It is not surprising that anti-choice activists would oppose Obama's lifting of the "gag rule" which prevented US foreign aid from going to agencies which offer abortions or referrals for abortions as part of their family planning services. What is kind of surprising to me is that some of the arguments they use are deceitful and insulting to our intelligence. Take, for example, the following by Laura Hollis at townhall.com.
What are we to make of the first African-American president who is so blind to the devastation abortion has wrought among African-Americans? African-Americans make up less than 15% of the U.S. population, but over 35% of abortions are performed on African-American women. To get some sense of the magnitude of this impact, consider that, according to the Center for Disease Control, nearly 293,000 black Americans died in 2005. The single largest cause of death was heart disease, which claimed over 74,000 lives. By comparison, the 1400 abortions of black babies daily in the United States is over 438,000 African-Americans destroyed every year. Upwards of 13 million abortions have decimated the African-American population in this country. This is a holocaust, and one that cannot be prettied up under the rubric of "reproductive freedom."
While I can admire a skillful playing of the race card this is just pathetic. The disproportionate use of abortion as a means of family planning is much more associated with low social-economic status (poverty) than race. And to compare woman using abortion to prevent having babies before they can adequately care for them or to limit the size of their family to the Nazis trying to completely eliminate European Jewry is insulting to our intelligence. White people in the developed world have been limiting the size of their families to an average of less than 2 children for the last 50 years or so, using abortion as a last resort, without the results looking anything like a Holocaust.
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