African American women in Atlanta will experience a new kind of advertising in the next few weeks. An anti-abortion group has begun putting up billboards around metro Atlanta, declaring black babies to be “an endangered species.” The move is meant to discourage abortion, though some take issue with usage of the term “species” in the ads.
The billboards were announced at a state capital news conference, accompanied by an announcement by pro-life group Georgia Right to Life that it would back legislation this session that would make it a crime to “solicit a woman to have an abortion based on the race or sex of the unborn child.”
Ryan Bomberger, co-founder of the Radiance Foundation, said plans are in the works to have 35 of the billboards by mid-February. “We’re aiming for a lot more, but that’s where we’re at,” Bomberger said.
The two groups say they’re basing their outreach on federal statistics that indicate 56 percent of abortions in Georgia are performed on African American women, though blacks make up 30 percent of the general population.
Abortion is typically a clandestine procedure, thus it is hoped that the billboards will draw attention to the “black” elephant in the room. –gerald radford
