Challenging the NAACP

‘Blacks make up about 13 percent of the US population, but they account for about a third of all abortions. Clearly, there are some discrepancies here.’,’

Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal puts these numbers in the context of efforts that the NAACP could support in order to help the black community, especially women. Read the whole piece , but this part puts the case pretty clearly:

On the other side, of course, are the maternity homes and Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Planned Parenthood and their allies accuse these centers of posing as medical clinics, offering religion instead of science, and of “traumatizing” pregnant women by showing them things like sonograms. It’s an odd complaint from a group that runs a Web site called Teenwire – which offers adolescents tips on everything from anal sex to a crude, animated condom game. Given that the overwhelming majority of women who have abortions are over age 20, showing one a sonogram or telling her “Jesus loves you” seems pretty tame stuff.

Planned Parenthood has every legal right to pursue its business. But if – as our pro-choice friends like to say – we really want a world where abortion is more rare, could not the NAACP help?

Just imagine if this institution used its voice and resources to ensure that, beside all those Planned Parenthood clinics located in our minority neighborhoods, African-American women could find another kind of place. A place not unlike Good Counsel – where a scared young pregnant woman could carry her baby to term, complete her education, train for a new job, and be treated with the love and respect that a mother needs and deserves.

In other words, could not the NAACP work for a society where pregnant African-Americans had two doors open to them? Planned Parenthood’s not going anywhere, so the first would still lead to America’s largest abortion provider, a business that has already eliminated millions from America’s population. But the other would lead to people whose business is of a vastly different order: welcoming these children into the world, and getting their moms the help they need to live lives of purpose and dignity.

Then again, that would give women a real choice.