A pro-life billboard in Manhattan was taken down on Feb. 24 owing to its controversial but truthful content. The huge ad showed a black girl with the words “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.” The poster was part of an advertising campaign by the pro-life organization, Life Always, directing viewers to the website ThatsAbortion.com. It was displayed in the SoHo neighbourhood, half a mile away from a Planned Parenthood abortion facility. The billboard was denounced as an “affront” and “fear-mongering” by city council members. Brooklyn City Councilor Leticia James, who is black, said the ad “borders on racist” and “minimizes the emotions that young women have to go through when faced with this predicament.”

Rev. Johnny Hunter is national director of the Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN, Inc.), an organization that emphasizes the destructive effects of abortion on the black community. Rev. Hunter told The Interim that it is sad that people are criticizing the billboard “when they won’t go after the real thing,” which is that more black people in New York City are aborted than any other race. “That’s what real people should be upset about.”

The Life Always campaign came in the wake of the release of New York City abortion statistics from 2009, which showed that 59.8 per cent of black pregnancies were aborted, 50 per cent higher than New York City’s overall abortion rate of 41 per cent, which itself is almost two times the national average. According to ThatsAbortion.com, abortion is responsible for 46.7 per cent of African American deaths, 32.5 per cent of Hispanic deaths, and only 11.9 per cent of Caucasian deaths in New York City, if abortion fatalities were counted as a cause of death in official statistics.

The elevated abortion rate of blacks and other minorities is not unique to New York. ThatsAbortion.com points out that “more African American babies have been killed by abortions since 1973 than the total number of African American deaths from AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, cancer and heart disease combined.” The US Center for Disease Control indicates African American babies are three times more likely to be aborted than white babies. Since Roe v. Wade the black population has declined by 25 per cent. The CDC’s 2006 statistics indicate that black people accounted for 36.4 per cent of abortions in US while, under the 2000 census, they were only 12.3 per cent of the population. White women accounted for only 55 per cent of abortions even though they comprise three-quarters of the population.

The imbalance in abortion rates suggests something sinister at work. Rev. Hunter points to Maafa 21, a film showing how abortion of black people is a symptom of the eugenics movement and that “blacks have been targeted for elimination.” This has been the legacy of Planned Parenthood, whose creator, Margaret Sanger, was a notorious eugenicist. “Planned Parenthood has not sued the filmmaker,” said Rev. Hunter, which indicates that “the facts in that documentary stand.”

Sanger proposed the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” and the sterilization of the “genetically inferior races.” In her autobiography, she wrote about “the incessant fertility of (the Chinese) millions spread like a plague” and promoted eugenics and racism in her magazine, The Birth Control Review. According to a 2008 Washington Times editorial, Sanger wrote in 1939 that Planned Parenthood should use black ministers to promote birth control and abortion among the black population: “we should have three or four colored ministers… The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the one who can straighten out that idea.”

Rev. Hunter points out, “she is dead and from her grave she is still killing off black people.”

To some extent, Planned Parenthood is still targeting ethnic or racial minorities. Estimates show that 62 to 78 per cent of Planned Parenthood abortion facilities are in minority neighbourhoods.

Furthermore, in 2008 the pro-life organization Live Action released the video from an undercover operation where an actor wanted to donate money to the organization specifically to fund African American abortions to “lower the number of blacks in America.” Not one PP facility declined the money and some even expressed approval of his opinions. Lila Rose, founder of Live Action, writes on the group’s web site that “the calls unearthed a Planned Parenthood program that poses a threat to minority communities. Many centers set up ‘women in need’ or ‘justice’ funds designating money specifically for minority abortions.”

According to Rev. Hunter, minorities are such a significant clientele that, “when blacks decide not to get abortions, (the facility) must shut down.”