The Radiance Foundation, an anti-abortion group out of Atlanta, has launched a campaign on billboards that links abortion to slavery. Deliberately releasing the ads during the Juneteenth celebration, the 50 billboards state that “The 13th Amendment Freed Us. Abortion Enslaves Us.”
Ryan Bomberger, chief creative officer of The Radiance Foundation, said that he wanted to send a message with the ads that abortions are dangerous.
“When you look at what abortion has brought to the black community, it can’t be typified to anything other than present-day slavery,” he said. “Roe v. Wade used the 14th Amendment–which finally gave humanity to African Americans—and contorted it to give someone the right to kill an unborn child. It’s just like slavery, because you have a class of people who are considered less than human, and therefore they can be treated like property.”
Currently, African American women account for 30 percent of the abortions occurring in the United States. This is disproportionate to their representation in the general population, which is 12 percent. The Radiance Foundation issued another campaign recently, stating that ”Black Children Are An Endangered Species.”
Life Always, a group out of Texas, featured a campaign in Chicago with a picture of President Barack Obama stating that, “Every 21 minutes, our next future leader is aborted.”
The Guttmacher Institute argues that 62 percent of all pregnancies of women below the poverty line are unplanned, which some say explains why so many black women end up getting abortions. African Americans represent nearly one-fourth of those below the poverty line.
While the NAACP has not taken a position on the abortion issue, they’ve shared their concern about the race-baiting issue.
“Comparing abortion to slavery certainly raises major concerns,” Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the NAACP, told HuffPost in an interview. “Women are not forced to have abortions the way they were in servitude. Slavery was about not having the right to make any decisions. Women were actually bred to produce children for the purposes of profit. This is so far removed from that, that if it weren’t such a serious issue, it would almost be laughable.”
