Right To Lifers Link Abortion to Genocide--deftly using History

by Mara Gay

When the billboards began to crop up last month, I knew we were in trouble.

"Black Children are an endangered species," the ad declares. An adorable baby with brown eyes stares down at the highway below.

This startling claim is sponsored by Georgia Right to Life, a largely white anti-abortion group in the U.S. South that has created an ad campaign unlike any other. Abortion, they insist, is a covert attempt to stop black Americans from reproducing. No, worse. It's an attempt to wipe out black people altogether.

That's not hyperbole. On its website, TooManyAborted.com, the group likens the "abortion industry" to the holocaust and makes other serious allegations. Reproductive freedom? "An elitist mentality" that gave birth to the same eugenics movement that fueled Jim Crow. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger? A woman who held a " deep-seated hatred" of "inferior classes.

Think the idea is laughable? Think again.

This week, The New York Times reported that the campaign is catching on.

"What's giving it momentum is blacks are finally figuring out what's going down," Johnny M. Hunter, a pastor from North Carolina, told The Times.

"I know for sure that the black community is being targeted by abortionists for the purpose of ethnic cleansing," Alveda King, a niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told The Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.

I know how this looks.

The notion that supporters of abortion rights want to exterminate the black population has "Tea Party" and "Birther" written all over it, right?

You and I may think so, but the ads are likely to be effective anyway. Why?Well, for one, the numbers are distressing: though blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, they account for almost 40 percent of the all abortions in the United States. Still, as The Times reports, there are more unwanted pregnancies among black women as well.

The campaign's real genius is that it has found a historical truth and exploited it brilliantly. For years, thousands of women of color were systematically sterilized against their will, often by doctors being reimbursed by Medicaid. Some doctors even refused to deliver the babies of African American women unless they agreed to be surgically sterilized after the birth.

In 1972, Clovis Pierce, a South Carolina doctor, had a warning for one black mother: "Listen here, young lady," he reportedly said. "This is my tax money and I'm tired of paying for illegitimate children. If you don't want this sterilization, find another doctor." But Dr. Clovis was the only doctor in the county who accepted Medicaid patients, of course

The now-defunct Eugenics Board of North Carolina alone has admitted that it sterilized over 1,600 women - nearly all of them black and under the age of 20 - between 1960 and 1968. Some doctors even tried to coerce women into agreeing to have their tubes tied while they were in labor. In the South, tubal litigation was so common it came to be called a "Mississippi Appendectomy."

The national memory has not yet found room for these crimes. But campaigns to reduce the poor black population were real, documented, and experienced by some of the most central figures in American history.

In 1961, SNCC activist Fannie Lou Hamer went underwent routine surgery to remove a small uterine tumor, but emerged from the procedure without any uterus at all. Without her consent, the doctor had given her a hysterectomy.

Dick Gregory, the brilliantly acerbic black comedian, was convinced there was a conspiracy. In a 1971 Ebony piece entitled, "My Answer to Genocide," he explained his opposition to black abortions:

"First, the white man tells me to sit at the back of the bus. Now it looks like the white man wants me to sleep under the bed. Back in the days of slavery, black folks couldn't grow kids fast enough for white folks to harvest. Now that we've got a little taste of power, white folks want to call a moratorium on having children."

And in 1977, Jesse Jackson, who is now pro-choice, called abortion "black genocide."

Of course, the Georgia Right to Life's campaign is darkly ironic. Restricting a woman's access to an abortion is a continuation of policies that give black women - and indeed, all women - less control over their bodies. The only thing revolutionary here is the tacit acknowledgment of a sordid history that seems to have all but disappeared from the American memory.

True progress would be a campaign to give American women access to resources that help them prevent unplanned pregnancy and exercise control over their own lives.

But Georgia Right to Life is not in that business.

The billboards may seem literally unbelievable. But this particular anti-abortion campaign is loud, proud, and unafraid to plumb the depths of America's disturbing flirtation with eugenics.  And among many black Americans, the message is certain to resonate deeply.

Mara Gay is a New York based writer who writes for AOL Sphere and who has contributed to The Atlantic Wire.