Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
Time Magazine shows that some things never change with time. The liberal publication’s relentless defense of abortion, no matter the lie, remains unchanged. Writer Katha Pollitt, author of “Reclaiming Abortion Rights,” is on a mission to destigmatize abortion. She wants to recast the act of killing human life via abortion as a “moral right” and “social good”.
It apparently doesn’t matter if you have to immorally misrepresent the facts in order to promote this violent “social good”. Her article, “6 Myths About Abortion,” is laced with sloppy research and silly accusations. Others will inevitably dismantle her other five so-called mythbusters; I’ll tackle Myth #5: Abortion is racist.
Of course, liberals who decry racism in seemingly every facet of American life deny that it can possibly exist in the one industry that kills for profit. Pollitt attacks the Life Always billboard that went up, every so briefly, in New York City in 2011. “The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the womb” billboard was up for a mere 7 days before Lamar Advertising decided to remove it. They were concerned about possible violence from pro-abortion activists who were harassing employees in the Mexican restaurant housed in the building to which the ad was affixed.
Abortion activists threatening violence? Say it isn’t so! Pro-abortion activists are as explicit and raunchy as they wanna be, but cannot stand when others exercise their free speech rights. Lamar caved, but the truth of the message escapes abortion cheerleaders like Pollitt. For years, more black babies have been aborted than born alive in New York City, home of Planned Parenthood. For every 1,000 black babies born alive, 1,223 were aborted. (To compare, 265 white babies were aborted for every 1,000 born alive, and 517 Hispanic babies were aborted for every 1,000 born alive.) These alarming statistics certainly reinforce that the womb was a dangerous place, disproportionately, for these black lives. As if there weren’t enough abortions in New York (102,678 in 2011 when that billboard went up), Governor Cuomo has been trying to rid the state, which has 249 abortion “facilities”, of any and all abortion restrictions with his pro-Gosnell “Women’s Equality Act”. Which demographic do you think will be impacted even more?
Before the “Dangerous Place” billboard, The Radiance Foundation placed hundreds of billboards, the first of their kind, in major cities around the country. Although pro-abortion activists tried desperately to remove our billboards, none of our 500 ads in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Milwaukee, Madison, Bryan-College Station, Camden, Little Rock and other cities were ever removed. Pollitt falsely claims they were. She attributed our “Black Children Are An Endangered Species: TooManyAborted.com” billboards to Life Always. Ah, what’s wrong with a few incorrect details?
She also denounced our subsequent billboards which addressed slavery and abortion in our 2011 Juneteenth Atlanta campaign declaring: “The 13th Amendment Freed Us. Abortion Enslaves Us.” and “The 14th Amendment Made Us Members. Abortion Dismembers.” Roe v. Wade perverted the rich legacy of civil rights by taking the 14th Amendment, landmark legislation that finally ascribed humanity to people of my color, and abused it to strip away the humanity from another group of human beings—the unborn.
Comparing abortion to slavery is exactly the right comparison. There are no other examples in American jurisprudence more closely tied than the blood-stained institution of slavery and the blood-filled industry of abortion. In Dred Scott, seven justices ruled that an escaped slave—a black man—was not a person and could not be a citizen of the United States. The Constitution did not apply to him, and people of his ancestry could be bought, sold, traded or killed. In Roe, seven justices ruled that the unborn are not persons and therefore are not entitled to the protections of the Constitution and can be bought, sold, traded or killed because they’re merely someone else’s property.
If Time’s Pollitt had done some investigation (like simply visiting the website of these billboard campaigns) she would see that plenty of black women were championing these efforts like Star Parker, Dr. Alveda King, Catherine Davis, and Day Gardner. Even one of the first black women to serve as a Planned Parenthood board member, Dr. LaVerne Tolbert, endorses and has worked closely with our campaigns. Her discovery of how Planned Parenthood targets the black community compelled her to become a prolife advocate.
Frederick Osborn, President of the American Eugenics Society, declared that “birth control and abortion are turning out to be the greatest eugenic advances of our time.” No historian can deny the pseudoscientific American Eugenics movement was anything but profoundly racist and elitist. Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, and its most prominent president, Alan F. Guttmacher, were both members of the American Eugenics Society; Guttmacherwas a Vice President.
Pollitt absurdly misses the obvious when she states: “Imagery of abortion as slavery or genocide allows abortion opponents to posture as anti-racists without having to learn anything about the lives of black women or lift a finger to rectify the enormous and ongoing legacy of slavery and segregation.” That ongoing legacy, Ms. Pollitt, is abortion. Eugenics is the thread that ties slavery to Jim Crow to poll taxes and literacy tests to race-based birth control efforts (The Negro Project) to abortion-on-demand. Abortion occurs at rates up to five times higher in the black community than among the majority population. History shows this has been by design.
Oh, and Jesse Jackson, once passionately prolife, stated that “abortion is genocide” in a March 1973 JET magazine article. He only changed his tune about the racial genocide when he ran as a Democratic presidential candidate in 1984. That’s when principles and facts no longer mattered and pro-abortion ideology became sacrosanct. Jackson, like leaders of the NAACP and the National Urban League which once vehemently denounced abortion as racist and nothing but population control, now partner with the number one killer of black babies—Planned Parenthood.
Miseducation is powerful. Time magazine knows all about propaganda. And Pollitt’s recent article is full of it.
Ryan Bomberger is the co-founder and chief creative officer of the Radiance Foundation.
