DALLAS — Antiabortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more African Americans into their movement, targeting urban communities that they have long considered hostile turf.
They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing provocative leaflets to raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive healthcare and abortions in poor urban areas.
Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights -- an effort to stop "black genocide" -- these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tours the nation, speaking out against "the war on the womb." The great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott recently compared Roe vs. Wade to the 1857 Supreme Court decision declaring blacks so far inferior that they had no rights.
Antiabortion efforts: An article in Wednesday's Section A about antiabortion efforts in black communities oversimplified the eugenics views of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in saying she did not support coerced birth control. Sanger did not support measures to limit the population of minorities through coerced contraception. She did, however, support forced sterilization of the mentally disabled.
"Often the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue," said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 antiabortion counseling centers across the nation -- almost all in mostly white suburbs.
The nonprofit launched an initiative last year to stake out a presence in cities, where abortion clinics tend to be clustered. "It's only recently that we've realized we need to be there," Hartshorn said. Her initial goal is to open three to five crisis pregnancy centers in Miami over the next several years.
The intensifying outreach to African Americans is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries. Heartbeat focuses on steering one woman at a time away from abortion. The black activist group LEARN tries to rally political outrage by touring colleges with the Genocide Awareness Project -- giant murals that juxtapose photos of aborted fetuses with images of slaughter in Rwanda.
A single statistic underlies all these efforts: African Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Though blacks tend to express deep moral qualms about abortion, liberal groups that support abortion rights -- most prominently Planned Parenthood -- have spent years building ties with black churches and providing subsidized healthcare, such as pap smears and AIDS tests, to poor urban communities.
