I’m not really surprised that The Radiance Foundation has a new set of billboards to coincide with Juneteenth. While I’m not surprised, I am continually saddened by the messages displayed on the billboards. Growing up in a small, rural Midwestern town, I learned early on that liberty and independence were to be treasured and protected beyond almost all else – values that epitomize Juneteenth. As I see and learn more about these billboards, the more I realize that the value underpinning both liberty and independence is trust. This trust is commonly extended to allow everyone to exercise liberty and independence.
These billboards continually sadden me because it is an example of a group that refuses to extend the common trust while demanding it from everyone else. Without fact or understanding, The Radiance Foundation undermines the independence and liberty of all women who decide to have an abortion, minority women especially, for their decision. Furthermore, instead of investing in options and programs that could ease the burden of those who would prefer to carry a pregnancy to term, they invest in condemnation. The Radiance Foundation’s campaign is meant to imply or reinforce the notion that these women are abusing the liberty and independence of others. This is done to justify the persecution of women who chose abortion, when in fact these women are having their liberty and independence abused.
In late March, the racist anti-abortion group “Life Always” unveiled a new campaign in Chicago, using the face of our president to demonize and defame black motherhood.
“Every 21 minutes,” the billboard read, “our next possible leader is aborted.” Next to that text runs the very recognizable profile of our commander-in-chief. Get their message? It’s not subtle: black women, they have no shame in saying, are destroying black communities. By choosing abortion, they’re decimating our future (never mind that Obama’s mother was white). Black women cannot be trusted, these ads clearly imply — not with their children and families, and certainly not with decisions about their own bodies. Do not trust black women, Life Always implores you. Do not trust them.
It’s a message anti-abortion advocates are getting very good at spreading — and I for one have had enough of it. As a black mother, I take these ads personally — and you know what, Life Always? I am offended. I am enraged. I am disgusted that it seems to you, and to all these folks who are willing to sell you ad space, just fine to call black women dangerous, incompetent and downright dumb, out in the open air.
To expose these children that you claim to care so much about to messages that come a hair’s breath away from criminalizing their mothers. To assume we don’t have the good common sense to make reasonable decisions about the limits of our bodies, and our families. To treat us so definitively like what we want and need and believe to be best just doesn’t matter.
Do I imagine that the folks behind this ad much care about how angry and depressed these ads make me feel? Do I think they mind that seeing a billboard declaring “the most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb” – in my own hometown– made me want to tear my hair out with shame and grief? Not really.
Because despite their use of the first person possessive to describe their relationship to the black community, what’s agonizingly clear is that groups like Life Always don’t really give a fig about black people – not about how they make us feel with their racist rhetoric, nor about what happens to black babies after they are born.
If they did care, they would support policies and programs that prevent pregnancies before they happen (and by that I mean policies and programs that are actually proven to work, as opposed to abstinence-only education). They’d stop cutting the guts out of programs that provide subsidized child-care and early education to low-income families, and stop trying to roll back provisions of health-care reform that provide a greater pool of families and children with the medical resources they need.
They’d be leading investigations into why black women die so much more often in childbirth than women of other ethnicities do, and why black babies are also more likely to suffer the same fate, within the first year of their lives.
But they do none of that. Instead, their goal is to undermine the credibility of humanity of people of color, with an eye to the election season that will quickly be upon us. Don’t be fooled: as much as it is about anything else, this campaign is about convincing white Americans (who drive past these billboards, too) of the purported continued “pathology” of the black community – and now, in Chicago, they’re tying the president directly to that insidious message, as a means of delegitimizing him, too.
That should be enough to make anyone who believes in equality and justice furious – regardless of how you feel about the very complex issue of abortion.
As for me, I’m tired of being insulted. I’m tired of waking up every morning to a new affront to my existence and intelligence. But I know that this only ends when we make it end. The moral arc of the universe may be long, and it may bend towards justice, but it does not bend without our help. So sign a petition to put an end to these menacing campaigns. Stand with an organization working to stop the insanity. Do something now — before they come to take more than just our wombs.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon placed such a high priority on family planning that he approved the Title X program to make contraception available to low-income women. Another prominent Republican supporter of the policy, the future President George H.W. Bush, said at the time, “We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather are using it as a political steppingstone.”
Between then and now, however, a lot changed—and nothing changed. Title X funding steadily grew over the years to go some way towards meeting the comprehensive reproductive health needs of low-income women. But, as made evident by Republican efforts—with the full support of representatives from the United States Conference of Catholics Bishops—to cut off Title X funding in the 2011 budget, it appears that conservative legislators don’t seem to understand that in 2008, Title X services helped 4.7 million women access family planning services.
Millions more received HIV testing, cervical cancer screening and other health services that were, in many cases, the only healthcare they received. Did they truly believe that low-income couples should be left without any means to plan their families, or that essential services would be picked up by shrinking state Medicaid budgets? I think it is more likely that clever political maneuvering has succeeded in hanging contraception with a scarlet letter so that policymakers now fear that being associated with it will alienate part of their constituency.
The reality is that choosing how many children to have, and when to have them, is an intimate decision made by women who, as moral agents, know what is best for themselves and their families. Many have now grown up in an America where reproductive freedom and religious freedom are intimately connected and fundamentally protected. For Catholics, the injunction to respect others’ beliefs is reinforced by the Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, which tells us that “in spreading religious faith and in introducing religious practices everyone ought at all times to refrain from any manner of action which might seem to carry a hint of coercion.”
The Catholic tradition also promotes the primacy of conscience, and thus that every person has the right to make choices according to that conscience. The majority of Catholics also want their lawmakers serving individual constituents, not the bishops, so with 98 percent of Catholic women having used a type of birth control forbidden by the Vatican, who is being served by the three bills limiting reproductive freedom currently before Congress? (For that reason, I was delighted to see so many Catholic state legislators sign onto an open letter to Congress that opposed cuts in funding for family planning.)
By ratcheting up the ideological heat associated with family planning, conservatives have succeeded in making it politically dangerous to support funding for family planning services that, according to the Guttmacher Institute, prevented 973,000 unintended pregnancies that would have resulted in 433,000 unplanned births and 406,000 abortions in 2008. Meanwhile, what will happen to the low-income women currently served by Title X? We need look no further than the many nations in Latin America where women’s reproductive rights vary by class.
In almost all Latin American countries, contraception is not widely available and abortion is highly restricted or illegal—officially. In reality, almost any service is available for women with the money to pay for it, which creates a society where only some women are able to act as moral agents. When women are denied reproductive rights based on income, we see poor women with high rates of unplanned pregnancy, mortality from unsafe abortions, and empty promises from conservative lawmakers that don’t translate into a real commitment to poor families. Women of means can afford to purchase safe services outside the law, but poor women don’t have the same escape valve to help them as they seek to live their lives according to their consciences.
Differential access to reproductive health services doesn’t work, and is the opposite of Catholicism’s “preferential option for the poor.” By serving the uninsured, the homeless and the vulnerable, Title X clinics are already on the public health front lines. Stripping them from the landscape will turn many communities into a reproductive health frontier where abortions, legal or illegal, become the only means a woman has for controlling her reproductive destiny, resulting in more abortions every year—not a campaign promise that conservatives were open about.
What other policy items will become “scarlet”—too ideologically loaded to talk about in practical terms? Restrictive legislation has been pushed into center stage in Congress in part thanks to the rhetoric used by people like Tom Grenchik, the executive director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Grenchik recently issued a special briefing to excoriate the services Planned Parenthood offers low-income women and attack Sen. Harry Reid for saying the Senate wouldn’t go along with the attempt to totally de-fund Planned Parenthood. Such talk has little to offer the thousands of women who rely on federally-funded reproductive health services. (Not all conservatives were on the same page—the notorious funder of a plethora of right-wing causes, Richard M. Scaife, placed an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review—which he owns—bemoaning the short-sightedness of this latter move.)
There will always be some cooler heads in Congress who are not afraid to handle a hot topic—oftentimes they are Catholic. In a letter to leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), a Catholic, said, “I believe Planned Parenthood provides vital services to those in need and disagree with their funding cuts in the bill.” Getting a birth control prescription filled, going for a yearly OB-GYN exam—these are the quiet acts that make up everyday life lived according to conscience. Title X is one of the successful federal programs in tune with the small, crucial decisions important to low-income families’ lives. Block access to these actions based on income, and you will see something sensational; exactly what Nixon, the Republican family planning advocate, deplored: dramatic health disparities that no lawmaker of any ideology should find acceptable.
Vital Signs: Anti-abortion groups step up attack on Planned Parenthood with Madison billboard
BY SHAWN DOHERTY | The Capital Times| Posted: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 1:00 pm
Pro-Life Wisconsin has teamed up with a national anti-abortion campaign to put up a billboard near a Madison Planned Parenthood clinic today. “CHOICE KILLS THOSE WITHOUT ONE,” the sign says in giant letters. A photo of an African American baby is in the center of the letter “O,” a slash across it.
The billboard has been placed near the Planned Parenthood clinic on South Park Street.
It is the latest salvo in what has been a stepped-up campaign not just against abortions but against sex education and family planning and birth control programs across the state. It is also an example of the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to revive old and widely debunked charges that Planned Parenthood has links to the eugenics movement.
“Abortion is not a true choice for the unborn, for women or for men. Abortion providers prey on those who feel they have no choice, and this campaign highlights this daily reality,” says communications director Virginia Zignego in a press release.
Pro-Life Wisconsin opposes sex education and the use of all forms of contraception. The group has been invigorated by the Republican charge in Wisconsin to defund and shut down various family planning programs across the state. The Governor’s budget includes significant funding cuts and the elimination of some of these programs.
So if the group opposes sex ed and birth control, what alternatives are there for poor women who want to avoid or end unintended pregnancies? I asked Zignego. Adoption and crisis pregnancy centers supported by anti-abortion groups, she said.
The Madison billboard takes aim at Planned Parenthood for what the group’s press release describes as a “history of racism and the continuing eugenics movement in Wisconsin.”
The billboard is just a small example of what has been a ferocious attack, even including undercover sting operations, by anti-abortion activists against Planned Parenthood clinics across the country.
The Madison billboard refers viewers to a website called TooManyAborted.com, run by a group called The Radiance Foundation and headed by Ryan Bomberger, who the press release points out is biracial.
“Our goal is to expose an industry that doesn’t trust women enough to tell them the truth, injects gender animosity by demonizing men, and targets minorities resulting in hugely disproportionate rates of abortion in the urban community,” Bomberger says in the release.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood point out that the clinics are often the only affordable providers of not just family planning services, but of much needed health care in many minority neighborhoods.
Every year, says Amanda Harrington of Planned Parenthood, more than 11,000 Wisconsin women receive screenings for cervical and breast cancers, annual check ups, STD testing, and family planning services that many of them can not get anywhere else. “The simple fact is that many communities in Wisconsin suffer from a lack of access to basic health care. An inability to access preventative health care leads to many health disparities,” she says.
Last December, the Radiance Foundation worked with Pro Life
Wisconsin to put up 13 billboards in mostly minority neighborhoods
in Milwaukee. "Black children are in danger: too many aborted,"
some said. Others read "Black and Beautiful: Too many aborted."
At that time, Amanda Harrington, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, called the charges against her organization “lies and distortions” and the billboards “reprehensible.”
“They are using racism to interfere with a woman’s ability to access health care,” she told me, as quoted in my Vital Signs post.
Harrington called Planned Parenthood “the state’s largest and most trusted health care provider,” with “doors open to all.”
Racial disparities in abortion rates are not the result of a conspiracy, she said. They occur because minorities experience greater numbers of unwanted pregnancies because they lack access to adequate sex education and affordable health care including birth control.
“If organizations like Pro-Life Wisconsin were truly concerned about reducing unintended pregnancies, they would work with us to increase access to sex education and affordable birth control,” Harrington said. “Instead, they work against us to eliminate health care to women who really need it.”
Just days after the Milwaukee billboards equating abortions with black genocide, Pro-Life Wisconsin erected two signs in La Crosse featuring ultrasound images the organization claim represent the baby Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. Here is an image of that bilboard.
Placed over the fetus in the billboards was a miniature halo. “He’s on His Way. Christmas Starts with Christ,” described by a Pro-Life press release as a Christian nonprofit in England that sponsored the campaign there.
In my post about the La Crosse billboard, Zignego said the group planned to step up its anti-abortion work in Wisconsin, targeting the state’s controversial sex education law, passed last year.
This letter to the editor by Meg Brown nicely captures a realistic approach to reducing abortions in response to the 40 Days for Life demonstrations taking place across the nation. NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice have also responded with a Forty 4 Forty campaign. I hope you appreciate these efforts as much as I do. Frances
GRAND FORKS — Like Rod Lammer, I too have noticed the 40 Days for Life campaign’s signs urging North Dakotans to “pray and fast to end abortion” (“Advice for the faithful: Trust but verify,” letter, Page A4, Sept. 30).
I found myself asking how prayer and fasting compares to proven means of reducing abortions.
Unlike comprehensive sex education and access to birth control, neither prayer nor fasting has been shown to prevent abortion. Instead of depriving one’s self of nourishment or mentally soliciting supernatural intervention, individuals opposed to abortion should make contraceptives available and ensure that consumers know how to use them correctly.
There is much in the literature by moderate Catholic bioethicists which indicates that using Methotrexate to terminate an ectopic pregnancy is permissible. The intention of the use of the drug is to act on the trophoblastic tissue attached to the fetus. The intention is not the destruction of the fetus which will definitively result but is not the motive. Thus, most Catholic hospital ethicists judge it to be licit.
Here’s a quote from a recent article on the issue from William May. “Methotrexate attacks the DNA in the trophoblastic tissue that attaches the unborn child to its site within the mother’s body; it thus attacks the trophoblast attaching the child to the fallopian tube or cervix or other part of an ectopic pregnancy (I prescind from unborn children implanted in the mother’s abdomen insofar as this is very rare and children so implanted usually can survive until birth).”
“With other moral theologians I thus judge that use of methotrexate can be used to “remove” the unborn child implanted outside the womb; the death of the child is the foreseen but not intended side-effect of an action morally specified as the necessary removal of the unborn child from the mother’s
body as the means, not morally evil in itself, chosen to protect the mother’s life.”
Are there very conservative Catholic hospitals that will not accept this opinion? Yes.
However, since we, as Catholic bioethicists and advocates, agree with most hospitals and physicians that using methotrexate to end an ectopic pregnancy is acceptable under Catholic Ethical Directives, how much emphasis do we give to the much smaller number who disagrees? How is our purpose of better patient care more effectively advanced? Is it not better to stress the positive view which permits its use rather than focus all attention on the minority which is outside the mainstream of medical and ethical opinion of even Catholic medical and ethical opinion?
