Anti-Abortion Advocates Don’t Care About Black People
August 18, 2015Anti-abortion advocates don’t care about Black people. They never have. And frankly, I don’t believe they ever will.
I’m not saying this as a sensationalist statement. The evidence is long. We’ve been useful to them as pawns in this political chess game with the sole goal of ending abortion in the United States. They pick us up each and every time they need to score points in the media to somehow prove they aren’t racist because they care about “Black life”, yet do nothing to improve the economic or health care outcomes of our community. There are plenty of Black lives that they could rally around and get justice for – Sandra Bland, India Clarke, Raynette Turner, Rekia Boyd, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner (I could go on) are just a few in a way too long list of lives lost to epidemic of state sanctioned violence. But, no. They choose to spend millions of dollars attacking Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider who also provides 1 in 5 women with basic healthcare throughout in the United States, and more all around the globe. A healthcare provider who has stood by the low-income, uninsured, and underinsured for almost 100 years.
For over a decade, anti-abortion advocates have been targeting Planned Parenthood through sting operations, most recently releasing highly edited videos of Planned Parenthood staffers discussing the donation of and reimbursement costs associated with fetal tissue based on patient request. In reality, fetal tissue, stemming from abortion and birth, is used for research purposes to create the very life saving cancer drugs and treatments for Alzheimer’s that our families depend on. If anti-abortion advocates truly cared about the Black community, they would know that we’re twice as likely to develop late-onset Alzheimer’s and they would support our efforts in finding a cure.