The NAACP is coming out against the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011,” saying the only thing more misleading that the premise of the bill is the name of it.

Via Huffington Post:

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the longest-serving African American member of the House, responded to Franks’ proclamation by asking why Frederick Douglass’ and Susan B. Anthony’s names are on the bill.

“I’ve studied Frederick Douglass more than you,” Conyers told Franks. “And I’ve never heard or read about him saying anything about prenatal nondiscrimination.”

The anti-abortion community has long tried to tie race into the abortion debate by comparing abortion to “black genocide,” but civil rights groups are often skeptical of their intent. The NAACP, the National Council of Jewish Women and 45 other U.S. civil rights groups echoed Conyers’ skepticism in a letter to the subcommittee on Tuesday. The reason African American women have a higher abortion rate than white women, they wrote in the letter, is that their rate of unintended pregnancy is 67 percent, compared to 40 percent for white women. The answer is not to penalize doctors who serve communities of color or to restrict women’s choice, but to address the root of the problem by empowering minority women to make informed personal health decisions and have fewer unintended pregnancies.

“We are very concerned to see the fight against discrimination being misappropriated to push a bill that does nothing to combat sex and race discrimination, but instead imposes additional barriers on women in the United States,” the groups wrote. “If passed, this bill would exacerbate health disparities.”

As for the “growing” problem of women obtaining abortions because of the gender or race of the fetus, the Guttmacher Institute told Huffington Post, “As far as we know, there is no research that shows that sex and race selective abortion occurs in the U.S.”