USA: Anti-abortion campaign targets black community

The UK Independent reports on a controversial poster campaign in Georgia.

The message on dozens of billboards across Atlanta is provocative: black children are an ‘endangered species’. The ads featuring a young black child are an effort by the anti-abortion movement to use race to rally support within the black community.

The reaction from black leaders was mixed, but the Too Many Aborted campaign, which so far is unique only to Georgia, is drawing support from other anti-abortion groups across the country, the Independent says.

The billboards went up in Atlanta in February and urge black women to ‘get outraged’.

The effort is sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, which also is pushing legislation that aims to ban abortions based on race.

Black women accounted for the majority of abortions in Georgia in 2006, even though blacks make up just a third of the state’s population, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Nationally, black women were more than three times as likely to get an abortion in 2006 compared with white women, according to the CDC.

Anti-abortion advocates say the procedure has always been linked to race. They claim Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to eradicate minorities by putting birth control clinics in their neighbourhoods, a charge that Planned Parenthood denies.

‘The language in the billboard is using messages of fear and shame to target women of colour,’ said Leola Reis, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Georgia. ‘If we want to reduce the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies, we need to work as a community to make sure we get quality affordable health care services to as many women and men as possible.’

US anti-abortion activists target black community. Independent, 15 February 2010