Blacks courted in abortion fight

'White Republican' image shifting

DALLAS -- Anti-abortion activists are reaching aggressively to draw more blacks into their movement, targeting urban communities that they have long considered hostile turf.

They are opening crisis pregnancy centers in minority neighborhoods, establishing partnerships with black pastors and distributing provocative leaflets to raise suspicion about Planned Parenthood, a longtime provider of reproductive health care and abortions in inner cities.

Framing their cause as the new frontier in civil rights -- an effort to stop "black genocide" -- these activists have turned to revered names in black history. A niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. tours the nation, speaking out against "the war on the womb." The great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott recently compared Roe v. Wade to the 1857 Supreme Court decision declaring blacks so inferior that they had no rights.

"Often the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue," said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 anti-abortion counseling centers across the United States -- almost all in mostly white suburbs.

The nonprofit group launched an initiative last year to stake out a presence in inner cities, where abortion clinics tend to be clustered. "It's only recently that we've realized we need to be there," Hartshorn said.

The intensifying outreach to blacks is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries.

A single statistic underlies all these efforts: Blacks make up 13 percent of the population but account for 37 percent of abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Liberal groups that support abortion rights -- most prominently Planned Parenthood -- have spent years building ties with black churches and providing subsidized health care, such as pap smears and AIDS tests, to poor urban communities.

By contrast, the national anti-abortion movement has largely ignored the inner city. Its energy, funds and volunteers come mostly from "white, suburban, small-town, red-state America," said the Rev. John Ensor, who runs Heartbeat's Urban Initiative.

That legacy has sown indifference and mistrust.

"When you go to African-American communities -- even myself, an African-American woman -- you'll find they don't trust pro-life people," said Lillie Epps, a vice president of Care Net, which runs about 1,000 suburban crisis pregnancy centers.

In the past three years, Care Net has opened 19 urban anti-abortion outposts -- in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Indianapolis -- and Epps hopes to set up centers soon in Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Orlando, Fla. "But it's been very tough," Epps said.

"I'm just being honest with you. When they hear 'pro-life,' the first thing they think is 'white Republican.' "