Abortion: The Black Holocaust

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Topic:	Religions > Atheism
User:	"words of truth"
Date:	07 Dec 2005 08:02:40 PM
Object:	Abortion: The Black Holocaust

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/002/11.21.html
Saving Black Babies
Abortion has cost 13 million African American lives.
By Sheryl Blunt in Washington
Growing up in inner city Detroit, Janine Simpson and her girlfriends
didn't think twice about having abortions. In her all-black
neighborhood, teen abortions were the norm, she says, and the local
abortion clinic was a fixture.
"My friends and I, we all had abortions," Simpson says. "We didn't even
think about it. To us it was just getting rid of a blob of tissue. We'd
say, 'Oh, you pregnant? Okay, let's go take care of it.' "
But after Simpson's own abortion her freshman year of college, things
changed. She became a Christian and after graduation developed a
passion to help other women with unplanned pregnancies.
"I had gone through a healing process and felt I needed to talk to them
and share my heart," says Simpson, now an ordained minister through the
Potter's House.
Simpson has just started a new job as director of urban center
development for Care Net. She works with inner-city church leaders to
educate their communities about the need for alternatives to abortion.
Care Net, an umbrella group for 600 crisis pregnancy centers across the
country, launched a pilot project in Philadelphia last September. It
aims to establish pregnancy resource centers and prolife clinics in
largely black, urban areas where such centers are rare.
Black abortion epidemic
"The perception is that we as black people keep our children," Simpson
says. The reality, she says, is that 512 of every 1,000 African
American pregnancies end in abortion.
African American women constitute 13 percent of the female population
in the United States. However, they have 36 percent of the abortions,
according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's
research arm. In Pennsylvania, the figures are even more
disproportionate. Ten percent of the female population is black, but
they have 45 percent of all abortions in Pennsylvania.
"Planned Parenthood has come in and exploited the inner city," Simpson
says, adding that many inner-city residents have easy access to an
abortion clinic.
"Thirteen million African Americans are missing from abortion," says
Clenard Howard Childress, regional director of the North East chapter
of LEARN. The Life Education And Resource Network is the nation's
largest African American prolife group. "We are the only ethnic group
in the county whose numbers are declining."
Charges of racism
The disproportionate number of abortions among African Americans has
spurred prolifers to charge that Planned Parenthood and other abortion
providers are systematically targeting blacks and other minority groups
for abortion. Critics say Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's
founder, held racist views.
Planned Parenthood maintains that Sanger disagreed with eugenicists,
Nazis, and racists. But prolife activists cite evidence that Sanger and
her colleagues were closely associated with white supremacists and
sought to limit the populations of minorities and the disabled.
According to Emily Taft Douglas's book Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the
Future, in 1926 Sanger was the guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in
Silverlake, New Jersey. She founded the American Birth Control
League-the precursor to Planned Parenthood-in 1921 with C. C. Little
and Lothrup Stoddard, two known racists. The latter authored the book
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.
Sanger and the founders of the league advocated population control
through abortion, contraception, or sterilization. A particular target
of their efforts was the urban poor. She also opposed welfare and
charitable intervention because she believed it increased the minority
underclass.
In her book, The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger complained that
governments have not managed "to restrain, either by force or
persuasion, the moron and the imbecile from producing his large family
of feeble-minded offspring."
Particularly disturbing to many pro-life African Americans is Sanger's
involvement in the Negro Project. Devised more than 60 years ago to
promote sterilization and birth control among blacks, the Negro Project
focused on training black ministers and doctors to take Sanger's
message into minority neighborhoods. In an ambiguously worded letter to
colleague Clarence Gamble dated December 10, 1939, Sanger wrote: "The
minister's work is also important and also he should be trained,
perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to
reach. 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."
Recruiting ministers
Abortion-rights groups continue to recruit African American clergy. In
1997, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC),
previously the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, launched the
Black Church Initiative. According to the program's founder, Carlton W.
Veazey, the initiative was a response to the high rate of pregnancy
among black teens. It sought to create discussion in black churches
about sexuality, reproductive health, AIDS, violence, and sexual
orientation.
The successful kickoff event included 400 pastors and black religious
leaders. Afterward, the group developed a curriculum called "Keeping It
Real," which has been introduced in 600 mostly inner-city churches in
15 states, says Veazey.
The RCRC is based in Washington D.C. and includes abortion supporters
from mainline Christian denominations as well as the Unitarian
Universalist and the American Humanist associations. Also, the RCRC is
closely allied with Planned Parenthood and top secular abortion-rights
groups.
Veazey told CT that he has a program with Planned Parenthood called
"All Options Counseling." In it, Planned Parenthood will call him if it
needs an RCRC-trained minister to come to a clinic and counsel a
pregnant woman one on one. "I support Planned Parenthood 100 percent,"
he says.
Veazey says his group "absolutely does not promote abortion in any
way." But an RCRC listing of online resources says, "Our primary role
is educating the public to make clear that abortion can be a moral,
ethical, and religiously responsible decision."
To some prolife activists, Sanger's Negro Project and the Black Church
Initiative seem eerily similar. "As far I'm concerned, their Black
Church Initiative is the same thing, repacked," says Johnny M. Hunter,
national director of LEARN, Inc. "[Veazey's] going along with a group
that's doing the KKK's work for them."
Veazey called some of Sanger's statements "unfortunate." He says
charges of racism and genocide against Sanger are scare tactics. "The
black community and religious leaders of our country would not be
supporting us if we were pursuing genocide."
Prolife African Americans say they are vigorously challenging the link
between abortion-rights groups and inner-city churches. LEARN's
Childress says abortion providers know "if they ever lose their
foundational stronghold in the black church, [their] movement ceases to
exist."
"They also understand that the greatest threat to their agenda would be
conservative churches that espouse a Judeo-Christian ethic." Childress
says he is trying to get the word out through his radio program and
website, blackgenocide.org. His radio program, "The Urban Prophet," is
broadcast five days a week in eight states and twice weekly in New
York.
Practical help
Prolife activists say getting more African American ministers to speak
out is key. "The clergy and the black leadership in general run from
the word abortion," says Barbara Thomas, founder of the inner-city
North Baton Rouge Women's Health Center in Louisiana. "They don't want
anything to do with it, and it's their parishioners we're seeing. The
majority of our clients have never heard their pastor even talk against
abortion."
Thomas says that of the 60 to 80 clients she sees each month, 98
percent are African American. In order to help these predominantly
low-income women, many of whom are high- school dropouts, the center
now focuses on education and vocational training. It also helps with
child placement, abstinence education, and pregnancy services. It has a
pregnancy health clinic with a nurse practitioner and a sonogram
machine. The center also has a child-loss recovery program for women
seeking post-abortion counseling.
To encourage fathers, the health center co-sponsors with a local church
on the "Man to Man" program, which helps new fathers build stronger
relationship with their children. The center plans to renovate a 22,000
square foot warehouse to add typing and computer training to its GED
and literacy program. Thomas says while the average age of her clients
is 19 or 20, she's seen pregnant girls as young as 11. One 12-year-old
girl, Thomas says, was on the verge of having an abortion. She
reconsidered and gave birth to twins. Different families later adopted
the twins and the girl.
Simpson is exploring using Thomas's center as a model for other crisis
pregnancy centers in Philadelphia. "We cannot encourage women to have
babies and then continue their dependency on the system," Simpson says.
"We can't leave them without the resources to care for their children
and then say, 'Praise the Lord, we saved a baby.'"
Hunter says LEARN Chicago plans a Midwest regional conference for April
24-26 to mobilize black opinion leaders. "There are people God has made
watchmen, and now's the time for the watchmen to call out," Hunter
says. "Abortion has been allowed to creep into the black community, and
a lot of black pastors have missed it. They haven't sounded the alarm.
No pastor wants to stand before God and say this happened on their
watch."
.

User: "L�rd Ph�lt�r"
Title: Re: Abortion: The Black Holocaust	09 Dec 2005 06:49:47 AM

"words of truth" <wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> astounded us with:
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