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?

How We Learned

Approximately four years ago, Dayton Right to Life decided to seek the answers to these questions. We started out by enlisting the help of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Dayton to conduct some focus groups with African American women. From those focus groups we were able to discern some basic information as to how these women perceived the abortion issue, as well as their attitudes towards Right to Life, area crisis pregnancy centers and organizations such as Planned Parenthood. We also tested the effectiveness of various pro-life tools, including some of the leading pieces of literature, television and radio ads, and slogans.

Based on our initial findings, we continued to conduct a number of personal interviews, group discussions and more formal focus groups over the next two years. The participants in this research ranged from teens, single mothers, fathers, pastors and professionals. Some had experienced abortion; many considered themselves to be "pro-choice."

Following are some of our key findings, which we hope will begin to foster a concerted effort on the part of the pro-life movement to reach out in a more effective manner to our African American neighbors.

While these findings represent dominant opinions identified in our research, it is important to keep in mind that not all African Americans think alike, any more than do individuals in any other group of people. We found that the more removed someone was from black cultural influences, the less likely he or she was to share in some of these attitudes. For example, while the group as a whole did not feel that the desire to keep a pregnancy a secret had much bearing on abortion decisions, the participants who were suburban and college-educated seemed to feel that the need for secrecy was an overriding concern.

What We Learned

One of our most striking findings was the high rate of denial many of the participants exhibited over the rate of abortion within the African American community. Some accused us of making up the figures to "make them look bad." As one woman told me, "When I first heard you saying these things, my reaction was, 'Here we go again. White people telling us one more thing we are doing wrong.'"

Men especially seemed to believe that abortion is a "white problem." We were frequently told, "Our women don't do that." Some men expressed disbelief that any black woman would seek an abortion for economic reasons. Their thinking went along the line that black women are used to being poor and that they somehow always made room at the table for another mouth to feed.

The women tended to believe that while abortions did indeed occur, they usually were reserved for serious situations where no other option was perceived to exist--and economics often played an important part.

For years, African American families have dealt with out of wedlock births by absorbing the child into the family structure, with grandparents or aunts informally adopting the child. While this continues to happen to a considerable degree, the number of women who choose abortion has gone unnoticed.

There is a striking lack of knowledge about the pro-life movement within the African American community. In our initial focus groups no one was able to identify even what issue Right to Life was involved with. When prompted that we were an organization that was opposed to abortion, they tended to identify us with stereotypical negative media images, such as "those people who bomb clinics." While some were familiar with and had actually utilized area crisis pregnancy centers, they did not really connect them with abortion opposition or other pro-life efforts.

On the other hand, virtually all the participants correctly identified the services provided by Planned Parenthood and generally had favorable opinions of that organization. They saw Planned Parenthood as a place where teens especially could go for help when their parents were not available. However, we also found it interesting that several women who had previously undergone abortions mentioned pressure from Planned Parenthood as contributing to their decision to abort.

Many of the women we talked with expressed strong religious opposition to abortion. I don't believe we heard any woman express the belief that abortion was not morally wrong. However, they also believed that God readily forgives abortion since He knows the personal circumstances that would make abortion a woman's only option.

In one of the few in-depth sociological studies we found related to abortion and the black community, it was noted that while in the seventies attendance at church was a contributing factor towards an African American woman's opposition to abortion, this factor had disappeared all together by the nineties.⁽¹⁾

It is our theory that as "abortion rights" became more and more of a key dogma of the Democratic party, African American churches, which have been intimately linked to that party, grew increasingly silent on abortion. This perhaps accounts for the muddy theology we heard so frequently expressed on the issue.

Reactions to Pro-Life Materials

Very little pro-life literature held much appeal to the African American women in our study. It was generally perceived as being "written by white people, for white people." With these comments in mind, we have developed two new brochures that hopefully will be more effective in reaching the African American community.

The first one, which we refer to as "The Answer," is directed towards women facing a crisis pregnancy. Included in this brochure are several photos of aborted babies--something which many crisis pregnancy centers have avoided using. Our research revealed that these photos, which by and large have never been seen in the African American community, had an extremely powerful impact. We also found none of the negative reactions which have led many pro-life groups to stop using these photos. Women who had experienced abortion appeared to feel most strongly that the photos should be shown.

Some of these women described how they had been pressured into their abortions by family members and said that they if they had known more about abortion, they might have been in a better position to resist the pressure. I remember one young woman especially who stated, "If I had been able to show these pictures to my brother, I just know he would not have wanted me to do that to my baby."

Another thing we found that might be especially useful for post-abortion healing is the power of the testimonial. The voice of women who have "been there" is something African American women really seek. There is a strong sense that "If you haven't walked the walk, don't try to talk the talk."

The second brochure, "The Question," is designed to awaken the African American community to the toll that abortion is taking on them as a race. We have found this brochure to be very helpful in starting dialogue on this issue. It was the information in this brochure that I used in my "debate."

The women and men we spoke to are very aware of the African American role as the dominant minority group in American culture. Showing them that (1) abortion has so greatly diminished the population of their racial group and (2) they have been displaced by Hispanics as the largest minority group sets off powerful alarm bells.

Before the Rev. Jesse Jackson entered presidential politics, he correctly preached that abortion was a form of genocide that would devastate the black community. African American pro-life leaders, such as the Rev. Johnny Hunter of L.E.A.R.N., continue to preach the same message. Our research suggests that their instincts are right. Outreach efforts to the African American community that underscore the devastation abortion has wrought on African Americans as a group are very effective in awakening concern about abortion--which is otherwise commonly dismissed as a "white issue."

There is no question that the African American community is in great need of pro-life education and services. Among the approximately 18 million African American women in this country, a very high percentage of them are carrying the pain of 13 million abortions. Each year more than 400,000 abortions are added to those numbers.

As pro-lifers we must start building bridges into our African American communities. I believe that as we make the effort, we will quickly find that we are building the bridge side by side.

Peggy Lehner is President of Dayton Right to Life.

If you would like to contact Dayton Right to Life for a sample of their materials or additional information, you may email them at info@dayton.righttolife.org. Or write Dayton Right to Life, 211 S. Main St., Suite 830, Dayton, OH 45429.

Notes

1. John Lynxwiler and David Gay, "The Abortion Attitudes of Black Women: 1972-1991," Journal of Black Studies, 27(2):260-277, Nov. 1996.