The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 75/No. 10      March 14, 2011

 
Rightist outfit targets
abortion rights for Blacks
 
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS  
NEW YORK—A billboard in Manhattan attacking the right of Black women to choose abortion sparked outrage here.

The three-story-high billboard pictured a six-year-old Black girl in a pink dress and the words, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” It was placed in the busy downtown SoHo neighborhood not far from one of Planned Parenthood’s facilities.

“This an insult to Black women,” Francesca Wilder, 22, who is Black and national campus organizer for the Feminist Majority Foundation, told the Militant. She was one of thousands who joined a February 26 rally at City Hall opposing federal funding cuts to Planned Parenthood. The group that put it up “used the photograph of an innocent child to say Black women kill Black children. It’s racist and antichoice,” said Wilder. Among those speaking out, she added, were Black male union workers employed at jobs across the street from the billboard.

The right-wing campaign against legal abortion comes in light of recent statistics showing the high rate of abortions performed in New York City, a large number of them sought by Black women. A recent report by the city’s health department showed that in 2009 41 percent of pregnancies in the city were ended by abortion, nearly twice the national average. The rate of abortion among Black women was nearly 60 percent.

Abortion services are more accessible in New York State because fewer legal restrictions are in place. Laws in many other states require parental consent for minors and waiting periods and counseling before being able to get an abortion.

The antiabortion display was erected by the Texas-based outfit Life Always, which had planned to keep it up at this location for three weeks and then tour it to other cities. Similar antiabortion billboards targeting Black women have been displayed over the past year in Jacksonville, Florida, and Austin, Texas, by the antiabortion group Heroic Media. In Atlanta in February 2010, Georgia Right to Life placed 80 billboards around the city proclaiming, “Black children are an endangered species.”

At a February 23 news conference here, Life Always founding board member Stephen Broden, who is Black and pastor of Fair Park Bible church in Dallas, tried to associate this campaign with Black History Month. “We celebrate our history, but our future is in jeopardy as a genocidal plot is carried out through abortion,” he stated.

Broden ran as a Republican Party candidate for Congress in Texas in 2010, featuring his antiabortion views along with attacks on immigrant rights. In an interview with the New American last September, he called for “protecting states from invasion” by “securing the borders from illegal immigration.”

Planned Parenthood spokesperson Roger Rathman condemned the antiabortion billboard for “using divisive messaging around race to restrict access to medical care.” Some residents in the area began tearing parts of it down.

Among those most angry about the billboard was Tricia Fraser, mother of the girl photographed in the ad. “I would never endorse something like that,” she stated. Fraser had taken her daughter Anissa and her other children to a modeling agency for photographs two years ago, but said she never thought their images would be used in an antiabortion ad. “I want an apology,” she told the Daily News. “At the same time I’m concerned that they can use that image again.”

Concerned that protests would occur by the site, Lamar Advertising decided to take the billboard down.

Life Always targets Planned Parenthood, a provider of women’s health services nationwide. On its website the antiabortion group attacks Planned Parenthood for placing “the majority of its abortion clinics in minority neighborhoods.”
 
 
Related articles:
Thousands rally to support women’s right to abortion  
 
 
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