Anti-Abortion Billboard Targeting Blacks Placed In New York’s SoHo Neighborhood
Thursday Feb 24, 2011 – By Jamilah Lemieux
Yesterday, Texas-based anti-abortion group Life Always erected a billboard targeted at African-American women on the corner of Watts and Sixth Avenue in New York’s upscale SoHo shopping district. According to the NY Times, Steven Broden, a pastor and Life Always board member, stated that the campaign is starting here in New York and will spread to other cities over the next few weeks. He added that a Black History Month start date was intentional, as to highlight the “disproportionate” number of Black women who terminate pregnancies each year.
The Times cites 2009 Department of Health statistics, which report an overall abortion rate of 41% and 59.8% for non-Hispanic Black women.
In a statement, city public advocate Bill de Blasio said, “This billboard simply doesn’t belong in New York City. The ad violates the values of New Yorkers and is grossly offensive to women and minorities.” He added, “A mix of intolerance and bad judgment put this ad up. Common decency demands it be taken down.”
In Wednesday’s press conference, which was described by the Times as “sparsely attended,” Reverend Michael J. Faulkner of Harlem’s New Horizon Church joined Broden in describing abortion as genocide and claimed the ad was not meant to attack one group of women. “This is not targeting black women. This is targeting the practice, and saying to black women, ‘If you find yourself in this crisis of an unexpected, unwanted pregnancy, there are alternatives,” he stated.
Broden stated that the billboard was placed in the “largely White” neighborhood, as opposed to areas in Brooklyn, Harlem or the Bronx that boast large Black populations, because it would be “the best way to get attention.” The family of the young girl pictured, who Broden described as a “prop”, contacted Brooklyn City Councilwoman Letitia James to say that they were outraged by the poster and that they had been told the child’s image would be used in a different manner. The advertising company responsible for the ad claims that the family signed a standard picture release form.
City Councilwoman Christine C. Quinn, who represents the SoHo district where the billboard was placed, had harsh words for Life Always: “To refer to a woman’s legal right to an abortion as a ‘genocidal plot’ is not only absurd, but it is offensive to women and to communities of color. Every woman deserves the right to make health care decisions for herself, and I will continue to fight to protect this basic right and against this sort of fear mongering.”
The billboard sits only a few blocks from Planned Parenthood’s SoHo clinic, which the Life Always site refers to as an “abortion office”. Abortion accounts for only 3% of the visits to Planned Parenthood locations across the country each year. An official statement from the organization about the offensive ad states that the campaign is “an offensive and condescending effort to stigmatize and shame African-American women while attempting to discredit the work of Planned Parenthood.”
The statement goes on to say that in 2010, New York’s Planned Parenthood offices provided “71,000 STI tests, 56,000 family planning visits, 21,000 HIV tests, 19,000 contraception consultations and 12,000 cervical cancer screenings.” In addition, they deal with “tens of thousands of parents, caregivers, teens and community based organizations” through educational outreach initiatives. “The unintended pregnancy rate in New York City is impacted by a myriad of societal factors, including poverty, access to information and education, access to birth control, and intimate partner violence, among others.”
The statement quotes columnist Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution who stated, “It’s both sexist and racist to suggest that black women don’t have the intellectual and emotional firepower to make their own decisions.” In response to the emergence of these billboards in Los Angeles last month, Janette Robinson Flint, Executive Director of Black Women for Wellness, wrote “Black women stand at the intersection of racism and sexism in this country, and we face the pain of living at this crossroads every day. It is demonstrated by our health status — we suffer from some of the highest health disparities in Los Angeles County. Rather than allow outside agitators to barge in and try to divide us by scape-goating Black women for political gain, Black women’s organizations and our allies must come together to find solutions to ending the health disparities and crises we face.”
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Controversial Anti-Abortion Ad Targets Black Women, Blames Planned Parenthood
Once again, Black women’s bodies are being used to make a political point. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion around controversial pro-life ads targeting Black women. An Austin, Texas based pro-life organization developed a campaign that (once again) blames Planned Parenthood for high abortion rates among Black women.
Heroic Media, the Austin-based group behind the campaign, recently tried to set up billboards reading, “The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb.” The billboards were banned in most cities, and have caused quite a stir.
Heroic Media contends that minority children are at a higher risk of being aborted than White children and that it’s all Planned Parenthood’s fault.
“The overwhelming majority of abortion facilities are in minority neighborhoods. We think they need to know that,” said Kim Speirs, Heroic Media’s director of communications.
A similar campaign (and controversy) erupted across Georgia last year when The Radiance Foundationran billboards across the region equating Black children to endangered species.
While the focus on Black women may make many think that abortion numbers for African-American women are on the rise, they are not. While Black women have higher rates of abortion based on race (38.5% of all abortions), White women still account for over half (almost 60%) of all abortions. So it seems like adding race to an already controversial issue is meant to sway Black voters to pro-life politicians who want to repeal Roe vs. Wade, and make abortion illegal.
I find this ad not only disrespectful to Black women/mothers, but also disingenuous. Talking about lowering abortion rates for Black women without discussing the systematic factors that lead to unplanned pregnancies will do little to change the conditions that lead to unplanned pregnancies. Joblessness, access to high-quality education, and poverty all contribute to some unplanned pregnancies, but maybe it’s easier to treat the symptoms, than deal with the real problem.
Black women have a long history of taking care of our own bodies, which has included having abortions when necessary. These types of ads, blaming Planned Parenthood or some other boogieman, make Black women out to be victims who are too lazy or too stupid to make the right choice, instead of women with power (and sense) enough to know what’s right for them.
Watch Heroic Media’s ad campaign targeting Black women and tell us what you think!
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Pro-Life Billboard: Saving (Those Baby-Dropping) Black Women From the Abortionist
I’d say the Gothamist article accompany this photo let the billboard off too easy.
The key to the advertisement is to get beyond the the language of cautious concern. And once you do, the otherwise arbitrary allusion to black women and pregnancy by the far right comes off as much like a racial ploy as anything else. Beyond the use of the word “dangerous” and “African American” in such close proximity, it’s hard to understand the combo of cultural concern and pro-life authorship without considering how the billboard – this one installed a half-mile from Planned Parenthood on Bleeker Street — activates the stereotype of the young black women as mindless baby-making machine.
It’s not just the text to watch out for here, though. This girl’s body language — with the direct gaze, the tight mouth and cheeks blown up just so, and the hands behind her back — makes her look, simultaneously, slightly-victimized, slightly-guilty and slightly-busted. Clever work! The haters have found a photo that elicits empathy at the same time it makes this black child look complicit, perhaps with the outside hint that, having escaped the abortionist, thank God, this lovely dear, in not too many years from now, will be ready to drop a few herself.
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Mom Wants Child's Image Gone from Anti-Abortion Billboard
Updated: Thursday, 24 Feb 2011, 8:56 PM EST
Published : Wednesday, 23 Feb 2011, 11:10 PM EST
By DAN BOWENS
MYFOXNY.COM EXCLUSIVE - A billboard that sits above Sixth Avenue in SoHo reads "The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb." It has a picture of a young African-American girl behind the text and a link to a website.
The group Life Always hopes the controversial ad will bring attention to its agenda.
That innocent looking face you see belongs to Anissa Fraser -- she is 6.
"I would never endorse something like that," says Tricia Fraser, Anissa's mother. "Especially with my child's image."
Two years ago, Fraser signed up with a modeling agency to have all four of her children photographed.
"I know what I went into that shoot for," Fraser says. "And that's not what I agreed to. I want them to take it down."
When she signed a release form, Fraser knew the photos could be sold as stock images but never thought her daughter would become the face of a pro-life campaign focusing on African Americans.
"This is not targeting black women. This is targeting the practice and saying to black women is you find yourself in this crisis of an unexpected, unintended pregnancy," says Rev. Michael Faulkner, of the New Horizon Church in Harlem. "There are alternatives to death."
When Fox 5 asked about Fraser's demands, the organization said: "The image was properly licensed through a reputable stock image service. We'll be looking into the origin of the image and are certainly open to talking to the family directly if they have any concerns."
This family still has concerns about an image -- so innocent and so controversial.
"It's bad enough you're saying this about African Americans, but then you put a child with an innocent face," Fraser says. "I just want the image off of it. Use another image -- just not hers.
>via: http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/manhattan/mom-wants-childs-image-g...
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| Don't Believe the Hype: Attempting to re-frame a woman's right to choose as genocide against blacks is one of the ways in which anti-abortionists try to persuade. |
Anti-abortion advocates kill me (and not because I am a doctor who performs abortions).They yell and scream and pray and shout and speak in tongues to protect fetuses, but once they are born and are actually living, breathing children, they no longer give a fuck.Let's have a look at the evidence provided by The New York Times'Charles M. Blow: Republicans need to figure out where they stand on children’s welfare. They can’t be “pro-life” when the “child” is in the womb but indifferent when it’s in the world. Allow me to illustrate just how schizophrenic their position has become through the prism of premature babies.The bad news is that, according to the March of Dimes, the Republican budget passed in the House this month could do great damage to this progress. The budget proposes:• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding the causes and developing strategies for preventing preterm birth.”• Nearly $1 billion in cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for its preventive health programs, including to its preterm birth studies.This is the same budget in which House Republicans voted to strip all federal financing for Planned Parenthood.It is savagely immoral and profoundly inconsistent to insist that women endure unwanted — and in some cases dangerous — pregnancies for the sake of “unborn children,” then eliminate financing designed to prevent those children from being delivered prematurely, rendering them the most fragile and vulnerable of newborns. How is this humane?It's not.But in the world of cognitive dissonance, it is very possible to both love fetuses and be indifferent or hostile to the welfare of actual children while simultaneously claiming moral authority. It is utter bullshit, but they do it every day of the week and are unbothered by the contradiction. They are NOT pro-life; they are anti-abortion, which is, at root, about defining patriarchal power vis-à-vis absolute control over a woman's body.Don't believe the hype. Read more.
On Abortion and Humanness
My girl DeeDee was to most, including her older sister and mother, too young to care for a child. They, as women, had traveled the road of being young mothers and saw promise and redemption in DeeDee, who shared my gifted and talented classes in high school. I distinctly remember the somber faces sitting in the waiting area of the doctor’s office where DeeDee would terminate her pregnancy. I recall the blank faces of the women, some my age, some older, and the weight. I could see the weight that they were carrying, and not any in pregnancy pounds. I sat there with her, sixteen, holding her hand, hoping she wouldn’t be broken by what she was facing, wondering if I would have the courage that she did even in her trembles. This was my first experience with abortion past a medical, textbook definition and what I had learned in my Catholic CCE classes about how girls like my friend DeeDee and the doctors who performed abortions were evil. DeeDee wasn’t a murderer. She was just a girl, an awkward book worm like me who believed in the boy who promised her everything, including love, but who wouldn’t even accompany her on that day because he “didn’t know if the baby was his or not.” In that moment, whether I realized it or not, I became pro-choice.
Many years later, past my teenage years, my best friend T, who was struggling through an unproductive relationship with her son’s father, and working diligently to support a new baby boy, found out she was pregnant, again. She cried, we both did, wondering how this happened, though we knew, and lamenting on ideas of raining and pouring. At this point in our lives we were both mothers and we understood, without doubt, the cost of mothering. She knew she wasn’t prepared to take on the responsibility of another child. I mostly listened, and wiped tears, and held hands, much like I had done with DeeDee those years before. In addition though, this time, I gave what I could financially to help her end the pregnancy. I suppose now, according to many, I was supporting the end of a life and was by definition, complicit in committing murder. In my eyes though, I was helping to save a life, T’s, in giving her hope and another chance to get it right. Who among us, in all our glory and sin, does not deserve another chance? The human journey, especially for women, is hard.
Nailah, my magnificent, brilliant, and healthy five year old daughter, gives me life. After reading Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ post concerning the GOP’s desire to gain (more) control over women’s reproductive health I revisited my own birth story. Nailah’s father and I were newlyweds and so ready to start a family that we hurried into getting pregnant. I knew, I believe, when Nailah was conceived. I certainly knew I was pregnant before a test (even a blood test almost) could confirm it. I was excited about becoming a mother, that in itself I realized was the good fortune that some women never have. We chose midwives who worked within a local hospital, as we wanted our birth experience to be as natural and non-evasive as possible. I quickly had to change to a high risk doctor though, as I realized that I had a very rare blood clotting disorder that would make my pregnancy difficult. This condition could be dangerous, but it usually was not according to my doctor and specialist, so I went on with my hopes of a fairy tell birth like those wonderful ones I watched often on The Learning Channel.
Despite a difficult and painful pregnancy, I had done all the right things. I ate well, took those disgusting prenatal vitamins, picked out African baby names and bought lots of books for my future bundle of joy. I would read to her, nightly, as she lay in my womb. I was hopeful and unprepared for what would soon come. It came anyway. A few days before my pregnancy hit the six month mark I was told by my doctor why the headaches I had been having were leaving me incapacitated. I was quickly admitted into the hospital and told that I was, essentially, having a stroke. The condition was pregnancy induced hypertension (or preeclampsia). Over the next few days my organs began to shut down. Also, my daughter was not receiving the blood flow that she needed to develop. We were both apparently dying.
We survived, the both of us. We are fortunate in ways that I can’t lend words to. Nailah, born at one pound and one ounce, spent the first four months of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit, as did I, visiting every day for her entire stay. And even in that, the terror of not knowing from one day to the next if the child that you love with all of you will die, or be handicapped by any one, or all, of a long list of illnesses associated with premature infants, was mostly unbearable. It was a weight. A weight similar to what I had witnessed the women in DeeDee’s doctor’s office carry, and DeeDee, and T, and, well, many women. The other day, after reading Tah-Nehisi’s analysis and contemplating what has been happening in the news from the GOP’s stance on abortion definitions to South Dakota’s attempted legislation making possibly murdering an abortion doctor, or anyone associated with an abortion procedure, a justifiable homicide, I pondered if I would have known upfront the hardships that I would face in my pregnancy and even what Nailah might have faced as a result of my condition, would I have chosen to terminate my pregnancy. Would I become one of the women that this nation appears to hate? Would I be a murderer, a sinner, a statistic?
What I have realized is that regardless of whether or not I chose to terminate my pregnancy or stand by the sides of my sisters T and DeeDee, as a woman I am still very much under attack. Regardless of whether abortions are legal, or whether killing an abortion provider is legal, abortions will still take place, as they always have. What many consider means to stop abortions are actually only means to withdraw safe environments for women to do what they will do, which is and has always been what they deem necessary. As much as I despise comparing the events of the Maafa with, well, anything else that has ever occurred, I somehow feel less free and less in control of my personhood today. I stopped trying to change people’s minds in my twenties. I am fully aware that opinions are heavily formed by experience, and we each have our own. What I hope to do is provide something more profound to this debate- humanness. We live in and by theories that others philosophize, laws that others enact, decisions that have absolutely nothing to do with our well being, bartering all the while with the lives of others. In these acts, we call ourselves righteous. There is something very, very wrong and even cowardly about it all, which, I gather, is all I really am trying to say.
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>via: http://jonubian.com/2011/02/16/on-abortion-and-humanness/