Antiabortionist Making Moves

The abortion issue with African Americans has
long been tied into the economics of Blacks and
therefore the stance on abortion has leaned towards
the right to choose. Now antiabortion activist are
courting Blacks in an effort to get us into their ranks.
How do you feel today about abortion and do economics
still play into the equation?

Antiabortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more African Americans into their movement, targeting urban communities that they have long considered hostile turf.
They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing provocative leaflets to raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive healthcare and abortions in poor urban areas.

Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights — an effort to stop "black genocide" — these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tours the nation, speaking out against "the war on the womb." The great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott recently compared Roe vs. Wade to the 1857 Supreme Court decision declaring blacks so far inferior that they had no rights.

"Often the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue," said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 antiabortion counseling centers across the nation — almost all in mostly white suburbs.
The nonprofit launched an initiative last year to stake out a presence in cities, where abortion clinics tend to be clustered. "It's only recently that we've realized we need to be there," Hartshorn said. Her initial goal is to open three to five crisis pregnancy centers in Miami over the next several years.

The intensifying outreach to African Americans is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries. Heartbeat focuses on steering one woman at a time away from abortion. The black activist group LEARN tries to rally political outrage by touring colleges with the Genocide Awareness Project — giant murals that juxtapose photos of aborted fetuses with images of slaughter in Rwanda.
A single statistic underlies all these efforts: African Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.




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