Posted on 04/01/2007 4:44:46 AM PDT by rhema
Anti-abortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more blacks into their movement, targeting urban communities they long have considered hostile turf.
They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing leaflets that raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive health care and abortions .
Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights - an effort to stop "black genocide" - these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s is touring the nation, speaking out against "the war on the womb." The great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott recently compared Roe v. Wade to the 1857 Supreme Court decision bearing her ancestor's name, a ruling declaring blacks so inferior that they had no rights.
"Often, the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue," said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 anti-abortion counseling centers across the U.S. - almost all in mostly white suburbs.
The nonprofit launched an initiative last year to stake out a presence in inner cities. Her initial goal is to open three to five crisis pregnancy centers in Miami in the next several years.
The outreach is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries. Heartbeat focuses on steering one woman at a time away from abortion. The black activist group LEARN tries to rally political outrage by touring colleges with the Genocide Awareness Project - giant murals that juxtapose photos of aborted fetuses with images of slaughter in Rwanda. A single statistic underlies these efforts: Blacks make up 13 percent of the population but account for 37 percent of abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Liberal groups that support abortion rights - most prominently Planned Parenthood - have spent years building ties with black churches and providing subsidized health care, such as Pap smears and AIDS tests, to poor urban communities.
By contrast, the national anti-abortion movement has largely ignored the inner city. Its energy, funds and volunteers come mostly from "white, suburban, small-town, red-state America," said the Rev. John Ensor, who runs Heartbeat's Urban Initiative. That legacy has sown mistrust.
"When you go to African-American communities - even myself, an African-American woman - you'll find they don't trust pro-life people," said Lillie Epps, a vice president of Care Net, which runs 1,000 suburban crisis-pregnancy centers. "They look at us as a group who cares very little about what's going on in the inner city."
When LaToya Yarbrough became pregnant six months after her first child was born out of wedlock, she didn't think anyone at a crisis pregnancy center in the suburbs could understand her situation. "I had this view ... that I'd be saying, 'I can't afford this, I can't afford that' and I'd be looking at (the counselor) and thinking, 'You can, because you probably have a husband at home who's a doctor or a lawyer,' " she said.
Yarbrough started dialing abortion clinics. At one, a secretary sensed her despair and referred her to Family Care Pregnancy Center, run by a black megachurch in Dallas.
There, Yarbrough met other black women as afraid as she was and black counselors determined to help them find a way to carry their pregnancies to term. She took free classes in prenatal care, child discipline, car-seat safety and spiritual growth. Center director, Jettie Johnson recognized Yarbrough still had postpartum depression from the birth of her first son, Byron, and provided counseling.
Yarbrough's second son, Joseph, will turn 1 in May.
"Now that I look at him, I wouldn't care if the counselors were white, Asian, black - they saved his life," Yarbrough said. "But when I first started out ... I wouldn't have been as comfortable with a white person as I was with Jettie. She looks like me. She knows what I'm going through."
The Rev. Tony Evans, whose church runs the Family Care facility, has staged national conferences to persuade other black preachers that they can press hard to save lives in the womb without giving up on the traditional, often liberal concerns of the black church.
It's an uphill struggle. Not only are black pastors often afraid to offend their mostly female congregations, but many have developed close partnerships with abortion-rights supporters.
Planned Parenthood uses the Washington, D.C., affiliate as its template. Executives visit black churches on Sundays and even speak from the pulpits on topics such as HIV testing. President and CEO Jatrice Martel Gaiter holds clinic tours for black ministers, "to show them that their kids will be safe with us."
Gaiter encourages the perception that the anti-abortion movement is made up of imperious outsiders. As she puts it: "Upper-middle-class, white organizations should not be able to interfere with families in black communities."
? ? ? ? ?
Nobody's gonna steal them from the garbage can?
Anti-abortion activists Pro-lifers woo blacks seek to save black babies' lives
Notice the inflammatory language, bias, etc.. And not a peep about a peep about the founder of Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger), being a bigot who saw abortion as the perfect method to do away with blacks and other undesirables...mentally retarded, etc..
I wish I had a nickle for every black friend who has said to me, "We want shopping centers in our community, but we get abortion clinics, instead."
The paragraph about the child whose life was saved is heartening, but frankly, and especially if you're black, you can't be on the fence about this issue. Moral relativism is evil and so is killing babies.
Where's the verse in which the Lord invokes judgment against shepherds who devour the sheep?
Sometimes the jokes just write themselves. < /bitter irony >
Citation?
Fishing for the secular vote, ergo: it's all about me. Liberal votes for secular folks.
This one?
Zechariah 11:16 "For behold, I am going to raise up a shepherd in the land who will not care for the perishing, seek the scattered, heal the broken, or sustain the one standing, but will devour the flesh of the fat sheep and tear off their hoofs.
This is similar:
Ezekiel 34:2 "Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? 3 You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. 4 The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them. 5 So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. 6 My sheep were scattered; they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. My sheep were scattered over all the face of the eart
If more of them would get jobs instead of getting pregnant when they don't want to be and are unemployed, I'm sure that would happen. It's just a matter of supply and demand, and they have no one but themselves to blame for what their community demands.
{Liberal groups that support abortion rights - most prominently Planned Parenthood - have spent years building ties with black churches and providing subsidized health care, such as Pap smears and AIDS tests, to poor urban communities.}
The above statement shows the main reason why blacks are so heavily Dem. Liberal groups are all over the palce in minority communities, while conservative groups are nowhere to be seen.
It amazes me that the followers of Margaret Sanger are allowed to propagandize in black churches while people who bring an alternative to abortion might be shut out. Planned Parenthood and the KKK want the same thing -- to control the "Negro" population. That makes me think that some (no all) black churches want their people to remain second class citizens and victims. The pro-life people ought to distribute booklets with quotations from Sanger and others -- that should open some eyes.
I prefer the brotherhood approach of the people in the article over the we vs them in your statement.
From the National Right to Life Committee website:
http://www.nrlc.org/bal/sanger.html
"MISATTRIBUTED QUOTES The quote, “blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race,” has been attributed to Sanger, but it appears to have been fabricated. The proposal of the Negro Project reads: “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.” This quote has been attributed to Sanger; actually, it is was originally written by W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and quoted in the proposal. The above quotes should never be attributed to Sanger. Other publications have argued that Sanger was a Nazi or an anti-Semite, with no evidence to substantiate those positions; she should not be given those labels. Many people have in good faith reprinted citations or statements that have appeared in publication without realizing that the original author did not have his or her facts straight. In general, one should be careful about quotes attributed to Sanger: they should always be documented."
and, quoting a passage where Sanger actually did refer to "human weeds", without any reference to blacks or any other specific group, in an article entitled "The Need of Birth Control in America" :“Birth Control is not merely an individual problem; it is not merely a national question; it concerns the whole wide world, the ultimate destiny of the human race. In his last book, Mr. [H. G.] Wells speaks of the meaningless, aimless lives which cram this world of ours, hordes of people who are born, who live, who die, yet who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race one iota. Their lives are hopeless repetitions. All that they have said has been said before; all that they have done has been done better before. Such human weeds clog up the path, drain up the energies and the resources of this little earth. We must clear the way for a better world; we must cultivate our garden.”
Wikipedia lists the exact line Verax used in its section on quotes misattributed to Sanger:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger
This fellow was one of the early advocates of Planned Parenthood.
Many of us don't regard it as an act of "brotherhood" to browbeat women who can't even support themsleves, much less children, into having babies they really don't want to have. Kudos to the abortion clinic worker who recognized a caller who really didn't want to have an abortion, and referred her to an agency that would help her if her decided to continue her pregnancy, but that's a pretty rare situation. Most of these women know they shouldn't have gotten pregnant in the first place, and if they're getting as far as calling an abortion clinic, they're trying to put things back the way they should have been, i.e. no baby. It's next to impossible for women to dig themselves out of the hole of poverty and ignorance when they start having babies before they've done that, and children raised in poverty and ignorance are very prone to repeating the cycle. That's why so many of the teenage girls presenting themselves for abortions are the daughters of women who had babies in their teens.
The "human weeds" on this site are the pro-abort posters who belittle the work of Christians trying to save lives.
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