Black Women Matter, All Women Matter

Growing up in Southfield Village in Stamford, CT afforded me a great childhood. Really.  I had a great childhood even though I had fights with my neighbors and friends all the time. When it was time to fight or if we wanted to pick one, we drew a line on the ground and dared our opponent to step across it. Sometimes we put a stick on our shoulder and dared our combatant to knock it off.  If they had the cojones to do so, the fight was on and one or the other of us would get a beat down. It has been a long time since I encountered someone bold enough to cross the line or knock the stick off. In recent times, however, Planned Parenthood has done both. 

They first enlisted the aid of black leaders starting with the likes of W.E.B. DuBois, back in the early 1900’s all the way up to today’s cadre of advocates that include Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Nia Long, Star Jones, and Gabrielle Union. They have sought out the most trusted voices for the voiceless - the Black media and fed them talking points cloaked in the rhetoric of civil and women’s rights. Using the funds provided by many of those that fueled and supported Hitler’s Nazi regime, they have enlisted politicians, entertainers, sports figures and others to sell their services to communities of color. They have billed themselves as champions of Black and Latina women, fighters for the cause of their reproductive rights! They have even recruited Pastor’s to tell the 37% of Black women who say they are Believers, that it is morally alright to abort their child.

You've heard their slogans and talking points – trust Black women to self-determine their reproductive needs; there are disparities in health care and Black women are victims of those disparities; America, they say, has “a premature birth crisis” that “can be directly linked to our failure to provide adequate contraception and abortion care. They even go so far as to declare abortion helps with maternal mortality! (http://huff.to/1nODtBr) They proudly boast of having launched a multi-year campaign to reverse their ineffective outreach to communities of color ((http://bit.ly/1iwUJqw). Yes, Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry have crossed the line and knocked off the stick.

Taking off the cloak of secrecy that kept many of us blinded to their mission, they have tapped into major Black media outlets pushing their eugenics agenda. BET, Ebony, Essence, Madam Noir, and The Root, are just a few of the outlets that have published pro-Planned Parenthood and pro-abortion articles, commercials and opinion editorials. In February, Black History Month 2014, Planned Parenthood chose ninety-eight Blacks to honor, one for each year of their existence. Many of those honored could be considered among the movers and shakers in the Black community, influencers able to convince others to follow their lead. And like the Pied Piper, these influencers are persuading Black women to walk into the dens of abortion that are rendering them infertile, diseased or worse taking them off the cliff of death.

What makes this particularly disheartening is that these influencers know Planned Parenthood’s eugenic history. They know that abortion and birth control are counted the greatest advances in the eugenic toolbox as Frederick Osborne, past president of the American Eugenics Society boasted in 1973. They know that Roe v. Wade is the case that allowed the elitists to deal with “the populations we don’t want too many of”” as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed in her 2009 New York Times Magazine interview. How do I know they know? Because they tell us so in the many articles they publish. For example the Root’s Keli Goff and Madam Noir Ann Brown's recent articles about Black women saving a struggling Planned Parenthood both call Planned Parenthood's’ early history of racism “complicated”.  They both dismiss the fact that Planned Parenthood’s founder hung out with Nazi’s and others that believed in ethnic cleansing.

Despite mounting evidence that abortion and the centers where the surgery takes place are unsafe for women, and are actually dangerous, these promoters of abortion join with Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the National Abortion Federation among others, calling for less regulation. The industry has acknowledged that it is not attracting reputable doctors (see Eyal Press' article in New Yorker Magazine, A Botched Operation), and substandard abortionists are filling the void. Yet, none of these honorees are fighting for the babies or the many women being injured every year. The Guttmacher Institute reports five percent of the 1.2 million abortions each year (about 60,000 a year) result in an injury that require hospitalization. Few of them reveal the truth about abortion in America – that there is a growing trail of women that can no longer have children having been rendered infertile by one of these substandard practitioners. They do not report on the many women that have bacterial and other infections from the filthy conditions found in many of these centers. They do not discuss the practitioners that sedate the women and rape them, nor do they discuss those whose centers do not have the needed medical equipment to resuscitate a patient if necessary.

Instead the culture is bombarded with rhetoric designed to lure women into the arms of those bent on destroying the life within them. And if the woman happens to die, well, who cares? She does not matter.

A line has been drawn in the sand. A stick has been placed on our collective shoulders. On which side will you fight? As for me and my house, we will do what our ancestors have done since the founding of this nation. We will fight for our lives because Black women matter, all women matter.