Why Does the NAACP Fight for Race- and Sex-Based Baby-Killing in Arizona? by Derryck Green

green_smIt’s as if the NAACP hasn’t done enough to dishonor its legacy and completely ruin its reputation as a civil rights organization.

Grasping for political relevancy, the so-called civil rights group’s Arizona chapter, with the help of the ACLU, is suing the state of Arizona for what can only be called greater access to race- and sex-based abortion.

Arizona’s “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act” makes abortions based on the race of the mother or preborn child illegal. It also criminalizes anyone who knowingly performs an abortion based on race or gender issues. Lastly, it criminalizes anyone who engages in physical or verbal coercion that leads to a race- or sex-based abortion.

The first lawsuit — which claimed the new law restricted access to abortions — failed. Now, the ACLU is making a second claim on behalf of the state NAACP chapter and National Asian-Pacific American Women’s Forum that black and Asian women in Arizona “must endure the humiliation of living under a government that views them as a threat to American values simply by virtue of alleged character flaws possessed by persons of their race.”

In other words, black and Asian women who might be the subject of a race- or sex-based abortion shouldn’t have to be associated with the stigma of intentionally having an abortion based on race or gender. Instead, they should be free to have their preborn babies killed without question and perhaps even under duress.

Fools, the whole lot.

As written, the person getting the abortion should never even be at risk of prosecution under this law. And this fact, plus the lack of any such use of this law to enact a sweeping ban on minorities seeking abortions since its passage, should show how precisely it is tailored. But the ACLU, NAACP and NAPAWF still say minorities are being persecuted. Not by those who wish to see the unborn killed because of race or sex, but by those who want to prevent such unnecessary and hateful murders from being committed.

It seems the NAACP is not content with the disproportionately high number of abortions in the black community. It seems it wants more, and its Arizona state chapter will apparently sue repeatedly to make abortion access easier.

Imagine if a white person, or a predominately-white so-called civil rights organization, sued to overturn a law prohibiting race- and sex-based abortions to increase black abortions. This would rightly be called racist, and one can believe the NAACP would waste no time letting America know about such racism and how it reflects a greater racist America.

Yet the NAACP itself is pretty much engaged in this very same practice. In my opinion, it clearly indicates a reprehensible hypocrisy. The NAACP is actively supporting a position, through word and deed, to increase abortion in the black community. Doing so effectively undermines the group’s shrinking credibility when it advocates against racism.

Who should take any group seriously when it protests and demonstrates against racism but then works to stop a protection against blatant (and deadly) racism and sexism?

Since racism as a comprehensive obstacle to black advancement has been overcome, the NAACP has increasingly lacked moral and cultural relevancy. It should therefore drop the pretense of being a civil rights organization. In this case, the group obviously refuses to believe civil rights extend to those in the womb.

NAACP leaders should admit what the group has become and what many Americans already know — the NAACP is a political advocacy group seeking to advance progressive political causes.

# # #

Derryck Green, a member of the national advisory council of the Project 21 black leadership network, received an M.A. in Theological Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary and is currently pursuing his doctorate in ministry at Azusa Pacific University.  Comments may be sent to [email protected].

Published by the National Center for Public Policy Research. Reprints permitted provided source is credited. New Visions Commentaries reflect the views of their author, and not necessarily those of Project 21, other Project 21 members, or the National Center for Public Policy Research, its board or staff.




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.