07 Sep 2018 Billboard Markets Abortion in Black Community, Project 21 Responds

It’s reported that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in or near minority neighborhoods. Black women account for 28 percent of all abortions, far exceeding their proportion of the population.

When such disparities occur elsewhere, they are usually considered discriminatory. It should in this instance, too.

After all, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wrote in 1938 that it is “a dangerous procedure to accept a way of life where the poor, ignorant, diseased and mentally and socially unfit maintain the stock of the population.” In a 1939 letter about the Birth Control Federation of America’s “Negro Project,” she explained nefarious ways of promoting abortion in the black community: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

This same sort of smoke and mirrors continues today. Project 21 Co-Chairman Stacy Washington spoke out against a new billboard campaign in Dallas that suggested abortion is “self-care” for black women. In an interview with American Family Radio’s One News Now, Stacy pointed out:

Last I checked, self-care is a manicure and pedicure or an afternoon out with friends. Abortion has eliminated almost 40 percent of the black population in America since Roe v. Wade.

The billboards, commissioned by The Afiya Center, read: “Black women take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care.” In a tweet about the billboards, Stacy added that the abortion industry likening ending a life to “a day at the spa” for black women is troubling because they “don’t market this way to any other group.”

Stacy’s tweet received recognition from former congressman Allen B. West, who now lives in the Dallas area. He wrote that this campaign “demonstrates just how leftist North Texas is becoming.”

In an earlier interview with One News Now, Stacy criticized the billboard company for accepting such an ad, and suggested bringing its decision to do so up with other businesses using that company’s signs:

This advertising that they’re doing is such an insult to black women, black people, black babies and Americans in general that Outfront Billboards should have denied the request to run this ad. A backlash against them and anyone advertising on their billboard system would be an appropriate response.

Marsha Jones, the executive director of The Afiya Center, claimed to be shocked by the reaction of Washington, West and others. She told the local NBC affiliate, “[I]n a million years, I didn’t think that it would be this visceral.” That’s hard to believe, considering she sought to provoke confrontation. The Afiya Center commissioned its own billboards as a response to another billboard that appeared a month earlier at the behest of a local pastor and the Black Pro-Life Coalition that read: “Abortion is not healthcare. It hurts women and murders their babies.”

Jones told the local CW affiliate that the pro-life sign “sparked anger” in her. Her signs were an angry reply that, now that it has revealed an apparent callousness toward the notion of ending a life, she is trying to downplay as “creat[ing] conversation.”

Acknowledging the devastation that abortion has inflicted on the black community, Project 21 recommends a ban on race-specific abortions and the sale of fetal body parts as part of its “Blueprint for a Better Deal for Black America.”They are among its suggestions for rebuilding ties between the black community and the faith-based organizations that have always been a stabilizing and strengthening force in them. Project 21 recommends the consideration of federal law similar to ones already adopted by eight states prohibiting gender-selection abortions. Such a law would require physicians to ascertain whether a mother wishes to abort her baby because of its ethnicity and, if this is the case, require the physician to inform the mother it is illegal to have an abortion based on race and refuse to perform the procedure. Civil and criminal penalties would be imposed for violations of the law.

Speaking about this Blueprint recommendation, Project 21 Co-Chairman Horace Cooper said:

Abortion is a billion-dollar enterprise. Planned Parenthood and other “family planning” providers profit handsomely from America’s silent genocide. But making a buck hasn’t stopped Planned Parenthood from sticking with its founder’s goals to go after blacks and the poor. Planned Parenthood clinics specifically locate near the neighborhoods of poor black women and as a result have achieved a devastating record: the’ve managed to kill the babies of five times as many women of color than whites. This targeting by race must end. No unborn child should ever lose his life because of the color of his skin.