Georgia Law Proposes 10 Yrs in Jail for Doctors Providing Abortions Based on Race or Gender

Georgia’s House of Representatives Rules Committee passed in a 7-6 vote a bill that will imprison health care providers for 10 years with a fine of $25,000 for performing an abortion prompted by the baby’s race or gender. Pregnant women would not be held liable.

According to ABC News, 

There are now more than 60 of the giant billboards in Atlanta’s black neighborhoods, where a majority of Georgia’s black residents live, and the message isn’t going over well.

“They need to tear it down; they just need to put something else up,” said Atlantan Ashley Varner. “I think they could get their point across without just targeting black people.”

Another, Carrie Logan, went further. “I think it’s just a racist thing that they put out,” she said. via ABC News

Fox News reports:

Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, the group behind the billboard campaign, told FoxNews.com that she supports the legislation that she says will address an issue that has “such a disproportionate impact on the black community rather than every other community in Georgia, as well as the nation.”

Davis noted that in 2008, blacks made up 30 percent of the population in Georgia but more than 57 percent of the abortions.

“Those numbers are so horrific,” she said. “There has to be something else contributing to this number.” via Fox News

The anti-abortionists behind the billboards are black themselves and say they are motivated by the disproportionately high number of abortions in black neighborhoods. While the Georgia Right to Life helped pay for the signs, the Georgia case is not a group of white pro-life groups leading the charge against abortion clinics in black neighborhoods.

The Radiance Foundation has a beautiful website and information about their project, vision and hopes for the future.

Loretta Ross, national coordinator of SisterSong, an abortion-rights group, responds that the clinics are located not in places that target blacks, with the hope of exterminating blacks, as argued by the Radiance Foundation, but because they are needed there.

SisterSong agrees that abortion is disproportionate in its impact on the black community, but Ross is furious about what she feels is a distortion of reality by the Radiance Foundation.

“Because of health disparities, less access to birth control, less access to sex education,” she said. “We have a higher rate of childhood sexual abuse. … And so when you have those types of disparities, you’ll have unintended consequences.

“I tend to resent the manipulation of data that claims abortion is the problem when we’re not doing everything we can to make sure health disparities are addressed.” via Fox News