Free Republic

Saving Black BabiesAbortion has cost 13 million African American lives.By Sheryl Blunt in Washington | posted 01/10/2003 Growing up in inner city Detroit, Janine Simpson and her girlfriends didn't think twice about having abortions. In her all-black neighborhood, teen abortions were the norm, she says, and the local abortion clinic was a fixture. "My friends and I, we all had abortions," Simpson says. "We didn't even think about it. To us it was just getting rid of a blob of tissue. We'd say, 'Oh, you pregnant? Okay, let's go take care of it.' " But after Simpson's own abortion her...

Anti-abortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more blacks into their movement, targeting urban communities they long have considered hostile turf. They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing leaflets that raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive health care and abortions . Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights - an effort to stop "black genocide" - these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s is touring the nation, speaking out against "the war...