Abortion as "Black Genocide"

This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.com, created by the Radiance Foundation—a vaguely defined antiabortion and “personal transformation” nonprofit founded by biracial advertising executive Ryan Bomberger—with funding from Georgia Right to Life.¹

At the unveiling of the billboards, Georgia Right to Life Minority Outreach Director Catherine Davis explained their justification: “Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project,” she said, “is succeeding.”² She was referring to a 1939 project begun by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger that has inspired decades of claims that family planning is a racist plan to wipe out populations of color. It’s an old argument, with roots in the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements. But in recent years it has become the province of anti-abortion groups who are selectively co-opting civil rights rhetoric to present abortion and even contraception as eugenicist plots disguised as voluntary reproductive choices, which are leading to a slow “Black genocide.”

Recent studies by the Guttmacher Institute found that abortion rates are indeed higher among women of color³. African Americans, in particular, are thirteen percent of the population but account for 37 percent of all abortions. However, Guttmacher determined, this is due to their greater incidence of unwanted pregnancies, resulting from economic inequality and poor access to contraception and education. Nonetheless, the anti-abortion movement holds that Black and brown populations are being targeted – rather than served – by abortion providers who deliberately place clinics in inner-city, low-income neighborhoods.

For the past several years Black History Month has brought an onslaught of antiabortion activities related to this “Black genocide” strategy. This year was no exception. At the same time that the Georgia billboards appeared, White Republicans Representative Barry Loudermilk and Senator Chip Pearson introduced the so-called Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (SB 529 and HB1155) into the state’s legislature. The bill, which the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports⁴ was crafted to pose an immediate challenge to Roe v. Wade before President Obama nominates a replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens would criminalize race- and sex-selective abortions and has been fast-tracked through Georgia’s legislature. The Senate passed it on March 26, and although the original House bill floundered in that chamber’s special judiciary committee, SB529 quickly replaced it.

The bill, which rests on the assertion that many women are coerced into abortions as a result of race or gender bias, goes on to establish “the offense of criminal solicitation of abortion” and requires doctors to prove patients have not been pressured into abortion. On April 15, Georgia Right to Life launched a series of robo-calls that featured 2008 presidential candidate and Fox talk show host Mike Huckabee, stumping for the bill on the grounds of its “powerful implications for the sanctity of human life nationwide.”⁵ The Network of Politically Active Christians made a similar pitch and the bill drew national support from groups like Focus on the Family. As the state’s legislative session wound down in the last week of April, Republican House Speaker David Ralston planned a last-minute substitution of the bill that addressed some constitutional issues with the original, but maintained its ban on abortions performed because of the race or gender of the fetus.⁶

Reproductive-rights advocates of color have been appalled by these campaigns, with their implicit accusation that women of color are either dupes or agents of genocide against their own people. (Not to mention that the language of the billboards implies a tone-deaf comparison between Black children and animals.)

“We’re calling the bill the OB/GYN criminalization and racial discrimination act,” says the director of the women-of-color organization SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW, Paris Hatcher.⁷ She notes that the burden of proof the bill puts on doctors would greatly impede health care delivery. In an email campaign that has generated hundreds of complaints about the “endangered species” billboards to the owner of the signs, CBS Outdoors, SPARK tweaked a common refrain in the prochoice community—“trust women”—calling on people to “trust Black women” over those demonizing their decisions. “I think what you have here is tokenized leaders within a White movement floating an agenda,” says Hatcher. “You see White organizations capitalizing off of Black bodies and the shaming and blaming of Black women.”⁸

Civil Rights Rhetoric and “Black Genocide”

The token leaders to whom Hatcher is referring are a small but busy cadre of Black activists working in White-run anti-abortion organizations. For example, in late 2008, Pro-Life Unity hired a Black vice president, Samuel Mosteller,⁹ and in January 2009, after years of failed attempts to reach out to African Americans, Georgia Right to Life hired Davis to spread the word that reproductive health care providers such as Planned Parenthood have a “mission to eliminate blacks from America.”¹⁰

Most visible of these leaders is Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr., whose full-time position with Priests for Life was the first funded role for a “Black genocide” activist. Her main strategy—and critics say her sole qualification—has been capitalizing on her uncle’s legacy, often asking, “How can the dream survive if we murder the children?”¹¹ She takes frequent aim at a speech delivered on behalf of Martin Luther King Jr. by his wife, Coretta Scott King, in acceptance of the 1966 Margaret Sanger Award. The speech includes a lament about the number of unwanted children among poor Blacks. Alveda King suggests that Martin Luther King didn’t write the speech—to her ears, it sounds like it was written by a woman—and that his wife’s delivery of it was due to a marital disagreement. On Alveda King’s website,¹² she annotates the speech with quotations from the Rev. King that she believes refute his apparent support for the birth-control movement.

Alveda King and other “Black genocide” spokespeople make ample use of imagery that aligns the anti-abortion cause with the Civil Rights Movement. There is no shortage of emotionally charged analogies. The Rev. Johnny Hunter, the president of the Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN), speaks of “womb lynchings.”¹³ The president of LEARN’s Northeast chapter, the Rev. Clenard Childress, who founded the website BlackGenocide.org, frequently partners with the California-based group Genocide Awareness Project, which hosts “photo-mural” demonstrations on university campuses, comparing abortion to the Rwandan genocide¹⁴. In 2007, 10,000 pamphlets published by the Waco, Texas-based anti-abortion group Life Dynamics Incorporated were mailed to inner-city neighborhoods to publicize an appearance by the Black right-wing radio personality, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. The pamphlets denounced “Klan Parenthood” and juxtaposed images of lynchings with those of aborted fetuses, under the slogan “lynching is for amateurs.”

Anti-abortion activists have long compared Roe v. Wade to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which opened the territories to slavery. They have also pointed to the Constitutional mandate to count Blacks as 3/5 of a person to show that the U.S. law has always devalued Black people—and that Roe is no different. Their strategy now includes merging this rhetoric with fetal “personhood” amendment campaigns underway in eight states—and building in dozens more. In January, the American Life League and Father Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, hosted a meeting about overturning Roe v. Wade, which focused both on recruiting supporters in Black communities and passing fetal personhood bills. “There’s a lot of personhood legislation nationally,” agrees Childress, “and that’s going to remind most African Americans that there was a question about our personhood with Dred Scott.”¹⁵

In an email interview, Pavone said¹⁶ that the language of the Civil Rights Movement lends itself seamlessly to the anti-abortion cause. After visits to Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church with the King family, Pavone said, “I have thought to myself, the message is exactly right. Nothing has to change except to include one more group of people—the unborn.” Pavone and Alveda King both sample civil rights language in their outreach to Black pastors, explaining that the “beloved community” must include the unborn, and “that nonviolence includes nonviolence to children in the womb”¹⁷—messages they’ll further this summer through a series of “freedom ride” bus tours kicking off in Birmingham on April 27, led by Alveda King and other “Black genocide” leaders.

The apparent success of such rhetoric has encouraged mainstream anti-abortion groups to ask their donors to support outreach to African Americans, arguing that these converts to the anti-abortion cause have the potential to revive the movement. Last December, Pavone told his donors, “With your help today we will help African Americans take their rightful place in the pro-life movement … men and women who know what it means to be persecuted and treated as ‘non-persons’ … men and women who will re-energize the movement.”¹⁸

Promoting Conspiracism

In 1999, Childress helped lead 1,500 people, mostly Black activists, on the “Say-So” anti-abortion march from Newark, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C., where they laid 1,452 roses—the number of abortions black women were then having daily—on the steps of the Supreme Court. Childress, a 2007 candidate for the New Jersey state assembly who often says that “the most dangerous place for an African American to be is in the womb of their African American mother,” was recruited to the anti-abortion movement by a White Catholic activist who convinced him to attend a 1994 conference featuring the Rev. Johnny Hunter.¹⁹

While other organizations contribute money or materials, Childress supplies bodies for protests from his 200-member, Montclair, New Jersey, congregation, New Calvary Baptist Church. His young “zealots” frequently volunteer for high-commitment activism, such as a bus trip to Birmingham in 2003, where they crashed a mainstream Civil Rights Movement celebration, and recent trips to NAACP conventions to protest the exclusion of “Black genocide” concerns.

Childress is featured in Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America, a 2009 film produced by Mark Crutcher, a White Texan who runs Life Dynamics Incorporated—the producer of the “Klan Parenthood” brochures. Maafa is a Swahili word that refers to the African holocaust of abduction and slavery. The film argues that the maafa didn’t end with slavery but rather continues in a plot to exterminate the black population through ongoing eugenics programs created by “wealthy white elitists.” Its chief villain is Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger.

“In the African American community, if you shout conspiracy, they’ll listen, because of the history they’ve had in this country,” Childress told me²⁰. “I come from the conspiracy tone whenever I’m speaking, especially to African Americans, so they understand you’ll have to do some digging, you’ll have to go beneath the veneer.” (Apparently using the same tactic, Alveda King dismisses the studies citing higher rates of unwanted pregnancy among Black women as the cause for high abortion rates by suggesting that Planned Parenthood intentionally distributes faulty contraception to minority teens so they’ll need abortions.²¹) Childress’s loose attitude toward historical accuracy seems representative of the broader “Black genocide” movement. Thus, Maafa 21 sidesteps historical hurdles to suggest that Sanger’s support for sterilization on mental illness grounds (see sidebar) was a coded effort to target Blacks; that a eugenics movement mobilized to legalize abortion to market it to Black women; and that the government “hired Planned Parenthood” to continue eugenics programs.

The film, which received financial support from Priests for Life, premiered at the United States Capitol Visitor Center last year on Juneteenth, an African American holiday marking the day the emancipation proclamation was finally enforced in Texas. The host was the White Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ)—a steadfast ally of the “Black genocide” cause. Later, Alveda King and others held a screening of the film for congressional aides. In early March, Maafa 21 was the feature presentation at the Jubilee Film Festival at the 45th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” attacks outside of Selma.²² The film has been shown at numerous Black churches and colleges. In April, Childress, hosted by the Christian student group Every Nation Campus Ministries, discussed the film at Florida A&M, the largest historically Black college in the country—an event he predicts will exponentially spread his message into the Black community.²³

In a March fundraising appeal seeking support to fill requests for the film, Crutcher claimed that 13,000 copies had already been distributed. He triumphantly announced, “Life Dynamics has hit pay dirt” with Maafa 21, as the film rages “like a wildfire” through the Black community. The film, he said, is “the stone our pro-life movement would use to bring the abortion Goliath to his knees.”

“Black Genocide” and Health Care Reform

For close to fifteen years, the “Black genocide” movement has drummed up publicity by capitalizing on discussions of race or Black history in the media and promoted the posturing of White antiabortion activists laying claim to Rosa Parks’s legacy. But from these awkward origins, the movement has grown enormously in size and sophistication over the past year. In January, Lou Engle, the White founder of the anti-abortion group Bound4Life as well as of a group that campaigned to pass California’s Proposition 8 forbidding same-sex marriage, convened a Martin Luther King Day march on a large Planned Parenthood clinic under construction in Houston, calling it an “abortion supercenter that targets the minority community.”²⁴ The march drew prominent White anti-abortion leaders, including the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Richard Land.

The stage had been set earlier in the year, as the abortion debate overwhelmed health care reform. In mid-July, White congressional Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) argued against President Obama’s health care bill on “Black genocide” grounds, suggesting that Obama’s mother might have aborted him if she’d had the option of “taxpayer-funded abortions.”²⁵ Tiahrt was backed up by a series of five op-ed essays in the conservative Washington Times, written by prominent Black leaders of the “abortion as genocide” cause, which urged Republicans to adopt the issue in their fight against health care reform. At press conferences throughout the summer, Alveda King and her colleagues kept the rhetoric heated, telling the media that “genocide is not health care.” In an open letter to President Obama in August, a writer for the creationist Discovery Institute implied that John Holdren, Obama’s pick to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy, was a eugenicist targeting people of color in developing nations.²⁶

Sex- and Race-Selective Abortion

At the end of February, Representative Franks upped the ante in the “Black genocide” debate, telling a blogger that with “half of all black children” being aborted, “Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the politics of today than were devastated by the policies of slavery.”²⁷ After his statement, a lineup of leaders from the “Black genocide” movement came to his defense. Alveda King declared that any critics of Franks shared “the slave owner’s mindset.”²⁸ Day Garder of the National Black Pro-Life Union said Franks “should be revered as a great modern day abolitionist.”²⁹

In 2008, Franks said, a “Black genocide” protest in Washington, D.C., inspired him to sponsor a bipartisan House bill that would prohibit “discrimination against the unborn on the basis of sex or race, and for other purposes.”³⁰ The bill, which benefited from the collaboration of “Black genocide” leaders like King and Childress, was reintroduced by Franks last spring as the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2009. It has 42 sponsors.

Intellectuals in the anti-abortion movement have long counseled linking abortion with female infanticide and sex-selective abortion, as a method of converting moderates who would recoil at the thought of reproductive choice being used as a weapon of gender inequality. This argument is making the rounds in states as well. Oklahoma passed a law banning sex-selective abortion in 2009 (it was struck down this February on technical grounds). Expanding the strategy to race may be even more potent. In addition to Georgia, with its Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, Arizona, Mississippi, and New Jersey have proposed bans on race- and sex-selective abortions.

When Franks first introduced his bill in 2008, the Catholic anti-abortion and anti-contraception group, Population Research Institute, mused that the bill’s premise—that there is discrimination through abortion—could be as powerful as the campaign against so-called partial-birth abortion. “Even those who believe in the absolute right to destroy a child under any and all circumstances, it is safe to predict, will be uncomfortable defending such an extreme position,” PRI President Steve Mosher suggested.³¹

There’s a clear sense among abortion-rights activists in Georgia that the campaigns there are deliberate efforts to splinter alliances between reproductive-rights and racial-justice organizations and individual supporters, as well as to lay the groundwork for a national push. During a March press call³² organized by the blog Reproductive Health Reality Check, Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of Sister Song: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, explains that because Georgia has the highest number of Black elected officials in the country, the anti-abortion movement is using the state as test case for enshrining the “Black genocide” argument into law. The issue has been deployed, she says, in classic wedge-politics fashion, to draw Blacks and South Asians—who are allegedly the targets of providers promoting sex-selective abortions—into the conservative base.

“I actually see this as an opening salvo,” says Ross, “because if the Right can deliver this bill in the state of Georgia as a successful trial balloon, I think it will embolden them to believe that around the country they can drive a wedge into the African American community and into other communities of color.” In fact, Sister Song has heard reports that a Republican legislator in Arizona may soon introduce a bill on race- and sex-selective abortion aimed at finding support among the Latino community.

SPARK’s Paris Hatcher agrees: