Black Abortions: The Truth About Abortions and Black Genocide
This has been a piece that I have been thinking about for a while but was unsure if it was the right time to speak on the matter publicly. However, in the wake of the new pro-life anti-abortion legislation that has recently passed in Georgia and Alabama and a few other states, the charged pollical and social climate has convinced me that the time is now. My relationship with abortion is complex. Before I get too far into this piece, let me say right now that I am without a doubt Pro-Life although I respect the right of a woman to choose. As a mother of eight children I have never had an abortion although I am not ashamed to admit that the idea had crossed my mind once when I was a sixteen your old low-income high school dropout with little support — although my mother was steadfastingly in my corner and my only unconditional support.
But my stance on abortion was decided before I became a mother. My decision mostly came about because from a conversation, or revelation, that I had had with my mother when I turned twelve. And I know what you must be thinking right now as your reading this, “What does having a conversation with your mother have to do with abortions?” But let me explain, and you'll see how it ties into my being Pro-Life. Anyway, it was during this conversation that my mother told me that she had almost aborted me. My mother was so determined to have an abortion while she was pregnant with me, that it took both of my older sisters several days of constant protesting and pleading before she finally agreed to allow me to live. As my mother was telling me her story, I saw the look on her face, a profound look of guilt and shame. When my mother was finished, she asked me for forgiveness to which I accepted. But, even though I accepted my mother’s heartfelt apology, deep down I was still very angry with my mother but also very grateful to my sisters to whom I owe my life. It took me a while to forgive her and get over — which in pre-teen time meant that I was angry for like a couple of days.
Now, my mother never told me why she wanted to have an abortion with me considering that she herself was Pro-Life and I never asked. It wasn't until several years after my mother passed away that a family member finally told me the truth. That truth was that my mother was sexually assaulted by a friend and that sexual assault was how I was conceived, and more importantly, why my mother wanted to have an abortion. I know that such scenarios are more common that people think — that is, something horrible happens, specifically sexual assault of some kind, and a child ends up being conceived due to that horrible act. It is under these terrible circumstances and/or situations that you find some Pro-Lifers willing to agree that abortions are acceptable. I am not one of these Pro-Lifers. I am not one of these individuals in that I do not accept abortion under any circumstances unless the pregnancy becomes life-threatening and then and only then would I consider an abortion the be warranted.
So here goes the crux of this piece and that is the abortions in the Afro-American community are too high and in fact are higher than any other group.
Abortions among Afro-American women are so high that many Pro-Life activists and advocates have concluded that “Black genocide” is occurring. And I have to agree. As an Afro-American woman from a low-income background and having lived in the ghetto — that is, segregated high crime low-income areas with large parentages of Afro-Americans — I have seen firsthand the disparate number of Planned Parenthood clinics located in these areas. It is not coincidental that when one walks into one of these clinics on any given day that you would immediately notice that many of the patients are Afro-American women. I would be an a good position to know having gone to several Planned Parenthood clinics both in Michigan and Ohio — not for abortions but to receive my birth control shots.
Even more profound is that there are no shortage of healthcare providers, most are non-minority white, that believe that it is their and responsibility and right to tell Afro-American mothers how many children they should and shouldn't have regardless of the health of the mother.
I myself have had several (mostly white and one Afro-American) OBGYN’s try and pressure, and scare, me to stop having children — this pressure, though I would say that it was more like harassment, started when I was pregnant with my third child. I have had doctors lecture me about my continuing to have children with one male doctor saying, “Why would you want anymore children when your struggling to care for the ones you have?” This same doctor then tried to give my a hysterectomy while lying on the operating table having my seventh child knowing full well that I was adamant about having more children.
During my last pregnancy, I was again constantly pressured to have my tubes tied — this time by a bi-racial female doctor — the pressure was so intense and it weighed on me so much that my husband, who is an ordained minister, finally had had enough. During one of the last doctor appoints before having our son, and right in the middle of the same tube’s tying discussion, my husband angrily cut off my OBGYN and told her that we didn't believe in serialization and to back off, which she promptly did. All that said, I would like to say that my experiences were the exception and not the rule, however, the opposite is true.
Speaking from both personal and professional experience — I am a trained healthcare administrator and former RN nursing student — I know for a fact that Afro-American mothers, especially low-income Afro-American mothers, are consistently pressured by doctors and society as a whole to have abortions, and if the mother has more than three children, they are pressured to have their tubes tied just like I was. This is but one example of how racism and classism manifests itself within the American healthcare system. After all, are white woman subjected to this kind of treatment and shaming when they've decided that want more than three children? better yet, are Catholic women — most of which aren't Afro-American — urged to stop having children because they ‘can’t afford more’? I doubt that.
Heck, we see more and more white women having children in their forties and fifties and again no one is telling them that they’re being “selfish” — I say selfish because that is one of the main things that social service workers and healthcare professionals call and/or tell low-income Afro-American women who decide to have more children — for bring children into the world at an advanced age. And if people don’t believe that having children in one’s forties and fifties or even older is not high risk, for both mother and child, and dangerous, than you don’t know much about reproduction. And while I don’t prescribe to conspiracy theories, it is undisputed that there is a strong connection between the Eugenics movement and abortions of Afro-American babies. This was, and to many myself included still is, a clear purpose — whether publicly stated or not — of Planned Parenthood which was founded by known racist and Eugenics campion Margret Singer. Singer wanted to use Planned Parenthood — and abortions and sterilization before the invention of the birth control pill — as a means of decreasing and maintaining Afro-American populations. Government and others have sought to control the Afro-American population and impede on our reproductive freedoms — freedoms that everyone else enjoys, especially whites — since our ancestors were brought here on the slave ships.
Several states engaged in forced and/or sterilizing coerced well into the 20th century— including Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, California and Alabama — poor overwhelmingly Afro-American teens and you women. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late seventies that the Eugenics and forced sterilization programs (mostly) ended. These programs stopped in large part due to and/or response to the Relf v. Weinberger case wherein Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, poor African American sisters from Alabama, were sterilized at the ages of 14 and 12. Their mother, who was illiterate, had signed an “X” on a piece of paper she believed gave permission for her daughters, who were both mentally disabled, to receive birth control shots.
Coerced sterilization is a shameful part of America’s history, and one doesn’t have to go too far back to find examples of it. Used as a means of controlling “undesirable” populations — immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill — federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century.
— Lisa Ko, NYC based Writer and Editor
It was this case brought in 1974 which revealed that around 100,000 to 150,000 poor people, again overwhelmingly Afro-American, were being sterilized annually under federally-funded Eugenics programs. But for those of you who believe that Eugenics and forced sterilization completely ended in the seventies you would be incorrect. In a recent case, California prisons authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010, most of whom are Afro-American and Latino. This article from the Center for Investigative reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion. That said, it’s time to break out the numbers as it relates Afro-American women and abortions. The following statistics are courtesy of Right to Life Michigan which is where I currently reside.
National Statistics
— More than 19 million Afro-American/Black babies have been aborted since the 1973 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in our country.
— Afro-American/Black women have a significantly higher abortion rate than Whites and Hispanics.
— 36.0% of all abortions in the U.S. in 2014 were performed on Afro-American/Black women, however, only about 13.3% of the total population is Afro-American.
— Afro-Americans are no longer the nation’s largest minority group. Today, Hispanics have outpaced Afro-Americans in population growth.
— For every 1,000 live births, non-Hispanic Afro-American/Black women had 391 abortions. Non-Hispanic White women had 120 abortions per 1,000 live births.
Michigan Statistics
— Afro-American/Black women had 12,789 of the 25,757 abortions performed on Michigan residents in 2017. (Of the total 26,594 reported abortions in Michigan in 2017, 837 were performed on non-residents and 25,757 were performed on residents).
While Afro-American/Black women make up only about 14% of Michigan’s female population, they had 50.6% of all abortions reported in the state in 2017.
96.2% of Afro-American/Black women having abortions are not married.
Afro-American abortions by age:
Under 20–8.8%
20–24–31.1%
25–29–34.3%
30–34–15.8%
35 and Older — 10%
We, Afro-Americans, have to be honest about what is happening here. The statistics above clearly demonstrate that there is an is indeed an Afro-American genocide going on. As an Afro-American woman, child welfare, parental rights, and social justice advocate, it is obvious to me that we, Afro-Americans, are being attacked from every and all sides. We have the child welfare and criminal justice systems that are needlessly ripping Afro-American families apart — both of which have been doing so for decades — thus, reducing Afro-Americans back to slavery status. And now with more and more Afro-American women placed under pressure to have abortions by healthcare providers and other societal influencers, it is incredibly disheartening to realize that not even our unborn are safe. So, to my fellow Sista’s, I will wrap-up with a poem I wrote:
Ladies you are beautiful. You are strong. You are great. Please remember that with every child you create. No matter what everyone says or the circumstances under which your baby came about, just know that your baby is a special gift, and will love you unconditionally when he or she comes out.
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Latagia Copeland-Tyronce, MSW, CADAS, is a longtime parental rights and social justice advocate, child welfare reform activist, writer/blogger, and journalist whose work has been featured in BlackMattersUs and Rise Magazine. She is the founder, president, and executive director of the National African American Families First and Preservation Association (NAFPA) a groundbreaking 501c4 nonprofit origination, the first of its kind, devoted exclusively to the protection and preservation of the African American (Black) Family though policy and legislative advocacy.
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