Yesterday, I linked to this article on Facebook (HT: Vitamin Z.) The article discusses the “Endagered Species” advertising campaign sponsored by the Georgia Right to Life.
I later saw this same article linked to by another person, who had a rather different take on it than mine. This other person suggested that this was a “Christian conspiracy theory” and an example of playing the “race card” while overlooking the true underlying theme–poverty.
I couldn’t help but mull over the suggestion. Is an injustice being done to black children in particular, or is poverty the only thing we should be worried about in this issue?
Yes, the data behind this campaign and the information shared in this campaign is fodder for conspiracy theorists. And some are taking hold of it in that way:
As the Los Angeles Times reports, “An increasingly vocal segment of the antiabortion community has embraced the idea that black women are targeted for abortion in an effort to keep the black population down.” Similarly, from The New York Times: “Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during the SuperBowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.”
“Planned Parenthood is out to kill blacks,” the conspiracy theorists would say.
I don’t really believe that. While there probably are some people who want to wipe out the black race, I do not believe this is the goal of the average (or even not so average) Planned Parenthood employee. But regardless of intent, Planned Parenthood is killing a disproportionate number of black babies. Regardless of intent, they are doing a remarkable job of carrying out their founder Margaret Sanger’s eugenic image of utopia.
In the public health world, we get worked up over things that disproportionately kill one population over another. We get worked up over sex differences in morbidity from heart attacks. We get worked up over racial differences in morbidity from diabetes and related disease. We want to know why these disease discriminate.
A huge goal of public health in the US is to eliminate health disparities. We don’t want death to discriminate. We don’t want one subset of our population to be dying off at a disproportionate rate.
So we work to understand and modify the factors that lead to these health disparities. Of course, much of our work is made more different because genetics plays a role in many diseases. Abortion is a different matter. There is no innate inborn difference between blacks and whites that causes black babies to be aborted at a higher rate. The factors responsible for these deaths are much more straightforward. People are killing those babies. And people are killing more black babies than white babies.
This should not be.
If we were to learn that people were giving out free baby formula in a black neighborhood–and that kids were dying because the baby formula was tainted with melamine (as in last year’s China scare)–that wouldn’t necessarily mean that people were intentionally killing black babies. But they were doing it nonetheless. Maybe the distributors of the free formula intended the distribution to be a mercy (and I believe many abortion providers believe that they are doing their clients a service by “relieving” them of another mouth to feed.) But their good intentions don’t change the fact that they’re killing babies in general and black babies in particular.
And if someone wanted to stop babies from dying, I think they’d focus on the population that is having the most children die. They’d say “Black people, pay attention. Your babies are dying from this tainted milk. Take note. Adjust your lives accordingly.” That’s what we do in health promotion–we target the population that’s most at risk. Because that population would do well to know the risks–and to say to the well-intentioned killers “Thanks, but no thanks. Take your free formula elsewhere. We don’t want you killing our babies.” Just the same, I think it is valuable for blacks to be awakened to the silent genocide of their children (whether said genocide is a result of design or happenstance.)
To use the campaign’s example, let’s think about endangered species. Say there’s a certain species of animals that is being destroyed by, say, fertilizers being used on farmland. The population of this type of animal is dwindling. The farmers aren’t intentionally setting out to kill this animal, it’s just a consequence of what they’re doing to help them achieve their goals. But when an environmentalist becomes aware of this, they lobby for endangered species status for the animal and seek tighter regulation of the fertilizers that are killing it.
That’s what we do for animals. But when it is babies–precious black babies–whose population is dwindling and who are being threatened, are we to sit back and say “but they’re not intending to kill black babies”? No way! We should be outraged by the inequalities and injustice we see and should seek to do all we can to stop the slaughter.
And what can we do to stop the slaughter? I think the Georgia Right to Life is making a good first step. They’re raising awareness–letting people know that black children are being killed by abortion at appallingly disproportionate rates. We can also pray and vote and work towards increased regulation and eventually closure of the clinics that perpetuate this murder. We can work to change the circumstances that make people feel that it would be better to kill their babies rather than let them live–circumstances like poverty, promiscuity, and lack of male responsibility. We can pray that God would change the hearts of people. Yes, we can pray that God would change the hearts of politicians, but also of abortionists, of people who seek abortions, and of the silent masses who just don’t care about the brutal genocide of the unborn–those who don’t care because it hasn’t touched them.
We must awaken to the fact that the slaughter is real–killing just under half a million black babies a year. This should be a startling statistic, a cause for alarm, a call to action.
It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the murders are–or whether they have anything specifically against blacks or not. The point is, they’re killing blacks–and killing a lot more blacks than they are whites. And if we are a church who is truly interested in social justice, we should be ringing the alarm and calling for and working toward an end to this silent genocide.