Focusing on abortion, race

Forty percent of all abortions in Pennsylvania are performed on black women. There are other choices.

By Arlene Campbell

During Black History Month, I sometimes wonder: How many Dr. Martin Luther Kings have we lost? How many Michael Jordans? Was there a black girl out there who would have been the next Rosa Parks had she lived?

Abortion has had a devastating effect on the African American community, in Pennsylvania and throughout the United States, and it’s important that we start looking at it through the prism of race.

Since 1973, when abortion was legalized, it has taken millions of black lives – and I say it this way because I believe an unborn child is indeed a living being. Here in Pennsylvania, blacks only make up no more than 12 percent of the population, yet about 40 percent of all abortions in the state are performed on African American women.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization and affiliate of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, black women are three times more likely than white women to have abortions.

In the continuing national debate over abortion, the voices of average black women are seldom heard. We are often talked about, but seldom talked to. I’m an African American woman who can speak about abortion from experience. It took me years to summon up the courage to talk about my abortion, but I now speak about it freely, so that young black women will know the truth about what the right to choose really entails.

In 1974, at the age of 22, I was a junior in college when I discovered I was pregnant. My boyfriend did not want the baby. He openly talked of abortion. The thought of this act scared me but we decided to go ahead with the abortion anyway. During the “safe and legal” abortion, I became quite nervous because the doctor seemed to be having some difficulty.

As he jabbed the suction instrument farther into my uterus, I felt a sharp pain and said, “Ow.” He then snapped, “Keep still! See what you made me do!” This man knew he had done something terribly wrong, but he never acknowledged it.

As the nurse led me to the recovery room, I tried to tell her that something wasn’t right. She quickly admonished me, saying, “What do you expect to feel? You just had an abortion!” After two hours in the recovery room, they gave me a pack of pain pills and an emergency phone number to call. They sent me back to my dormitory – to die, I felt.

Within 24 hours, I was rushed to the nearest hospital with a temperature of 103. The doctor from the abortion clinic had perforated my uterus. The abortion center staff never told me about this risk before the procedure.

Several days later, I was forced to have a complete hysterectomy because gangrene had destroyed my reproductive organs. I had lost the only child I would ever have to abortion. And I continue to grieve that loss to this day.

From 1999-2002, an average of 844 black babies were aborted each day in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. How many women are sitting in the pews of black churches, silently mourning the children they aborted? Research from the Elliot Institute, an organization in Springfield, Ill., that studies the aftereffects of abortion on women, shows that those who abort are more likely to attempt suicide, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. There is a hidden health crisis affecting black women, and abortion, I believe, is its cause.

It’s high time we start a new dialogue about the impact of abortion on the African American community. Young black women must be shown that there are viable alternatives to abortion, such as seeking help from churches or crisis pregnancy centers or adoption. They don’t have to shoulder the burden of unexpected pregnancy alone.

Abortion will never be a solution to poverty in our black neighborhoods, racial discrimination, or the shortage of black women in politics. Abortion is a failed public policy which is tantamount to setting off a bomb in black families. It will take us decades as a people to recover from this tragedy.

I am hopeful that one day black women will no longer be exploited by the abortion industry, that their bodies will no longer be mutilated by abortionists, and that their children will no longer be sacrificed on the altar of “choice.”