The Awakening of African Americans

The Post-Abortion Review
Vol 9, No 3, Jul-Sept 2001
Peggy Lehner, president
Dayton Right to Life
Reproduced with Permission

Recently I was asked to participate in a debate on abortion at an African American conference. The invitation came from the conference director, who had heard me speaking on a local black radio station about the prevalence of abortion in the black community. My opponent was to be a black social worker whom I did not know.

Very few conference participants chose to come into the workshop. Our audience consisted of three of my pro-life friends and six of my opponent's friends. Everyone else apparently chose to go to the workshop next door on racial profiling.

I started out by presenting some statistics on abortion and the African American community. Facts such as: Abortion is the leading cause of death in the African American community, accounting for more deaths in the last 25 years than all other causes combined . . . . Hispanics have now surpassed African Americans as the nation's largest minority group . . . . Married African American women have a five times greater abortion rate than married Caucasian women. This was just to be my introduction.

My opponent stood up, looked at me, and said, "Why has no one ever told us these things?"

The debate was over. We spent the rest of the hour having a rather serious discussion with the audience as to how these statistics came to be.

I certainly will not claim that everyone in the room became instantly pro-life. But there is no question that they were suddenly looking at abortion in a new light.

While virtually all polls indicate that African Americans tend to hold as strong or even stronger pro-life beliefs than the population as a whole, we also know that they undergo a very disproportionate number of abortions (36 percent, while representing only 14 percent of the child-bearing population).

Some might expect this dichotomy to lead to a greater percentage of African American women in need of post-abortion ministries. Yet certainly in our area we see very few African American women coming forward for help in dealing with their abortions. As a matter of fact, except for the high number of African American clients seen in our crisis pregnancy centers, very few African Americans are involved in the pro-life movement in any way. Why?




For entire article and more information view: http://www.afterabortion.org/PAR/V9/n3/afamericans.html

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