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.

Black Women Destroying Black Women while Saving Planned Parenthood

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

President John F. Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural Address

In 1961, many Blacks embraced the idea of passing the torch to a new generation – an idea that embodies responsibility, discernment and courage. President Kennedy defined this birthright as one built on strength, discipline and sometimes bitterness. What appropriate verbs for articulating the black experience in America – a legacy that should not be squandered or easily vanquished by the political expressions of the day. Yet, Star Jones, Nia Long and all the black women Keli Goff of the Root describe as “…Saving Planned Parenthood” have done exactly that – they have spit on the legacy of generations of black women instead favoring the politics of abortion over the lives of millions of blacks that have died in Planned Parenthood’s abortion centers.

Strong words, yes. Betrayal, yes. The cost of the betrayal: the lives and reproductive health of women who have believed and will believe Planned Parenthoods’ dogma because those spouting it are respected actresses, journalists, political leaders or entertainers. I cannot believe that any of these women looked past the rhetoric Planned Parenthood, has fed them to determine the truth of why Planned Parenthood centers are closing. It is not because they are suppliers of health care to women. The reality is that they are contributors to some of the very health issues many women and black children are facing such as breast cancer, bacterial and sexually transmitted infection, extreme premature births and infertility among other injuries including death.

To this day I remain haunted by the death of Tonya Reaves, a vibrant young twenty four year old that Planned Parenthood in Chicago left bleeding for more than five hours after a failed abortion during her fifth month of pregnancy. She did not have to die. But Planned Parenthood has so little regard for life that they left her there for more than five hours, unable to help herself as her life’s blood drained from her body. I am incensed by their rhetoric that this is a matter of access to contraception! No this is a population control agency continuing its objective to control the population we “don’t want too many of”, as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed in her 2009 New York Times interview. Tonya was one such victim of Planned Parenthood’s population control agenda.

The Root, carelessly continues the lie that black women lack “access to contraception” calling it “one of the key predictors for escaping poverty”. Since 79% of Planned Parenthood’s surgical facilities are located within a two mile walking radius of a Black or Latino neighborhood (see this study: http://www.protectingblacklife.org/pp_targets/index.html)one would think there would be far less Black and Latino women in poverty in these very same neighborhoods. After all, they tell us “When it comes to women’s health, they are the first line of defense for most lower-income women in America". This misinformation turns a blind eye to the fact that Planned Parenthood is the largest abortion provider in the nation. Instead they disguise this truth in the propaganda that "abortion accounts for less than 10% of their services".

The Planned Parenthood centers that are closing, are closing because the so call doctors in those facilities render such poor care, they cannot get admitting privileges to nearby hospitals and/or because they refuse to raise the facilities to ambulatory surgical center standards. Like Philadelphia’s Kermit Gosnell, they subject women to a myriad of horrors in the name of unfettered abortion rights. Most of these butchers are not held accountable for the poor services they render. In fact in most states while they may occasionally face disciplinary action, they are allowed time and again to go back to business as usual of butchering women. They want Black women to continue seeking this Gosnellian treatment because they refuse to raise their abortion centers to reasonable standards of medical care.

Not all Black women have drunk Planned Parenthoods' poison. Some of us get it. We stand as the dam, blocking the "undoing of human rights" of Black women and black babies and will continue to do so until the scourge is removed from our community.