When Minority Rights Apparently Don’t Matter to the NAACP

Baby boy of African American.

On December 20, there was a congressional hearing held to discuss the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”   The bill’s sponsor, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, calls the problem it seeks to combat “the civil rights struggle that will define our generation.”

According to the general findings section of the bill:

Implicitly approving the discriminatory practices of sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion by choosing not to prohibit them will reinforce these inherently discriminatory practices, and evidence a failure to protect a segment of certain unborn Americans because those unborn are of a sex or racial makeup that is disfavored.  Sex-selection and race-selection abortions trivialize the value of the unborn on the basis of sex or race, reinforcing sex and race discrimination, and coarsening society to the humanity of all vulnerable and innocent human life, making it increasingly difficult to protect such life.  Thus, Congress has a compelling interest in acting — indeed it must act —to prohibit sex-selection abortion and race-selection abortion.

If enacted, the bill would create civil penalties for anyone knowingly involved in an abortion procedure “based on the sex, gender, color or race of the child, or the race of a parent of that child.”  There are exceptions for the safety of the unborn child, unviable ectopic pregnancies and procedures to remove a dead child from the womb.

No brainer?  Not quite.

While they are not coming out and saying that they have no apparent problem with targeting unborn children for termination because they are not the right sex or not racially pure, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and 46 other groups claiming to work on civil rights issues sent a letter to the subcommittee to complain that the bill “would exacerbate health disparities.”

The coalition further complains:

We are very concerned to see the fight against discrimination being misappropriated to push a bill that does nothing to combat sex and race discrimination, but instead imposes additional barriers on women in the United States.

At a time when the Guttmacher Institute reports that black women get 37 percent of abortions (despite being approximately 13 percent of the female population), it would seem this racial disparity is not of concern.  Despite the assertion by Harvard economist Amartya Sen that baby gender preferences may have led to the more than 100 million “missing” women worldwide, this egregious form of sex discrimination isn’t a top concern to this civil rights crowd.

This really shouldn’t be surprising, considering that the National Center’s Groupsnoop.org calls the NAACP “a civil rights group that promotes a racial and progressive agenda.”

Project 21 spokesman Jerome Hudson wants to know why the NAACP is apparently going against its very name.  Hudson boldly asks:

Why does the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People seem to hate colored people?

Last summer, the increasingly influence-deprived group passed a resolution to condemn what it called “extremist elements within the Tea Party.”  Stunningly, the national NAACP has apparently never questioned the very real and extreme practice of abortion on the basis of race or sex.

The NAACP now has the chance to support a bill that would stop this practice in the United States.  It passed on the honor.  In fact, it protested the bill.

Representative Trent Franks introduced the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” on December 1, a bill that would ban sex-selection or race-based abortions.  The NAACP joined over three dozen other special interest groups in protesting the bill.

Along with their usual “choice” complains, another one of the beefs against the bill, voiced by Representative John Conyers (D-MI), is that Douglass the abolitionist and Anthony the suffragist were not leading pro-life advocates and are thus — in their opinion — not suitably connected to the issue of race- and gender-based abortions.

I beg to differ.

On March 14, 1875, in her famous speech “Social Purity,” Anthony listed, among other things, “abortions and infanticides” as part of a “monster evil of society.”  Conyers scoffed that “I’ve never heard or read about [Douglass] saying anything about prenatal nondiscrimination,” but Douglass said on October 22, 1883: “Only base men and oppressors can rejoice in a triumph of injustice over the weak and defenceless, for weakness ought itself to protect from assaults of pride, prejudice and power.”

For what its worth, the NAACP’s affection for defeating policies that would protect the life of colored people seems to be consistent.

In 2004, the NAACP officially took a position favoring abortion, with then-chairman Julian Bond saying the group was “pleased to join those insisting on a woman’s right to control her own body.”

In July of 2007, the NAACP rejected a pro-life resolution introduced by its Macon, Georgia chapter.  Lifesitenews.com described the resolution as seeking “to address the pressing issues of abortion and infant mortality in the American-African community.”

Last year, when Live Action uncovered Planned Parenthood clinics willing to accept donations to help “lower the number of blacks in America,” the NAACP’s silence was deafening.  That largely-unreported scandal inspired Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) to introduce legislation to deny Title X funding to Planned Parenthood.  The NAACP sided with Planned Parenthood over Pence.

This past June, NAACP lobbyist Hilary Shelton condemned billboards in Atlanta, Georgia sponsored by black pro-life group that read “Abortion Enslaves Us.”  Shelton said the comparison “raises major concerns.”  Yet NAACP president and CEO Ben Jealous says requiring an ID to vote is the same as Jim Crow?

It is a sign of moral bankruptcy and political expediency when the NAACP, America’s oldest civil rights group, finds itself on the same side of the abortion debate as the infamous eugenicist Margret Sanger.  Why else would so-called advocates for the black community ignore the Holocaust of unborn black babies?

Does the NAACP really think that it is to the “advancement” of “colored people” to oppose a bill that would make racially motivated abortions illegal?  Really?!



The National Center for Public Policy Research is a communications and research foundation supportive of a strong national defense and dedicated to providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems. We believe that the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility provide the greatest hope for meeting the challenges facing America in the 21st century.