of taxpayer funds.
Photo credit: American Life League (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved
Catherine Davis is the founder and president of The Restoration Project.
The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.
