Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) doesn’t like Arizona’s law against killing unborn babies on the basis of race or sex.
Lawmakers passed the measure in 2011. The NAACP and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum filed suit, but a court dismissed it. They want to revive their lawsuit. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments on Wednesday.
From the Arizona Republic:
Arizona is the only state in the country to ban abortions based on race. It is one of seven to ban abortions based on sex.
The focus of Wednesday’s court arguments was whether the civil-rights groups that filed the lawsuit have legal standing to challenge the law.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Maricopa County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. According to court documents, the groups are not opposing the law because their members want to seek abortions based on the race or sex of their fetuses, but instead allege the law stigmatizes minority groups by making the assumption that they would want to seek abortions for such reasons. They contended the law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Black abortion advocates believe such laws imply that black women can’t make their own decisions about whether to kill their children. Dianne Post of the NAACP said, “We’ve seen this before: White men controlling the fertility of Black women.”
State Rep. Steve Montenegro, who sponsored the bill, said that no one “should be discriminated against by being subjected to an abortion because they are going to be born the ‘wrong’ gender or the ‘wrong’ race.”
Racial disparities in education and employment are evidence of “racism,” according to liberals, but they don’t agitate over racial disparities in the deaths of unborn black babies.
