Roundup: The Billboard People

In Minnesota, when you refer to "The Billboard People," everyone knows that you are discussing "Pro-Life Across America," a group that raises funds to put up anti-choice billboards around the state, with pudgy babies spouting thought bubbles like "I had hiccups when I was in your womb!"  But these days, billboards are becoming synonymous with the infamous "Black Children are an Endangered Species" ads sprouting up in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Pamela Merritt started an excellent discussion over this campaign last week.   Today, our roundup has some other people weighing in.

Tana Ganeva of Alternet refers to the campaign as the "creepy billboards."

The billboard campaign, created by the Radiance Foundation and Georgia’s Operation Outrage, features a really cute, unaborted child staring accusingly at female passersby thinking about contributing to the destruction of the African-American community. ”Black Children Are an Endangered Species,” it reads.

...

What an apt way to trumpet the anti-choice message; no feigned concern for women’s wellbeing — not even of the “abortion should be illegal because it makes some women sad” variety (Unlike having a baby against your will, which always turns out great). Just a weird, creepy guilt-trip.

Guilt trip appears to be a common theme in reaction to the signs, even from people who consider themselves pro-life.

Unfortunately, through our laws and policies, we have convinced these young women that an unborn child is not a human being.

And we have persuaded them that there is little difference between the morning after and a few weeks down the road.

But while a much quieter debate, abortion always has been a divisive issue in the African-American community.

In "African-American Women and Abortion," an essay by Loretta J. Ross that traces the advocacy of black women in the planned parenting movement, the author noted that both the "left" and the "right" aligned themselves against black women when it came to birth control.

"That such disparate forces aligned themselves against African-American women demonstrated that both white bigots and black sexists could find common cause in the assertion of male authority over women's decision regarding reproduction," Ross wrote.

Although critics of Planned Parenthood still argue that the group had racist intentions, "[black women] perceived the free services to be in their own best interests," Ross wrote.

Frankly, young women who end up in an abortion clinic aren't thinking about politics. They are trying to survive.

The black abortion billboard reflects rhetoric that will cause a commotion.

But it will not change this tragic trend.

Even some who still believe emphatically in the eugenic past of the choice movement see the billboards as a reminder that the recent conservative movement has failed the African American community, too.

And, conservatives have much to think about when they ponder these billboards in Georgia. Just what do they know about the difficulties and challenges that face black America? Do they recognize that their invocations of Ronald Reagan’s name as if he was some kind of savior, rings hollow in black America, not least because of the race baiting that his campaigns entailed, the references to "welfare queens" and the like, but because he launched a new economic era in which the rich continue to get richer and the poor to get poorer, and America remains too selfish to recognize that we need to pay more, not less, in taxes if we are to maintain the standards of living which our forbears gave to us. Conservatives have to recognize that as long as this country does not treat health care as a universal right, as an entitlement, poor black women (and poor white women and poor Latina women) will get $400 abortions because they can’t afford the $10,000 it costs to give birth in America today. Health care is pro-life too, my conservative friends, and it will take more than tort reform to help poor women to keep their children.

Mini Roundup: Men, if your condom feels uncomfortable, you're not alone. And ladies, if his condom slipped off during sex, you're not alone, either.