A pro-life billboard campaign in Oakland, California, that seeks to draw attention to the devastating effects of abortion on the African-American community is being attacked as racist and offensive by the NAACP and supporters of Planned Parenthood. The 60 billboards, placed around the Oakland area by the campaign?s two sponsoring groups, the Issues4Life Foundation and the Radiance Foundation, include the image of a black baby, the phrase ?Black & Beautiful,? and the website Too.ManyAborted.com/CA.
The impact of abortion in the black community is the Darfur of America, declared Walter Hoye II, president of the Issues4Life Foundation, noting that some 15 million black babies have been slaughtered through abortion since the Supreme Courts Roe v. Wade ruling made the murderous procedure legal in 1973.
June 14 marked the 44th anniversary of the Therapeutic Abortion Act of 1967 (signed into law by Governor Ronald Reagan) that legalized abortion in California, a year that recorded 518 legal abortions in the state. Today California boasts one of the highest abortion rates in the nation, with over 214,000 of the procedures performed every year at 522 abortion clinics.
According to the federal Centers for Disease Control, the rate of abortion among blacks is over three times that of the majority population, differences which cannot be explained by health care disparities, the pro-life groups said in a joint press release.
We want to bring this to the attention of our community, the black community, said Hoye. We want them to take a look at the numbers. Lets take a look at the data, lets put all the rhetoric aside, and lets take a look at the real impact the loss of life, the loss of an innocent childs life in the womb of his or her own mother by way of abortion. He said he was confident that as we talk about it, as we create this environment for dialogue, were going to come to the inevitable conclusion that abortion needs to come to an end.
Not all Californians felt the same way, however. In response to the tastefully done campaign, pro-abortion individuals and groups went ballistic, charging that the billboards are racist in nature.
Alicia Walters of the pro-abortion Trust Black Women California argued that the billboards sponsors are using these terms with abortion to try to divide our community, as quoted by MercuryNews.com. To me that is offensive. It is not a message that uplifts our community. It is not a message that helps young women make a difficult choice.
Similarly, Democratic U.S. Representative Barbara Lee, who represents Oakland in Congress, said she was deeply offended by the race-based billboards that are being displayed in my congressional district by the Radiance Foundation and Issues4life. These billboards stigmatize women of color and perpetuate myths about parenting skills and the types of women who seek and use abortion services.
Incredibly, the NAACP got into the fray as well, with Alice Huffman, president of the groups California chapter, calling the billboard campaign a horrible approach, and racist on the face of it. Huffman called the campaign misleading and a very, very poisonous approach to politics. They are just alienating people on both sides.
Huffman appeared particularly disturbed by what she argued was an attack against Planned Parenthood. They are creating an illusion that Planned Parenthood is an organization that is murdering black babies, Huffman was quoted by MercuryNews.com. They just dont do abortions, they do education. They fill a need in the community.
Planned Parenthood has long dismissed the disproportionate abortion rate among blacks, with Lupe Rodriguez, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, arguing that the reason why there is a different rate of abortion is because those communities lack access to preventive health care services.
But Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the Radiance Foundation and creator of the TooManyAborted.Com campaign, pointed out that Planned Parenthood hasnt budged the national unintended pregnancy rate since 1995, but are relentlessly dedicated to increasing their annual share of abortions. They heavily advocate a singular choice that feeds their $1 billion dollar taxpayer subsidized budget.
Dr. La Verne Tolbert, a board member with the Issues4Life Foundation and a former board member with Planned Parenthood, said that in California children are targeted for abortions through school-based clinics and school-linked clinics, which are family planning clinics on or near school grounds. Girls are taken off campus to a Planned Parenthood clinic, where abortions are performed without parental consent or notification.
Bomberger, who is the product of a rape, and who was adopted into a multi-racial family with 12 other siblings, told LifeNews.com: Taxpayer-funded Planned Parenthood aborted 324,008 innocent lives and only made 2,405 adoption referrals according to their own latest Annual Report. Thats 135 children killed for every one adoption referral.
LifeNews cited a CDC report from February 2011 showing that black women accounted for 34.4 percent of all abortions in the United States despite comprising a much lower percentage of the population as a whole. The report revealed that black women had both the highest abortion rates (32.1 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years) and ratios (480 abortions per 1,000 live births), reported LifeNews.
Just how long the Black & Beautiful billboards will be allowed to stay in Oakland before pro-abortion activists pressure the billboard company to remove them is difficult to say. OneNewsNow.com reported that similarly themed billboards, targeting the Latino community in Los Angeles, were pulled after complaints from abortion proponents.
Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, told OneNewsNow that CBS Outdoor pulled his groups billboards, which carried the compelling message (in both English and Spanish), The most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb, after pressure from Planned Parenthood and its allies.
They really dont care about freedom of expression, said Aguilar. They certainly dont want us to express our opinion and to inform our community about the facts of abortion. He told OneNewsNow that 22 percent of all abortions are performed on Latino women. Thats a staggering figure. That means that over 250,000 Latinos die every year through abortion.
Added Aguilar: I know the theme of the ad, the statement was strong, but thats … how you get the attention of people. He added that a lot of Latinos in the community in L.A. reacted, just saying that they didnt know that fact. So this is a good way to educate the community.
