Antiabortion Advocates Organize Events In San Francisco Area To Address Issue In Black Community

Main Category: Abortion
Article Date: 09 Jan 2008 - 9:00 PDT

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Black antiabortion advocates later this month plan to host three events in the San Francisco Bay Area in an "aggressive push" to reduce the disproportionate number of abortions among black women, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The Issues4Life Foundation on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Jan. 18 plans to hold a two-mile walk in Oakland, as well as another walk the following day in San Francisco. The group also plans to host a conference at a Berkeley church on Jan. 18. Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King, will attend all three events. Clenard Childress, an antiabortion advocate and president of Life Education and Resource Network, also will speak at the events.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, black women account for 32% of those undergoing abortions nationwide, while they make up 13% of the population. "Black women are nearly four times more likely than white women to have an abortion," Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at Guttmacher, said. Finer said that black women also are more likely than white women to have unintended pregnancies because they are less likely than white women to use contraceptives. He also said that low-income women are less likely to use birth control and minority women are disproportionately poor.

Walter Hoye -- a Berkeley preacher and founder of Issues4Life -- said that abortion "is a moral issue as far as the church is concerned, and we want to strengthen the African-American leadership." Hoye said that abstinence "is Christianity 101. But when people decide to have sex outside of marriage, we want to do other things like post-abortion counseling, anger management, day care and recovery programs." He added that people should be equally concerned with abortion clinics located in predominately black neighborhoods as they are with homicides, liquor stores and genocide in Africa.

Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP, said San Francisco's "top civil rights issues are education, economic empowerment and political engagement," adding, "These pro-life people are demagogues and ideologues and are not receiving overwhelming support from the black community" (Fulbright, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/7).

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