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THE BIGGER PICTURE
IN THE UNITED STATES, THE ABORtion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women. Antiabortion activists, including some African-American pastors, are waging a campaign around this fact, falsely asserting that the disparity is the result of racism in the prochoice community, with the result that there has been aggressive marketing by abortion providers in minority communities.
The Issues4Life Foundation, for example, is a faith-based organization that targets and works with African-American leaders toward achieving the goal of "zero African-American lives lost to abortion or biotechnology." In April, Issues4Life wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus to denounce Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its "racist and eugenic goals." The group blamed ppfa and abortion providers in general for the high abortion rate in the African-American community - deeming the situation the "Da[r]fur of America" - and called on Congress to withdraw federal family planning funds from all ppfa affiliates.
The conservative Catholic group Priests for Life has also been active on this front, recruiting Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King, to argue a similar line in Catholic communities.
These activists are exploiting and distorting the facts to serve their antiabortion agenda. They ignore the fundamental reason women have abortions and the underlying problem of racial and ethnic disparities across an array of health indicators. The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. This applies to all women - black, white, Hispanic, Asian and Native American alike. Not surprisingly, the variation in abortion rates across racial and ethnic groups relates direcdy to the variation in the unintended pregnancy rates across those same groups.
Black women are not alone in having disproportionately high unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. The abortion rate among Hispanic women, for example, although not as high as the rate among black women, is double the rate among whites. Hispanics also have a higher level of unintended pregnancy than white women. Black women's unintended pregnancy rates are the highest of all. These higher unintended pregnancy rates reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time....