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Growing up in inner city Detroit, Janine Simpson and her girlfriends didn't think twice about having abortions. In her all-black neighborhood, teen abortions were the norm, she says, and the local abortion clinic was a fixture.

"My friends and I, we all had abortions," Simpson says. "We didn't even think about it. To us it was just getting rid of a blob of tissue. We'd say, 'Oh, you pregnant? Okay, let's go take care of it.' "

But after Simpson's own abortion her freshman year of college, things changed. She became a Christian and after graduation developed a passion to help other women with unplanned pregnancies.

"I had gone through a healing process and felt I needed to talk to them and share my heart," says Simpson, now an ordained minister through the Potter's House.

Simpson has just started a new job as director of urban center development for Care Net. She works with inner-city church leaders to educate their communities about the need for alternatives to abortion. Care Net, an umbrella group for 600 crisis pregnancy centers across the country, launched a pilot project in Philadelphia last September. It aims to establish pregnancy resource centers and prolife clinics in largely black, urban areas where such centers are rare.

"The perception is that we as black people keep our children," Simpson says. The reality, she says, is that 512 of every 1,000 African American pregnancies end in abortion.

African American women constitute 13 percent of the female population in the United States. However, they have 36 percent of the abortions, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's research arm. In Pennsylvania, the figures are even more disproportionate. Ten percent of the female population is black, but they have 45 percent of all abortions in Pennsylvania.

"Planned Parenthood has come in and exploited the inner city," Simpson says, adding that many inner-city residents have easy access to an abortion clinic.

"Thirteen million African Americans are missing from abortion," says Clenard Howard Childress, regional director of the North East chapter of LEARN. The Life Education And Resource Network is the nation's largest African American prolife group. "We are the only ethnic group in the county whose numbers are declining."

The disproportionate number of abortions among African Americans has spurred prolifers to charge that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are systematically targeting blacks and other minority groups for abortion. Critics say Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder, held racist views.

Planned Parenthood maintains that Sanger disagreed with eugenicists, Nazis, and racists. But prolife activists cite evidence that Sanger and her colleagues were closely associated with white supremacists and sought to limit the populations of minorities and the disabled.

According to Emily Taft Douglas's book Margaret Sanger: Pioneer of the Future, in 1926 Sanger was the guest speaker at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Silverlake, New Jersey. She founded the American Birth Control League-the precursor to Planned Parenthood-in 1921 with C. C. Little and Lothrup Stoddard, two known racists. The latter authored the book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.

Sanger and the founders of the league advocated population control through abortion, contraception, or sterilization. A particular target of their efforts was the urban poor. She also opposed welfare and charitable intervention because she believed it increased the minority underclass.

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February 2003, Vol. 47, No. 2