The religiously pro-abortion New York Times recently gave needed, though less than straightforward coverage to the pro-life outreach, only recently successful, to black women regarding abortion. The issue, long neglected by the MSM, is significant: Although blacks make up only 13 percent of the population, black women undergo nearly 40 percent of all the nation’s abortions.

What is now rousing black audiences, according to Times writer Shaila Dewan, is the pro-lifers’ ramped-up message, which links abortion to slavery, lynching, genocide, Nazi-style eugenics, and birth control. As she describes the pitch of one of the newly effective pro-life groups, Georgia Right to Life, abortion is “a decades-old conspiracy to kill off blacks.”


Perhaps, but Dewan and her article sources do not prove the charge historically. Nor do they specifically identify who these conspirators are. The reader is left possibly to infer that they lurk in the ranks of the very pro-abortion forces cited by Dewan, those forces that advocate, fund and perform abortions – to wit, abortion-providing organizations such as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (highlighted as under “sustained attack by black abortion opponents”); the U.S. government itself (duly noted as providing about $350 million a year to Planned Parenthood for “education and medical services”); pro-abortion politicians (who are let off the hook entirely); doctors who abort black children (black physicians who provided illegal abortions, Dewan points out, were praised as “community heroes”); and abortion-driving feminists (unmentioned, except for Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, whom Dewan portrays with unseemly ambivalence: Sanger’s guilt for having allied herself with eugenics is mitigated, the writer suggests, because “at the time [it was] a mainstream movement.”).

Although Dewan cannot quite bring herself to clarify the identity of the “bad (conspiratorial) guys,” she does, although only implicitly, name the “good guys” (that is, those who would by definition be non-conspirators because they the oppose the aborting of black children). She acknowledges, correctly, that “the anti-abortion movement [has long been viewed] as almost exclusively white and Republican.” The reader must surmise for himself that these white, pro-life Republicans have been the natural and likely actual allies of dedicated black pro-lifers. Nonetheless, in a roundabout way, Dewan is giving credit where credit is due.

cirque_du_soleil_contortionists8

The reporter might have thought to add that white, Republican pro-lifers are typically religious – an important point of unity with black pro-lifers. One black leader, Day Gardner, tells Dewan that she is shocked that black women abort more than white people “because we’re a religious people.” But perhaps the writer’s intent is in fact to accentuate the political and racial differences among pro-lifers (and among blacks and whites in general), as opposed to explaining what unites them.

Come to think of it, the title of her piece, “To Court Blacks, Foes of Abortion Make Racial Case,” seems designed to evoke exactly such discord. The same can be said of her polarizing, duel-standard labeling of pro-lifers as “anti-abortion” and “opponents” or  “foes of abortion,” while avoiding to characterize what abortion opponents stand for, except in one case to quote one interviewee’s euphemistic designation of herself as having been “pro-choice.”

Similar pro-abortion bias is at work in Dewan’s selective description of James O’Keefe III, who represented himself as a racist eager to donate money for black women’s abortions, thereby publicly exposing a despicable attitude toward black children on the part of a Planned Parenthood employee. Dewan identifies O’Keefe as “the provocateur” arrested on charges that he attempted to tamper with a senator’s phones. Yet she neglects to describe, much less laud, him for exposing the community organization ACORN’s abetting of child prostitution.


The article’s heated focus on conspiracy deflects the reporter’s failure to fully present something very basic to her subject, the core belief of both black and white pro-lifers that every unborn human being is of immeasurable and, as most believe, sacred value. Dewan features compelling pro-life advocates and work (such as black pastor Johnny M. Hunter and Mark Crutcher’s documentary on black abortions) to buttress the conspiracy theme, but never pro-lifers’ moral and spiritual first principles.

Conspiracy it is, front and center, as illustrated by the tidy recapitulation of the article’s main thrust at its end. Markita Eddy, a college sophomore is given the last word. Commenting on a film on the conspiracy charge, she says: “It showed me that [if she were to become pregnant] maybe I should want to keep my child no matter what my position was, just because of the conspiracy.”

This Times article fails to show whether or not there has in fact been a conspiracy to wipe out blacks. But, as a story necessarily also tied to conveying a true sense of the meaning and worth of the pro-life movement, it falls short. With the reporter’s urge to sow political division and thus no doubt to score political points, as well as her pro-abortion bias, how could it have been otherwise?