Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Racist Anti-Abortion
Campaign Comes to Austin


"The most dangerous place for some children is in the womb."

The Majella Society, d/b/a Heroic Media, is Austin's own do-nothing anti-abortion propaganda provider and they're back in force with this new, racist billboard on I-35 south at 8th street near downtown. It appears that this billboard is part of a larger campaign targeting black women, like the one reported in Atlanta earlier this year, and this message represents an interesting change for Heroic, which has typically focused on "Pregnant? Scared?" messages.

Last year Majella ran the "I Am A Life" ad during the season premiere of CSI: Miami, which is a CBS show. RH Reality Check reported in February that the Atlanta billboards were owned by CBS Outdoor and that CBS, which broadcast the Superbowl this year, allowed the tacky Tim Tebow anti-abortion commercial paid for by Focus on the Family.

On the website mentioned in the billboard above, there are several videos, including the one below. While the video itself doesn't explicitly say that African American women are contributing to black genocide, the Youtube handle of the uploader is "PPAbortsAA." The video itself includes language like "baby daddy" and the woman and the child presented--who is not an infant--are both black. The rest of the ads on Dangerousplace.org feature non-white women and children, too.



The downloadable "fact sheet" is also clearly targeting black women, and includes several spurious "facts" about abortion among African Americans. The website also links from this factoid: "In 2007, one pro-choice organization made only 4,912 adoption referrals while performing 305,310 abortions" to PPAbortsAA.org, which has the below super-obvious image on the homepage.



The text on the homepage is below:
Planned Parenthood's actions are the ultimate exploitation of African American women and an assault on the dignity of life. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had a plan. She wasn't interested in removing the cause of poverty, illiteracy, illegitimate births, or other social ills, she just wanted to eliminate the result, the pregnancy, ...the innocent life. She wanted to, "stop the reproduction of the unfit". Please help us, provide another voice for African Americans to listen to, to choose. A voice that encourages the heroic decision to become a mother.
And so on. But the curious thing is that, according to Statehealthfacts.org, black women in Texas account for a lower percentage of abortions in the state (23.2%) as compared to the national proportion (35%), and this Guttmacher report shows that black Texas teens have an abortion rate less than half (20) that of the national rate of 44. This may be more of an indication of how hard it is to get abortions in Texas, but regardless, there is not a "black abortion epidemic" in Texas.

So why Austin? The Census Bureau shows only 8% of the population here is black, as compared to 18% in Houston and 20% in Dallas. My money is on the Legislative session, which convenes on January 11th. The billboard's proximity to the capitol suggests the target of these ads may not be black women at all, but those in power who have the ability to make abortion that much harder to get for all women.

5 comments:

  1. Whose calling who racist? Are you not aware that the founder of Planned Parenthood which they trot out as a heroine and name their top award after "Margaret Sanger Award" is an admitted KLAN speaker- read Sanger's autobiography? Are you not aware that early civil rights leaders like Dick Gregory, The Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, Jesse Jackson, Samuel Yette, Fannie Lou Hamar, and others called these clinics "Genocide? " Are you not aware that many of Sanger's board members were in fact founders, officers, and writers for the American Eugenics Society including Guttmacher who was the AES Vice President while President of Planned Parenthood. The American Eugenics Society is well known for their racist antics and forcing sterilizations on many black women...speaking of forced sterilizations, one of Sanger's backers - Clarence Gamble- was also funding the North Carolina Eugenics Society and state records are now showing that that Society forcefully sterilized and targeted many blacks. Have you even read the files of Sanger and Planned Parenthood? Have you looked at their books, officers and their writings and beliefs, have you investigated this at all? I think not. I think you are merely speaking to your own ideology instead of hard facts, and I doubt you will even allow this comment to show here....but...in case you do allow a dissenting point of view, I wanted to point you to some facts you may just not be aware of....watch this powerful documentary called: Maafa21, whose producers did a thorough job at documenting FACTS not emotion and see the proof on screen, you can find it here: http://www.maafa21.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. not only will i allow this comment to show i would encourage everyone to look at the website, www.maafa21.com and to look up the organization that funded the film, life dynamics, out of denton, tx. here's their website, with information about how you can be a 'pro-life spy': http://www.lifedynamics.com/Anti-Abortion_Prolife/Anti-Abortion_Clinics/
    and here's their white male founder and president, mark crutcher: http://lifedynamics.com/Pro-life_Group/Prolife_Activist/
    and here is information about the ridiculous anti-abortion propaganda campaign they run to target medical students: http://www.lifedynamics.com/Abortion_Information/Abortion_Mail/
    you know what life dynamics doesn't provide? any services of any kind to any woman, regardless of race, who chooses NOT to have an abortion and to carry their baby to term.
    but they do carry this charming brochure claiming that "lynching is for amateurs," and that abortion is the real black genocide.
    thanks, saynsumthn, for weighing in.
    xoxo,
    julie sunday

    ReplyDelete
  3. there are plenty of people/organizations who want to help a woman who chooses NOT to abort. there are also plenty of people/organizations who want to adopt a newborn.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow. I've been seeing those "dangerous place" billboards and assumed they were about, like, drinking while pregnant or something irresponsible like that, not just a bunch of crap to get people more riled up against abortion.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @health-educator

    Then why aren't those organizations out there helping women who choose to remain pregnant? Why are there still thousands of children every year waiting to be adopted?

    ReplyDelete