BY MAYA RUPERT

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Black children are an endangered species. And the fault for that, apparently, lies with black mothers.

Recently, a billboard campaign in Atlanta has received national attention for drawing what some believe is a questionable link between race and abortion. The billboards, sponsored by The Radiance Foundation and Georgia Right to Life, make the endangered species claim, and then direct viewers to www.toomanyaborted.com, where the argument is made that black women are being targeted for abortions in an effort to reduce the black population.

The Web site points out that, historically, forced sterilization and eugenics, or selective breeding with the goal of “improving” humanity, have been used in an effort to make sure black women did not reproduce. It claims that abortion is simply the latest permutation of a disturbing trend of using reproductive technology to slow procreation in the black community. The site points out that facilities providing abortions are more prevalent in predominantly black communities than they are elsewhere, which subtly encourages more black women to terminate their pregnancies. 

While it’s true that reproductive technology and advancements have been used in the past to rob black women of their bodily integrity, it is misleading and dangerous to characterize abortion as a part of that history.

Casting efforts to ensure reproductive freedom as a conspiracy to coerce black women to abort misses the point.

Pro-choice advocates are just that: Pro-choice. The difference between forced sterilization and eugenics and the right to choose to have an abortion is the difference between robbing a store and buying something on sale.

If the concern is that black women are choosing to have abortions at a higher rate than other women, the solution is not to shame them into not making that choice.

Although roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population is African American, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates black women receive about 37 percent of all abortions, the L.A. Times recently reported.

This number illustrates a problem: Black women are having a disproportionately high number of abortions. But it’s overly simplistic to act like the answer lies in pedantically telling black women to have fewer abortions. The solution is to ask why it is that black women are having a larger number of unwanted pregnancies.

Interestingly, the Radiance Foundation advocates for abstinence-only education, even though studies have shown that teens who benefit from comprehensive sex education are 50 percent less likely to have unplanned teenage pregnancies than those who receive abstinence-only education. If the concern is really to reduce the number of abortions in the black community, these organizations should focus on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.  

This campaign also ignores the realities that the black community still disproportionately faces, such as lower socio-economic status, inadequate access to quality health care, and inadequate access to quality education, all of which have an impact on the likelihood that a woman will choose to have an abortion.

Changing these realities would be a more comprehensive and effective way of decreasing the number of abortions that take place among black women.

Instead, this campaign takes aim only at the women acting responsibly and deciding whether to terminate their pregnancies. It turns a blind eye to the complexities of the societal issue and essentially blames black women for participating in their own ethnic genocide.  

There are a lot of areas in public life where racism creeps in and negatively affects the black community. However, the effort of abortion providers ensuring the reproductive freedom of black women is not one of these areas.

This campaign is exploiting racial statistics in order  to pressure black women into denying themselves the choice to decide how to begin their families.

Making abortions accessible in black communities isn’t racist — but publicly shaming the black women who make this choice in a simplistic shock campaign is. Sadly, as it garners more attention, we should expect to see more of this and similar campaigns in communities outside of Georgia, attempting to further stigmatize a vulnerable community making a difficult choice.