Atlanta Antiabortion Billboard Campaign Generates Controversy

February 9, 2010 - An antiabortion-rights billboard campaign in Atlanta has drawn fire from abortion-rights supporters, who argue that the campaign is misleading and portrays black women in a negative light, the New York Times reports. The campaign currently consists of 65 billboards that show an image of a "worried-looking" black child with the message, "Black children are an endangered species" at the top, the Times reports.

According to the Times, the campaign was created in conjunction with a Web site, toomanyaborted.com, which claims that all of Georgia's abortion clinics are located in "urban areas where blacks reside." The site also claims that abortion is linked to segregation and is "the tool [racists] use to stealthily target blacks for extermination." The Web site contends that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to reduce the black population, a claim that Planned Parenthood refutes.

The campaign's sponsors -- including Georgia Right to Life and the Radiance Foundation, a group that encourages adoption -- say that the purpose of the campaign is to highlight data showing a disproportionate number of abortions among black women, especially women in Georgia, and to show that the number is rising in the state. Davis claimed, "The impact of abortion has become so great that it has begun to impact [the black] fertility rate."

According to the Times, blacks make up about 30% of the state's population. Federal data show that black women obtained 57.4% of abortions in Georgia in 2006, the Times reports. However, the fertility rate among black women -- the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age -- is higher than the national average and has increased in recent years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Loretta Ross, executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, said that the billboards portray black women as either victims of whites who control abortion clinics or women intent on destroying their own race. "The reason we have so many Planned Parenthoods in the black community is because leaders in the black community in the '20s and '30s went to Margaret Sanger and asked for them," Ross said, adding, "Controlling our fertility was part of our uplift out of poverty strategy, and it still works" (Dewan, New York Times, 2/5).