This edition of Hood Health 101 addresses the origins of genocide in the United States against Black and Brown people
“Sold on the auction. Taught birth control and abortion. Rulers of the first part became slaves of the worst part….How many more Black Gods must die?”
RZA- “The Night the Earth Cried”
Birth control and abortion are subjects that need to be discussed in our hoods so that we understand what’s actually happening. Some of us have fallen so deeply into the trap that we’ve actually begun to use abortion as a form of every day birth control. The abortion clinics have now become a staple in our communities. I know some sisters who refer to the abortion clinic as, “The Chop Shop”. Just let that sink in for a second. What type of dissonance must we be dealing with for us to think so lightly of going to an abortion clinic that we refer to it as a place where stolen vehicles are taken to be torn apart for their individual parts that are eventually sold?
I know you have all heard of, been to, or know someone who has been to Planned Parenthood, right? Well, Margaret Sanger is a popular eugenicist, promoter of the development of birth control pills and one of the founders of Planned Parenthood. This is what she had to say;
“While the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table… They do not do this with white people and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and…knowledge, which…will have far-reaching results among the colored people…The minister’s work is also important and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”
This chick used Black doctors and church ministers to push her agenda to kill Black babies in the hood.
W.E.B. DuBois of the NAACP helped encourage Sanger to take her agenda to Black leaders. At some point, she even tried to get help doing her dirty work to promote birth control in Harlem from Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. A clinic was actually opened there, but eventually closed. However, larger examples of those small black birth control clinics still exist today, like good ol’ Planned Parenthood.
Sanger pushed for the development of birth control pills so hard that when they were finally made, she gave them out for free to poor, Black women through her government supported Planned Parenthood clinics. When Black people started to realize what was happening, they did something. The NAACP and National Urban League no longer supported birth control because they saw that it was being used as a race elimination tactic. In New Jersey, the 1967 Black Power Conference decided that birth control was the same thing as Black Genocide. Later that year, a group of blacks in Cleveland, Ohio got so upset about what was happening that they burned a birth control clinic down. People had begun to realize what was going on and were pissed! Somehow, over time, they won us over again and we forgot all about their agenda or no longer cared.
Did you know that Birth Control Pills, Depo-Provera, and Norplant were all tested on original people around the world in places like Brazil, India, Africa, Mexico and Puerto Rico before it even got here to the United States? When it did get here, it went straight to the Black and Brown hoods where mostly Medicaid patients used the Planned Parenthood clinics, local clinics and even school clinics. Yes! School clinics! 50,000 Norplant kits were implanted in females throughout the United States around 1992, many of whom were in Baltimore Public High Schools and were between the ages of 13 to 19.
Here’s the problem. According to the CDC’s Abortion Surveillance System – 2011, White women had the lowest abortion rate at 132 abortions per 1,000 live births, and Black women had the highest abortion rate at 459 abortions per 1,000 live births. That means that African Americans abort almost half of what they actually birth. Then, because we have such high infant mortality rates in our communities, some of those live births don’t even make it beyond a year old and because we are not at optimal health and in impoverished areas, we are dying all at the same time.
I share this information just to prompt you to think deeply, because the reality is that, this is bigger than just you.
-Scihonor Devotion
SciHonor Devotion, CD, CPD, CCCE, CMA, CWSP is a contributing writer to the Hood Health Handbook set. She is a Labor Doula, Postpartum Doula, Childbirth Educator, Homebirth Midwife Assistant and Womb Sauna Practitioner who serves women and girls in her community through workshop, ceremony and rites of passage. She is also Co-Owner of Queen’s Quisine: Vegetarian and Vegan Catering Company and can be contacted at www.facebook.com/EarthDoulas / SciHonor17@gmail.com / www.facebook.com/QueensQuisine
