Abortion Is Devastating the African American Community
by Deal Hudson - March 1, 2010
Reprinted with permission.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, African American women have 40 percent of the nation's abortions, but make up only 13 percent of the population. That black children are being aborted at such a high rate has not been a subject of discussion among the Democrats in the Congress and the White House, who insist on leaving the door open for abortion funding in the health care bill.
But a recent article in the New York Times suggests that the disproportionate price being paid in the African American community for the pro-abortion advocacy of Planned Parenthood is beginning to be noticed. According to the piece, Georgia Right to Life changed its tactics last year by having minority outreach coordinator Catherine Davis visit black churches throughout the state, "delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks."
Pro-life activists have long known that Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, explicitly recommended the "eugenics value" of abortion as a means of suppressing minority populations. But now the story of the nefarious roots of the abortion movement are gaining traction among the African Americans that Davis met with. As a result, Georgia Right to Life expanded its outreach effort by leasing space on 80 Atlanta billboards, all bearing the message, "Black children are an endangered species," along with a special Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com.
Another abortion opponent, Mark Crutcher, president of Life Dynamics, has produced the film Maafa 21, documenting the roots of the abortion-rights movement in America and its impact on the African American community. According to Crutcher's Web site:
When slavery ended, their welcome was over. America's wealthy elite had decided it was time for them to disappear and they were not particular about how it might be done. What you are about to see is that the plan these people set in motion 150 years ago is still being carried out today.
The film's trailer opens with chilling quotes from American eugenicists like Sanger. Her attitude toward the "inferior" black race is startling for a woman born in Corning, New York, to a devout Catholic family of eleven children.
Priests for Life has kept a close eye on this issue for many years. Rev. Frank Pavone's African-American outreach is led by Alveda King, a niece of Dr. Martin Luther King. King and Day Gardner, head of the National Black Pro-Life Union, are the country's most visible black opponents of abortion. Their combined efforts had been slow-going until this recent breakthrough by Georgia Right to Life and the inroads made by Crutcher's film.
A telling detail at the end of the New York Times article helps illustrate just how much progress has been made on this front. Maafa 21 was shown at the historic Morris Brown College in Atlanta, which has been graduating black leaders in business and politics for decades. It made an impression.
"Before we saw the movie, I was pro-choice," said Markita Eddy, a sophomore. But were she to get pregnant now? "It showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was," Eddy said, "just because of the conspiracy."
Not long ago, I listened to a lengthy discussion among several pro-life leaders about abortion in the African American community. Some believed that this was where the pervasive culture of death could actually be turned back. I responded that winning that battle, given the alignment of African American leadership with the Democratic Party, would take a very long time and had a low probability of success. Maybe I was wrong.
Deal W. Hudson is the director of the Morley Institute, and is the former publisher of CRISIS Magazine, a Catholic monthly published in Washington, DC. His articles and comments have been published in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, National Review, Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Village Voice, Roll Call, National Journal, The Economist, and by the Associated Press. He appears regularly on television shows such as NBC Nightly News, One-on One with John McLaughlin, C-Span's Washington Journal, News Talk, NET's Capitol Watch, The Beltway Boys, The Religion and Ethics Newsweekly on PBS, and radio programs such as "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio. He was associate professor of Philosophy at Fordham University from 1989 to 1995 and was a visiting professor at New York University for five years. He taught for nine years at Mercer University in Atlanta, where he was chair of the philosophy department. He has published many reviews and articles as well as four books: Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Mercer, 1988); The Future of Thomism (Notre Dame, 1992); Sigrid Undset On Saints and Sinners (Ignatius, 1994); and Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). His autobiography, An American Conversion (Crossroad, 2003), is available from Amazon.com.
