Pro-lifers co-opt race

“Every 4 days in American more black children are killed through abortion than the KKK killed in 144 years.”  This is a base-energizing, factually misleading, hardly original and grammatically challenging tidbit given front-page billing on the Georgia Right to Life’s Web site.

The deplorable klanparenthood.com takes the Right to Life stance one step further by saying, “Lynching by the Ku Klux Klan isn’t as efficient at killing Blacks as Planned Parenthood abortions. Thanks to them, in America today, almost as many black babies are killed by abortion as are born.” It even offers free brochures titled “Lynching is for amateurs”  to prove its point.

These inflammatory statements set the stage for the drama of eighty billboards, which are starting to appear in Georgia, depicting an adorable black boy with piercing eyes while text next to him screams, “Black children are an endangered species,” under which the sign advertises “toomanyaborted.com.”

The sleek and inventive graphics of toomanyaborted.com are little more than a shambling facade for its patronizing quest to stop black abortions all under the guise of disdain solely for Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

From a source whose subtitle is “No hype. Just truth,” one cannot help but be interested to see that three of the 10 footnotes for its “Negro Project” piece are references to Wikipedia. Perhaps the most inflammatory of these Wiki-sourced references is one that supposedly connects Sanger with Nazi Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was responsible for the Third Reich’s eugenics program. While a controversial figure in her own right, Sanger is merely a scapegoat for the Georgia Right to Life’s campaign.

It is no secret that the black population in the United States was treated as animals for centuries and still feels the aftershock of this maltreatment. Georgia Right to Life has made an unmistakably horrendous decision to do nothing less than capitalize on the social stigma of the black population as subhuman and animalistic with their racially charged language.

The choice is one that this Right to Life group should never have made, yet it was one they had the option of utilizing. It is a choice based on what they have imagined are shocking statistics both of their own manipulation and of those who hold an even deeper racial hatred. Although it is true that black females have relatively high rates of abortion, the grotesque visualization of these infants as animals is one the Georgia Right to Life should never have employed.   

While Margaret Sanger’s intentions can be picked out from scraps of her work, seen both in and out of context, the body of the argument against the “Endangered Species” campaign is not found in the misrepresentative connections and untraceable paths of slanted historical data that make up sites such as toomanyaborted.com; the disgust for these advertisements is born from yet another image of heartbreaking racial naiveté that would find it is most welcome in a dumpster.

E-mail: schammoo@indiana.edu