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RCRC Joins Women of Color in Georgia in Denouncing Campaign Against Clinics
Statement of Reverend Dr. Carlton W. Veazey,
President and CEO, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

The racist, sexist campaign in Georgia is an assault on women's reproductive rights
and an affront to decency and truth

February 17, 2010
The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice stands with SisterSong and other reproductive justice and civil rights advocates in Georgia and nationally against a racist and sexist assault on the reproductive health and choices of women of color.

We urge people of faith to call for the defeat of HB 1155, The Sex and Race Selection Bill, introduced today (February 17) in the Georgia legislature. As advocates for social justice, we must affirm the right of women of color to have access reproductive health care.

Sign the Solidarity Statement!

As the United States celebrates Black History Month, groups in Georgia that oppose legal abortion are trying to push African American women back to the time when they lacked the right to make choices about child-bearing and their health. Approximately 65 billboards have been erected in the Atlanta area that claim African American children are “endangered” and refer to a website that states that racists are using abortion “to stealthily target blacks for extermination.” The bill that has been introduced in the legislature would make it a crime for abortion providers to solicit clients based on the race or sex of the fetus, despite no evidence of alleged abuses of this medical procedure.

Like other attempts to equate legal abortion with genocide, the Georgia campaign portrays African American women as victims who cannot be trusted to make moral decisions and tries to induce fear and shame in them. The perpetrators prey on the consciences of African American women. As SisterSong National Coordinator Loretta Ross has said, “The mere association between the born and unborn with endangered animals provides a disempowering and dehumanizing message to the black community, which is completely unacceptable.”

Rather than depriving women of color of already limited reproductive health care services, we should be addressing persistent racially-connected health disparities. To reduce the need for abortion in the African American community, it is critical to support increased access to contraceptive services and reproductive health care.

Disparities in Health Care (source: The Guttmacher Institute)

Racially-connected health disparities are a persistent problem in the Untied States. The area of sexual and reproductive health, in particular, is riddled with inequities, including differences in contraceptive failure rates, unintended pregnancy and abortion among teen and adult women, and rates of infection with HIV and other sexually transmitted infections among both men and women. While much progress has been made, our efforts and attention need to be directed toward equalizing health outcomes for all Americans.

Teen pregnancy rates have dropped significantly among African Americans over the past decade but remain much higher than rates among white teens. Among African American teens, the pregnancy rate fell by 45% between 1990 and 2005. Rates among non-Hispanic white teens also fell by 50% in the same time period, but started at a much lower rate. Alarmingly, teen pregnancy rates went up among all racial and ethnic groups in 2006.

Among women of all ages, African Americans are almost four times as likely as whites to have an abortion. Antiabortion activists use this statistic to make the groundless argument that the “abortion industry” is targeting and marketing aggressively to African American communities. What proponents of this argument fail to recognize is that these higher abortion rates are directly related to higher rates of unintended pregnancy. Disproportionately high rates of both unintended pregnancy and abortion are symptoms of the broader health disparities faced by African American communities.

The causes of these higher rates are many and include: lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community.

In contrast to the anti-abortion activists who use health disparities simplistically for political gain, many reproductive rights and reproductive justice organizations are working to advance the real interests of women of color by advocating for meaningful access for all women to the range of health information, services and options they need to lead healthy lives.