I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. H/T to Mother Jones for making this type of propaganda known to the public.
A memo on Monday was circulated by Republican members on the House judiciary committee on Monday before Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks’ Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act’s scheduled markup. The memo seems to promote the bill, and uses some interesting statistics to back up its inaccurate claims. As we all known, the bill would outlaw abortions based on race or sex and would also give family members the ability to sue if they can prove an abortion was done on the basis of race or sex.
Part of the memo reads:
Even more invidious, a thorough review of the American family planning movement reveals a history of targeting African-Americans for “population control,” arguably resulting in the current statistic that a black baby is five times as likely to be aborted as a white baby. Abortion is the leading cause of death in the black community. With greater than 450,000 black abortions per year, more blacks Americans are lost to abortion annually than are lost to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, and violence combined.
I should note that the memo cites Susan Cohen’s Abortion and Women of Color: A Bigger Picture, published by the Guttmacher Institute, as one of the sources for its stipulation that black babies are “five times as likely to be abortion as a white baby.” While the report does admit the black abortion rate is five times higher than that of white women, Cohen presents slew of economic, racial and social disparities that contribute to this statistic. She further notes that activists, “including some African-American pastors, have been waging a campaign around this fact, falsely asserting that the disparity is the result of aggressive marketing by abortion providers to minority communities.”
More:
These activists are exploiting and distorting the facts to serve their antiabortion agenda. They ignore the fundamental reason women have abortions and the underlying problem of racial and ethnic disparities across an array of health indicators. The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. This applies to all women—black, white, Hispanic, Asian and Native American alike. Not surprisingly, the variation in abortion rates across racial and ethnic groups relates directly to the variation in the unintended pregnancy rates across those same groups.
Black women are not alone in having disproportionately high unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. The abortion rate among Hispanic women, for example, although not as high as the rate among black women, is double the rate among whites. Hispanics also have a higher level of unintended pregnancy than white women. Black women’s unintended pregnancy rates are the highest of all. These higher unintended pregnancy rates reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time. Moreover, these realities must be seen in a larger context in which significant racial and ethnic disparities persist for a wide range of health outcomes, from diabetes to heart disease to breast and cervical cancer to sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV.
Looks like the GOP has been caught red-handed distorting the facts and picking and choosing sentences without providing any context in order to promote their paternalistic, racist, anti-choice agenda.
(New Black Woman breaks it down)
