When you need it to convince women of color that you know what's best for them.
ATLANTA — For years the largely white staff of Georgia Right to Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, tried to tackle the disproportionately high number of black women who undergo abortions. But, staff members said, they found it difficult to make inroads with black audiences.
So in 2009, the group took money that it normally used for advertising a pregnancy hot line and hired a black woman, Catherine Davis, to be its minority outreach coordinator.
Ms. Davis traveled to black churches and colleges around the state, delivering the message that abortion is the primary tool in a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.
......
Still, enough threads of truth weave through the theory to make “Maafa 21,” the documentary whose name is a Swahili word used to refer to the slavery era, persuasive to some viewers, at least at a recent screening at Morris Brown College, a historically black institution in Atlanta.
“Before we saw the movie, I was pro-choice,” said Markita Eddy, a sophomore. But were she to get pregnant now, Ms. Eddy said, “it showed me that maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.” (Source)
There are so many crazy-making angles to how our society treats unwanted pregnancy, financially unprepared mothers, and poor families and children.
If you get pregnant when you didn't want to, then you're stupid because you shoulda used birth control; if you decide to terminate the pregnancy, you're a baby killer; if you have the baby even though you can't afford it and ask for help, you're a drain on the system and a welfare queen; if there is no room in your budget to pay off the medical bills incurred for your child's birth, your credit rating is going down; and if you try to move your broke ass into a good neighborhood, you're the reason crime goes up and property values go down...if you can find anyone to take your section 8 voucher.
but now, if you terminate a pregnancy, you're an unwitting part of a vast conspiracy to rid the world of black children.
*eye.roooollll.*
instead of looking at the reasons why black women make up such a large percentage of women who choose pregnancy termination and address them, it's surely much easier to blame it racist conspiracy, the rain, and the ah-ah-ah-alcohol. because if the the focus is shifted to fake racist theory, the real questions about how and why institutional racism continues to negatively impact that lives of blacks are forgotten and pushed to the back burner. i'd be willing to bet that the majority of black women choosing pregnancy termination are also low-income.
while it's not really that surprising that the Pro-Life movement would try to appeal to blacks in this way, i do find it very interesting that it's suddenly OK to whip out that dreaded, hated, often duplicataed Race Card.
and by "interesting," i mean cynical and disingenuous.
