The anti-black racism of Planned Parenthood

A recent tweet by “Planned Parenthood Black Community” would appear to tell us much about Planned Parenthood’s racial agenda, or at least invites needless complication if it is to ever shake off the notion that the organization’s founder championed race-based eugenics. (I’ll leave it to others to debate whether Margaret Sanger was sincerely advancing a eugenics program or not, and focus instead on the tweet at hand and its implications.)

The tweet, posted by @PPBlackComm on Halloween, states, “If you’re a black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or to give birth #ScaryStats”. In subsequent tweets in that message chain, a link to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System” is provided.

According to CDC figures, there are:

• 12.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for white women,
• 40.0 deaths per 100,000 live births for black women, and
• 17.8 deaths per 100,000 live births for women of other races.

Yet another tweet in the chain links to a Huffington Post article citing a CDC study showing that out of a million abortions, only 108 resulted in death.

Taken together, the two studies are being used as a very thin pretext by Planned Parenthood to directly lobby black women for its abortion services by way of fear, however justified that fear actually is.

For starters, of course abortion is a much safer procedure (for the mother, at least), as the whole purpose of the exercise is to eliminate pregnancy itself as well as the risks a mother takes on once she has helped create life. That Planned Parenthood Black Community is soliciting more abortions for black women to avoid the extremely low risk of maternal death (and a 0.0004% chance of maternal death from pregnancy is indeed low) seems rather desperate. Also, while riskier to the mother, a successful pregnancy results in at least two lives (mother and at least one child), whereas abortion sacrifices fetal life altogether, thus guaranteeing only one life at the end of it all, the aforementioned 108 notwithstanding.

(I should say here that I’m not sure whether “Planned Parenthood Black Community” is comprised of actual black people or simply white liberals who feel they know better than actual black people. Based on the lack of named officials for this so-called “black community” on its website, I suspect it’s merely a black-branded marketing initiative.)

As for the numbers shown by the CDC Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System, the data also lists the main causes of pregnancy-related maternal deaths:

• Cardiovascular diseases, 15.2%.
• Non-cardiovascular diseases, 14.7%.
• Infection or sepsis, 12.8%.
• Hemorrhage, 11.5%.
• Cardiomyopathy, 10.3%.
• Thrombotic pulmonary embolism, 9.1%.
• Cerebrovascular accidents, 7.4%.
• Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, 6.8%.
• Amniotic fluid embolism, 5.5%.
• Anesthesia complications, 0.3%.

Considering that at at least three of those causes are related to heart health (cardiovascular disease, non-cardiovascular disease and cardiomyopathy, for a combined total of 40.2% of pregnancy-related maternal death), and are conditions that can be reduced through nutrition, exercise, and adequate health care, and given that blacks are at higher risk to such conditions, it is very telling that Planned Parenthood (under its “Black Community” guise) chooses to simply advocate for the termination of black children rather than improved nutrition and heart health for black mothers.

Keep in mind that the tweet series in question doesn’t differentiate between planned and unplanned pregnancies — it merely exhorts black women to get abortions by trying to stoke fear around pregnancy itself. (Perhaps the assumption they’re pushing is that black pregnancies are, by definition, accidental?) Nowhere is there any helpful information for black women who are planning to carry their pregnancies to term, including links to nutritional information or community health resources, knowledge which could help these mothers improve their own health and that of their entire families.

Why not?

Wouldn’t encouraging young black mothers (specifically the ones who happen to be on the lower end of the economic spectrum) to rise above their statistical health obstacles, as well as lobbying for better access to pregnancy-related healthcare in general (and not just birth control and abortions), go some ways towards improving life in general for their families, and perhaps even rectify some of the overall racial disparities?

Reducing the total number of black lives, rather than protecting new black lives, would appear to be the true matter at hand, as that’s where the real money is — don’t let Planned Parenthood’s two-bit minstrel act make you think otherwise.