A new documentary examines how fears of “black genocide” became part of mainstream anti-abortion activism.
Jan 19, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC
Women who have had abortions walk with thousands of pro-life demonstrators as they participate in the annual March for Life on January 27, 2017. Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
When the March for Life, the largest annual pro-life event in the country, starts on Friday, don’t be surprised if there are a few Black Lives Matter signs in the crowd.
While anti-abortion activism has attempted to link abortion to racism for decades, the argument that abortion poses a unique threat to black lives has seen an increase in attention in recent years, the result of a collaboration between the conservative black church, black anti-abortion activists, and some white anti-abortion organizations.
These claims speak to real fears about racism in the medical system, calling back to the unethical harms of the Tuskegee study and the days when women of color were forcibly sterilized by state eugenics programs.
It’s an apt comparison in the eyes of black anti-abortion activists, many of whom argue that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was a supporter of eugenics who, some say, worked to intentionally lower the black birth rate. (Sanger’s history isn’t as clear-cut — she certainly did support a form of eugenics, but her work on birth control in the black community was not viewed with alarm by prominent African-American community leaders.)
That black women are far more likely than women of other races to get an abortion (accounting for roughly one-third of those undergoing the procedure according to one commonly cited study) is, to the black anti-abortion movement, proof that something is amiss.
In connecting abortion access in the present to the harms of the past, black pro-choice advocates say the black anti-abortion movement ignores women’s agency. And while polling doesn’t fully capture the complex viewpoints a large segment of the public has about abortion, in polls of the issue, black Americans still overwhelmingly say that abortion should be legal in most cases.
Even so, the black anti-abortion movement has landed on a provocative argument, one that award-winning filmmaker Yoruba Richen says proved ripe for exploration.
Richen was first exposed to the criticisms of Sanger and the abortion-as-black-genocide argument when she stopped by an anti-abortion protest while working on a different project. “I went to [an] abortion center and there was a protest, and there were signs out there that talked about Margaret Sanger being a racist,” she says. Looking further at the protesters themselves, she found “it wasn’t just people from the sort of traditional, mostly white anti-abortion space; it was a sector of black folks from the black anti-abortion movement.”
After researching the issue, she quickly realized not only how potent the argument could be in parts of the black community, but how it had spread much further, becoming a common talking point of anti-abortion politicians. With the backing of PBS Frontline and the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, Richen set out to better understand how the black anti-abortion movement operates, speaking to a number of people on both sides of the issue and releasing a short film on the topic, “Anti-Abortion Crusaders: Inside The African-American Abortion Battle,” in December.
I spoke with Richen about the film and medical racism, how the anti-abortion movement moved faster on racial outreach than some reproductive rights groups, and why black anti-abortion activists embraced the election of Donald Trump.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
What led you to make this film?
I was working on another short piece on reproductive issues, and I was in Indiana with my team. We were looking at full-spectrum reproductive rights — innovative approaches of having information and services around birth and motherhood and abortion all in the same space.
While I was there, I went to the abortion center down the road, and there was a protest out there, as there normally is, and there were signs out there that talked about Margaret Sanger being a racist. They had these quotes from her saying that she had a racist agenda to eliminate black people. This is something I had never heard; I’m a middle-aged person who figures I know my history pretty well, and I had never heard this charge about her.
So I started looking into it, and I found that there was a lot of stuff being written from right-wing, conservative, anti-abortion websites saying that Margaret Sanger had an agenda to eliminate black people and that abortion was part of an agenda of black genocide. I was obviously intrigued by this and who was saying this, and it turned out that it wasn’t just people from the sort of traditional mostly white anti-abortion space; it was a sector of black folks from the black anti-abortion movement. So that’s how I started looking into it.
Through that, I started seeing that mainstream Republican lawmakers were also saying that Margaret Sanger was a racist and pointing to Planned Parenthood as having a genocidal agenda. This is all happening in the past few years, as there has been a ramp up against Planned Parenthood and a push to defund Planned Parenthood. It was not only people at protests saying it but also politicians. To me that was interesting because it had seeped into the larger anti-abortion movement.
This argument is one that [has] gone into the mainstream and deals with race in a way that reproductive justice people haven’t dealt with effectively. And I think it is something that needs to be looked at and followed, because it has grown. We’ve seen it in videos, and billboards, and postcards and [from] politicians. It’s something that people should be aware of.
