Anti-Abortion Group Targets Planned Parenthood With Paranoid Allegations Of Black Genocide

The National Black Pro-Life Coalition, an anti-abortion group targeting African-Americans, recently released a video claiming that “the #1 killer of black Americans is Planned Parenthood and the abortuaries [sic] that target” African-Americans, and saying we need to “stop Planned Parenthood” in order to “bring an end to the genocide.” Watch it:

The ad echoes a seven-year-old campaign, which claimed that Democrats want to kill “black babies.” That campaign featured an ad voiced by former pizza executive and current GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, which suggested that African-Americans who don’t vote Republican believe that “if you make a little mistake with one of your ‘hos,’ you’ll want to dispose of that problem tout suite, no questions asked.” Listen:

The bizarre claim that, by allowing women of all races to choose when they become a parent, Planned Parenthood and its supporters are somehow carrying out a campaign to eradicate black people is obviously false — but it obscures a very real injustice in American society. Black women are more likely to terminate their pregnancies, not because of some genocidal conspiracy among women’s health clinics, but because America still suffers a legacy of racial and economic injustice that forces millions of African-Americans to grow up in poverty. Three in four women who seek abortions do so because they cannot afford a child. Nearly half of women obtaining abortions live below the poverty line, and more than a quarter of women obtaining abortions have incomes between 100-199 percent of the federal poverty level.

So if anti-abortion groups are really serious about reducing the number of black women who seek abortions, they should focus on the surest, most obvious way to actually achieve this goal — fighting poverty and the legacy of racial discrimination — rather than spouting paranoid fantasies about genocidal plots.