Pro-choice and pro-life leaders, both political and religious, have been seeking in recent years to find common ground in the debate over abortion. If the debate is simply going to center around the legality of abortion common ground will be difficult or even impossible to find. However, most reasonable people believe abortion ought to be rare and that we should seek to limit the need for abortion through prevention (including better access to sex education and contraceptives), adoption and support for women who decide to raise a child.
Some abortion opponents, however, aren't interested in common ground. Albert Mohler is a good example. Dr. Mohler is the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He believes that women shouldn't be ordained into ministry, that women should be subservient to their husbands, and that women should have no role in making their own reproductive health care decisions. Dr. Mohler opposes sex education, of course.
Now this abortion opponent - a national leader in a church formed to support the segregation of blacks and whites and that still actively opposes civil rights - is claiming that abortion is in fact a genocide against African-Americans:
Catherine Davis is a woman with a message, and that message is getting harder to ignore. "Black children are an endangered species."The Director of Minority Outreach for Georgia Right to Life, Davis is taking that message to the public, along with a massive public awareness campaign that has captured national and international attention. Drivers in the metro Atlanta area are seeing billboards that demand attention - and are changing minds. Her argument is simple and the statistics are irrefutable. She accuses abortion providers in general, and Planned Parenthood in particular, of targeting blacks for abortion. She told The New York Times, "The impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact our fertility rate."
Consider the chilling facts documented in the data. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 57.4% of the abortions performed in Georgia in 2006 were performed on African-American women, but blacks make up only 30% of Georgia's population. Nationwide, the pattern is similarly stacked against black babies - black women have approximately 37% of all abortions each year, while blacks make up only 13% of the national population.
You can see why Catherine Davis' message demands attention. She points also to the fact that, in Georgia, every single abortion clinic is located in areas of black concentration. She argues, quite pointedly, that this amounts to an intentional effort to reduce the black population in the United States.
What Dr. Mohler and Ms. Davis don't point out (it wouldn't help their argument) is that Planned Parenthood clinics are located often in low-income communities where no health care is available and that well over 90% of Planned Parenthood's services have nothing to do with abortion. The legacy of segregation is still felt. African-Americans live in poverty in greater numbers, fewer have health care, and fewer have the same educational opportunities as white Americans. Progress has been made, yes, but we are only a generation removed from the Jim Crow laws that Southern Baptists advocated for so strongly.
The Religious Right's attempt to divide Americans over race is a transparent ploy.
The Southern Baptist Convention doesn't even want to expand health care. They're opposed to reform. The SBC Ethics and Liberty Commission issued a statement this week that said:
Proponents of reform seem undeterred from giving the American people a dose of bad medicine. While the reconciliation tool could potentially placate enough elected officials to send a bill to the president’s desk for signature, the steps toward that end would also shut out opponents from the public policy process and create a new set of problems in health care—more governmental control, more taxes, higher premiums, and funding of abortion, to name a few. This is a deadly prescription.
Those are simply re-issued talking points from the GOP.
And while the Southern Baptist Convention - which only a decade ago thought to apologize for their support of slavery - wants African-Americans to believe that abortion is a genocide against blacks that opinion is not shared by the NAACP or other groups that actually represent African-Americans in the United States. The NAACP is a pro-choice organization.
The National Black Church Initiative of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice has additional information on how people of faith can support the rights of women.
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, by the way, is one of the pro-choice organizations that has teamed up with pro-life leaders to support the Preventing Unintended Pregnancy, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act, an attempt to reduce the need for abortion. The Reverend Dr. Carlton W. Veazey, RCRC President, said last year:
This Act’s support for family planning services will allow an increased number of low-income and uninsured women to determine when and whether to have children according to their own conscience and religious beliefs. The Act’s provision for comprehensive sex education reflects the views of major faith traditions and their commitment to empowering young people with the knowledge to make responsible decisions. These faith communities take seriously their duty to instill a set of religious and moral values that will help guide young people to responsible life choices. They believe that it is the role of government to ensure that the nation’s youth receive the facts - unblemished by ideology - that will protect them from disease and unintended pregnancy.
Being of faith means being engaged in the world. And like it or not, the facts are clear: 95 percent of Americans have sex before marriage, 80 percent of teen pregnancies are unintended, and each year, 25 percent of American teens contract an STD. We want our young people to be safe. For that to happen, they must be informed by comprehensive sex education and have access to contraceptive services. Offering them anything less is irresponsible, dangerous and wrong.
Our hope is that these provisions will help eliminate the terrible disparity in access to reproductive health services that results in poor women being four times as likely to have an unintended pregnancy as their higher-income counterparts. Access to reproductive health information and services allows women to continue their education, thereby improving their economic status and the well-being of their families and their communities. U.S. religious denominations and an overwhelming majority of people of faith support the use of contraception and believe it is the moral and responsible path to follow.
The Act also provides much needed resources to help ensure a woman a healthy pregnancy and provides additional support that will make it possible for women who choose to continue their pregnancy to care for their children. RCRC and our members will continue to work hard to provide women the information and help they need to respond to unintended pregnancies in a manner consistent with their values and life goals.
If Dr. Mohler was serious about his commitment to reducing abortion he'd join the pro-choice and pro-life leaders supporting this legislation instead of trying to use his position as minister to further divide the American people along religious and racial lines.
But hysterics are what we have come to expect from Dr. Mohler. It was just a few years ago he called the legality of gay marriage the moral equivalent to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
