Black leaders differ on abortion

On Monday, April 11th, 2011, Mayor Gray along with six city council members were arrested on Capitol Hill. They were demanding that Congress re-institute the availability of U.S. Taxpayer dollars to kill unborn Black children while at the same time demanding that Congress kill federal funding of school choice which rescues Black children from failing public schools.

Over the past decade the D.C. Mayor and City Council have failed to collect "$347.4 Million" in Medicaid reimbursements. According to Washington Examiner's Harry Jaffe, "the inability to collect Medicaid funds is neck and neck with the public school system's miserable record of educating our children for scandalous government dysfunction." Medicaid which is only available to low-income individuals and families makes it possible for low-income individuals and families to get the health care they need. However, according to TBD's Amanda Hess, "28 women who had scheduled Medicaid-Funded Abortions at a District Planned Parenthood clinic today have been left without a means to pay for the [abortion] procedure." According to D.C. Abortion Fund President Tiffany Reed, D.C. City Councilman Jim Graham personally pledged $250 to help pay for medicaid abortions and even pulled an "All-Nighter" in hopes of drumming up enough donations to cover one day's worth medicaid abortions (i.e., about 28procedures) for one Planned Parenthood abortion clinic. Conflict of Interest

Washington, D.C., a city that is 52.7 percent African-American, has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. There are 265 abortions for every 100 live births, according to Guttmacher Institute statistics.

Responding to Mayor Gray’s street theater, a coalition of 10 African-American pastors from D.C. and the suburbs composed an open letter to the mayor.

The letter also promises a cooperative effort by the pastors to open a new pregnancy center in Washington, using private funds, “so that women have life-affirming and healthy alternatives to abortion.”

These Guttmacher statistics ought to shock: The number of black babies in the United States killed by abortion between 1973 and 2010 was 17.24 million. That’s a rate of 574,000 per year. Compare this to the number of blacks killed by lynching in America between 1864 and 1968 (4,946, or 47.7 per year). LifeNews