Conspiracy Watch: Is Abortion Black Genocide?

Are pro-choice policies decimating the African-American population? MoJo examines the myth.

Illustration: Peter Hoey

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The latest installment in our ongoing collection of wonderfully weird (and totally whack) conspiracy theories. Find more Conspiracy Watch entries here.

THE CONSPIRACY THEORY: Legalized abortion is a genocidal scheme to wipe out black people. Even though African Americans make up 13 percent of the population, the vast majority of abortion clinics are in minority communities, and 50 percent of all black fetuses are aborted. As a pro-life billboard posted earlier this year in Georgia put it, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.”

THE CONSPIRACY THEORISTS: This idea goes back to the early 1970s, when the Black Panthers claimed that abortion would “destroy our people” and Jesse Jackson told Jet that “abortion is genocide.” Jackson later went pro-choice, but he’s still cited by Clenard Childress, the creator of BlackGenocide.org and the president of Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN), a prominent black anti-abortion organization. LEARN has partnered with Life Dynamics, a predominantly white group that runs KlannedParenthood.com and produced a two-hour film, Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America. After screening the film last year, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) declared, “We are besieged by a racist abortion policy.”

MEANWHILE, BACK ON EARTH: Black women have 30 percent of all abortions, a disproportionately high rate; more than one-third of black women’s pregnancies (but not half) are terminated. However, Planned Parenthood points out that just 6 percent of its clinics are located in zip codes where the majority of residents are black. And according to the census, the African American population is expected to double by 2050.

Kookiness Rating: Tin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat SmallTin Foil Hat Small (1=maybe they’re on to something, 5=break out the tinfoil hat!)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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