Focus on the Family Citizen: Endangered species

Endangered species

by Karla Dial / Focus on the Family Citizen June/July 2010

A billboard campaign in Georgia is educating people about abortion’s roots — and fueling a national movement aiming to end it once and for all.

The message was simple and powerful. A tight shot of a black infant’s face, accompanied by the words “Black children are an endangered species. TooMany Aborted.com.” A message stretched across a billboard 48 feet wide and repeated 80 times.

That’s what drivers on highways throughout Georgia’s DeKalb and Fulton counties saw between Jan. 21 and March 31 of this year, a grim acknowledgement of the fact that the Peach State leads the nation in abortions performed on black women — 20,886 in 2008 alone. And DeKalb and Fulton counties, which are predominantly black, also happen to be where most of the state’s abortion clinics are concentrated.

It would be an amazing coincidence, the billboards’ creators say, if not for the fact that it’s so insidiously intentional.

The billboard campaign is the brainchild of Ryan Bomberger, the 38-year-old co-founder of The Radiance Foundation, an urban outreach ministry headquartered in Atlanta. For Bomberger, a biracial kid who grew up in a diverse family that includes 13 adoptees, abortion strikes closer to home than most: His biological mother was a rape victim who chose life.

“I wanted to get the message out there that the black community is being devastated by abortion,” he says simply. “Black children are an endangered human species, more so than any other demographic in America, through abortion.”

Bomberger’s efforts, supported by Georgia Right to Life, paid off. As papers from as far away as New York City ran stories, he and Georgia Right to Life Minority Outreach Coordinator Catherine Davis spoke to black colleges and churches around the state about the impact abortion is having on their community. Several began showing a new documentary produced by Life Dynamics, a pro-life group in Denton, Texas. Maafa 21 details the Nazi-style eugenics philosophy employed by Margaret Sanger, the woman who founded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Though the Georgia billboards were only up for two months, their impact is exactly the kind of momentum other states are hoping to build on. Pro-life groups from California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee are all hoping to replicate those results and build a strong grassroots movement in their own African-American communities. They say targeting black women for abortion is as much a civil rights issue as anything that took place in the 1960s — and a bill making its way through the Georgia Legislature at press time aims to treat it as such.

And that’s most likely what it will take: Though the nation’s first black president has repeatedly vowed to make abortion “safe, legal and rare,” his landmark health care bill passed with taxpayer funding for it fully intact, and Planned Parenthood still receives $350 million a year from the federal government.

“I am so glad [Barack Obama] was not involved in the civil rights movement,” says Johnny Hunter, president of the Life Education and Resource Network, a pro-life group based in Fayetteville, N.C., that’s working to bring the billboard campaign to the Tar Heel State. “What if we’d had him in there saying we need to make lynching ‘safe, legal and rare’?”
The evolution of Planned Parenthood

What few people realize about Planned Parenthood — and what Maafa 21 reveals — is that abortion had nothing to do with women’s rights when Sanger established the group in the early 20th century. It had everything to do with controlling and even eliminating the black population. In 1939, Sanger established something called “The Negro Project” as a joint effort between her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League. The goal, as she testified before Congress in 1932, was simply to “apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” In other words, weed out the undesirables of society and exterminate them.

Those views weren’t shocking coming from an open eugenicist like Sanger. After all, just a few short years later, the same views would lead to the extermination of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany. But what was shocking — even incomprehensible — is the fact that Sanger was able to sell those views to the American black population through their own churches. Several influential African-American leaders, including Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. DuBois and the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., worked with her as liaisons to the black community.
“The ministers’ work is also important,” Sanger wrote in a December 1939 letter to Clarence Gamble, grandson of one of the co-founders of Procter & Gamble and a family-planning advocate. “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Such obfuscation, critics argue, is as foundational to Planned Parenthood as its roots in eugenics. Consider that in an October 1952 “family planning” pamphlet, the group acknowledged the humanity of preborn children, describing abortion as an “operation” that “kills the life of a baby after it has begun.” Today, in order to better market its “services” to the public at large, it refers to preborn babies simply as “pregnancy tissue” and never discusses abortion in terms of taking a human life.

If there is one thing Planned Parenthood has been consistent about over time, however, it has been the way it goes about targeting blacks. According to a TooManyAborted.com analysis of a Centers for Disease Control report, black women have three times as many abortions as white women and twice as many as all other racial groups combined. The analysis reveals that abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community (286,581 in 2006), exceeding deaths from heart disease, cancer, accidents, homicides, suicides and diabetes combined.
In other words, it’s a holocaust. But it’s one to which many people — even in the black community — are turning a blind eye.

“The pro-abortion community is painting me as a traitor to my people, and that bothers me,” says Davis of Georgia Right to Life. “I don’t understand why they would not want to know the truth. It’s not that a woman can’t still get an abortion if that’s what she wants to do — but shouldn’t she be able to know the facts, to get understanding about the decision she’s making? There are forces out there that have an interest in limiting the birthrate of black women. Shouldn’t she understand that?”

Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union in Washington, D.C., does. But she also understands the process by which generations of Americans have been brainwashed into denying the humanity of preborn children.

“We’ve been taught ever since Roe v. Wade that this was the right thing. They’re not yet children, not fully human, just balls of tissue, not a child there yet. We’ve been told this from a very young age, and it’s very hard to unlearn something,” she explains. “It’s just like being in a cult in the sense that your mind and thought process is altered regarding abortion. Some people really don’t want to know the truth because it’s so ugly and so horrible.”

However, sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually pointed out that ugly truth in a July 7, 2009, New York Times Magazine article.
“At the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” she said.

The interviewer did not ask her to elaborate the point.

A growing movement

Pro-life blacks say one need look no further than the location of most abortion clinics to find evidence that the industry continues to target African-American women: According to a 2004 article in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, 94 percent of all abortion clinics nationwide are located in urban areas.

“Show me a place in North Carolina without a heavy black population,” Hunter says, “and I’ll show you a place without an abortion clinic.”

And that is certainly the case in Georgia, where 58.2 percent of the 35,888 abortions performed in 2008 were on black women, despite the fact that they only constitute 30 percent of the state’s population. Of those, 79 percent were performed in either DeKalb or Fulton counties, which have the highest concentrations of blacks statewide.

Those numbers inspired state Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Cassville, to sponsor a bill allowing the state to prosecute doctors who abort children based on their race or gender, or knowing the woman is being coerced into having the abortion.

SB 529, which passed the state Senate on March 26, was making its way through the House at press time. Though the bill isn’t directly related to the billboard campaign — Loudermilk began working on the language last June, after seeing reports of coerced and gender-based abortion — the timing is propitious because of the new awareness the billboards have raised.
“We had testimony by females that were minors when they became pregnant and their guardians threatened to kick them out of the home if they didn’t have (an abortion), and the abortionists were aware of it,” Loudermilk explains. “We’re making it to where the doctor is not allowed to perform the abortion if he has knowledge she was coerced or her intent is to abort it because of its gender or race. If he does, then he has performed a criminal abortion.

“Doctors ask you all kinds of questions, and the doctors in Georgia generally ask the coercion question, but there’s been no law to oppose it — so we’re going to have them ask these other questions, too. That will show actual knowledge.”

As a result of the billboards, young black women throughout Georgia are beginning to change the way they think about abortion.

“Before we saw [Maafa 21], I was pro-choice,” Markita Eddy, a sophomore at Morris Brown College in Atlanta, told The New York Times in late February. But if she got pregnant, she said, “it showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.”
Bomberger, Davis and other African-American leaders are hoping to use churches to spread their life-affirming message.

“The only way to move the African-American community is to get black pastors and churches involved,” Bomberger says. “I know just from working with foster care and adoption advocacy, the social workers who see the worst of the worst, that black social workers had no idea how profound the impact of abortion was. And I knew that if we reached the black civic leaders, they can effect change.

“The campaign was effective in so many ways,” he adds. “When the billboards go down, it doesn’t end, because we continue to fight the causes that would make someone choose abortion. The heart of the campaign is not only decrying abortion’s impact, but saying, ‘Here is the solution — adoption.’ ”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Visit TooManyAborted.com or maafa21.com.
Karla Dial is a freelance reporter in Colorado Springs, Colo.