Anne Midgley

AMU & APU Students for Life is proud to celebrate Black History Month by featuring influential pro-life Black voices through its social media accounts.

These pro-life leaders advocate for the dignity of all human life and stand opposed to the narrative that Black women need abortion to succeed in life. Pro-Life pioneer Dr. Mildred Jefferson said, “I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.”1

It is a sad fact that Planned Parenthood, founded by the eugenicist Margaret Sanger, targets the black community. Drawing on data from the 2010 census, “Protecting Black Life” mapped Planned Parenthood locations and found that seventy-nine percent “of its surgical abortion centers are located within walking distance of African American or Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.”2 Planned Parenthood’s trend to target minority communities has continued unabated: Life Issues Institute reported in 2017 that Planned Parenthood’s twenty-five new “abortion mega-centers” are targeting communities of color at an alarming rate. Their findings indicate that “80% target Black communities, 56% target Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods and 80% target one or more colleges. In total, 96% (24 of 25) of the mega-centers target women of color, college women, or both.”3

The Center for Urban Renewal and Education’s policy report to Congress in June 2015 noted that since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, more than nineteen million Black babies have been aborted.4 The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that almost 630,000 abortions occurred in the United States in  2019. Data from areas that reported race and ethnicity in the details provided to the CDC indicated that Black women accounted for 38.4% of these abortions.5 The US 2020 Census reflects that the Black population represents 12.4% of people living in the United States.6 The National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, frames the data in this manner:

“Black women have been experiencing induced abortions at a rate nearly 4 times that of White women for at least 3 decades, and likely much longer. The impact in years of potential life lost, given abortion’s high incidence and racially skewed distribution, indicates that it is the most demographically consequential occurrence for the minority population. The science community has refused to engage on the subject and the popular media has essentially ignored it. In the current unfolding environment, there may be no better metric for the value of Black lives.”7

Given the horrific impact that abortion has had on the Black community in the decades since Roe v. Wade, it is more important than ever to listen to the voices of Black men and women who oppose this genocide. Dr. Ben Carson, former Republican presidential candidate and professor emeritus of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, wrote:

“We have allowed the proponents of a woman’s choice movement to convince us that killing valuable human babies is not a big deal and certainly is better than infringing upon the convenience of a woman. We have established the setting where many women think the baby inside of them would negatively impact their lifestyle. These women believe their babies need to be eliminated rather than guarded and cherished. We’ve distorted things to the point where people believe that anyone who opposes mothers killing their babies is waging a war on women. How can we be so foolish to believe such a thing? One must be able to recognize the depravity to which we have sunken as a society when valuing a baby’s life is frowned upon.”8

That perspective is shared by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has said, “Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled, . . .  The idea that the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood the Due Process Clause to protect a right to abortion is farcical.” In framing the civil rights progress that American Blacks have made, Christina Bennett states: “As an African American woman, I enjoy many rights today because those who came before me earnestly fought for them. . . .  Yet I wouldn’t enjoy any of those rights if I never made it out of the womb.” Famed civil rights activist, Fannie Lou Hamer (1917 – 1977), a victim of forced sterilization, compared abortion’s effect on the black community to genocide.9  

This February, let us honor Black History Month by honoring all Black lives, including the unborn.

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1. Mildred Jefferson, MD quoted in Americans United for Life, Mildred Press, accessed February 8, 2022, https://aul.org/press/.

2. “Planned Parenthood Targets Minority Neighborhoods,” Protecting Black Life, accessed February 8, 2022, https://www.protectingblacklife.org/pp_targets/index.

3. Susan W. Enouen, “Planned Parenthood Minority Targeting Goes into Overdrive,” Life Issues Institute, accessed February 8, 2022, https://www.lifeissues.org/2017/06/planned-parenthood-minority-targeting-goes-overdrive/.

4. “The Effects of Abortion on the Black Community,” Center for Urban Renewal and Education Policy Report, June 2015, https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/HHRG-115-JU10-Wstate-ParkerS-20171101-SD001.pdf.

5. “Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2019,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, November 26, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm. 

6. “2020 Census Illuminates Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Country,” United States Census Bureau, August 12, 2021, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race-ethnicity-measures-reveal-united-states-population-much-more-multiracial.html.

 7. “Perceiving and Addressing the Pervasive Racial Disparity in Abortion,” National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, August 18, 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7436774/.

 8. Ben Carson, “We must value human life,” CNN, July 28, 2015, https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/28/opinions/carson-planned-parenthood/index.html.

9. Jamie Ehrlich, “Justice Clarence Thomas says Roe decision doesn’t have ‘shred’ of constitutional support,” quoting Justice Clarence Thomas, July 9, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/29/politics/clarence-thomas-abortion-dissent/index.html; Christina Bennett, “Abortion’s Impact on the Black Community,” Focus on the Family, December 7, 2021, https://www.focusonthefamily.com/pro-life/discovering-abortions-impact-on-the-black-community-moved-me-from-apathy-to-action/; Rachel MacNair, “Is It Too Late?” 1971 Speech of Fannie Lou Hamer,” Consistent Life Blog, February 6, 2018, http://consistent-life.org/blog/index.php/2018/02/06/fannie-lou-hamer/.