Report: Planned Parenthood Targets Minority Neighborhoods; Press Ignores

September 3rd, 2011 10:47 AM

It's no secret that the establishment press continues to serve as a virtual PR mouthpiece for Planned Parenthood. Among the canards employed in its defense is that the organization provides a wondrous array of reproductive health services. Abby Johnson, a former Texas facility director for the organization and others have shown that abortion constitutes 98% of such "services," and that taxpayer funds which aren't supposed to pay for abortions are routinely "combined into one pot, not set aside for specific services."

For several years, Life Dynamics Incorporated has documented an even more sinister aspect of Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry which its press defenders steadfastly refuse to call out, namely that it takes the lives of a disproportionate number of pre-born African-American and Hispanic babies. A new study by LDI ("Racial Targeting and Population Control") shows that this result is no accident, as, in LDI's words, "family planning" clinics "are disproportionately placed into minority neighborhoods" (full PDF report; HT Life News; bolds are mine throughout; internal link added by me):


... as far back as the mid 1900s, some well-known eugenicists were arguing that the most effective way they could advance their agenda would be to concentrate population control facilities within the targeted (minority and primarily African-American) communities.

... In Maafa 21 (a 2009 documentary -- Ed.), evidence is presented that Planned Parenthood and others within the abortion and family planning lobby took this approach when choosing locations for their facilities and that this practice continues to this day.

... For years, these people have consistently argued that the most effective way to reduce the number of abortions is to prevent unplanned pregnancies by making birth control chemicals, devices and information widely available.

This is why, until fairly recently, Planned Parenthood and so-called "family planning" advocates have acknowledged that they have placed locations "where the need is" in minority communities.

Forty years after Roe v. Wade, it should clear that the formerly acknowledged strategy has done nothing but keep the pipeline of preborn babies eligible to be exterminated filled:

... in contemporary America, the rate of pregnancy among black women is almost three times as high as it is for white women and, though they make up less than 13% of the female population, black women have about 37% of the abortions. In other words, the family planning lobby’s argument that they concentrate their facilities in minority communities because that is where the need is, cannot be reconciled with their long espoused claim about the connection between contraception, pregnancy and abortion.

Exactly -- which is why the abortion industry is denying it ever said what it formerly freely admitted:

Seeing that they had painted themselves into this corner, their options were to either abandon the assertion that contraception is the way to reduce abortion rates, or reverse field and start denying that their facilities are disproportionately placed into minority neighborhoods.

They chose the latter.

Virtually overnight, they went from claiming that they target minority communities with noble intentions to claiming that they don’t target them at all. Then, to support this revised strategy, they began quoting a new report by the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) showing that only one in 10 Planned Parenthood clinics is located in a minority community.

The LDI study blows Guttmacher's contention to bits. LDI developed databases of all Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities in the country, their zip codes, and each zip code's minority (black and/or Hispanic) component. Here is some of what it found:

The numbers are staggering. As just one example, consider Texas which has 94 Zip codes with at least one population control facility. Of those, only 22 are not disproportionately black and/or Hispanic. (In other words, 72, or 77% are. -- Ed.)

As the charts demonstrate, similar patterns are found across the country and they do not vary appreciably by the size of the state. In Connecticut – a state thoroughly dissimilar from Texas in size, culture and geography – there are 21 Zip codes in which population control facilities are located and only six are not disproportionately black and/or Hispanic.

... (Frequently) there are multiple facilities in disproportionately minority ZIP codes. For example, in New Jersey, ZIP code 07631 has a black population 286.7% of the state’s overall percentage and a Hispanic population 163.9% of the state. That ZIP code alone has four population control facilities. Similarly, Minnesota ZIP code 55404 has a black population that is 797.1% of the overall state percentage and a Hispanic population 537.9% of the state. In that ZIP code there are three population control centers.

Again, this pattern is repeated in state after state. We identified 116 ZIP codes with more than one population control facility. Of those, 84 were disproportionately black and/or Hispanic. What this means is that, when the American family planning industry places multiple facilities in a ZIP code, that ZIP code is more than two-and-a-half times as likely to be disproportionately minority as not.

... In the end, this data speaks for itself and does not require a lot of analysis. The numbers make it clear that the African-American and Hispanic communities have been targeted and logic makes it clear that this did not happen coincidentally or unintentionally.

The data does speak for itself if one takes the time to look through all of it. Maybe it's because I'm a numbers guy, but I would have been more impressed with the study's write-up if it had compiled state-by-state and national summaries of the results into a one- or two-page fact sheet. In the current media culture, it helps to have things in a form which can be virtually copied and pasted by reporters, because they normally won't take the time to pull anything together on their own -- especially on a topic which might upset their ideological applecart.

That said, what Life Dynamics has found is explosive enough that there really is no excuse for its findings to be ignored. But, as one would expect, they have been.

It will surprise no one that searches on "abortion" at the Associated Press's main site and the New York Times returned nothing referring to the Life Dynamics study. A Google News search on "Life Dynamics" (in quotes, sorted by date) returns six results, none of them establishment press outlets.

By contrast, as the study notes, there was extensive media coverage during the 1980s and 1990s of research purporting to show how minorities were targeted by tobacco and alcohol companies. The press has jumped to the defense of minority victims -- some legitimate, many not -- in these and so many other areas. So what, other than ideological self-defense, explains the silence in the face of clear evidence of life-taking industry targeting by a group which used to brag about what it was doing but now pretends it isn't happening?

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.