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Thanks to a tip from AlterNet and reading more from SPARK Reproductive Justice Now out of Atlanta, I’ve learned about some billboards that are going up around the city and especially in the predominately black areas that read, “Black Children are an Endangered Species”, with the website, www.toomanyaborted.com as the lone bottom tag. The billboards are the handywork of The Radiance Foundation in concert with Operation Outrage, led by Catherine Davis.

Going to the website listed on the billboards brings several multi-media presentations that speak of abortion statistics and documents by and about Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Clicking around, you find out more about Ryan Scott and Bethany Marie Bomberger, the couple behind the Radiance Foundation. Ryan shares his story as a child born of out of a situation of rape. He lauds his mother for allowing him to be born and thanks his adoptive family, who happens to be white, for giving him love and purpose. Furthermore, there are statistics from the Georgia Department of Human Resources that mention 15,000 children in fostercare of which 2200 are available for adoption.

My concern is if the Radiance Foundation is interested in adoption, not abortion, then why don’t the billboards target the beauty of adopting black babies. According to a USA Today poll from 2006, black kids make up one-sixth of the overall population but one-third of available foster kids. Seems as if pointing out the abortion of black babies does nothing but taunt women, possibly continuing the insult hurled against them by other societal voices especially if they are poor and without health insurance. The billboards aren’t really targeting men, whose privilege it still is to have sex whenever and where ever they please without the same physical consequence as women. It may bring outrage with some men, however in some cases that could result in continuing the cycle of mental or physical against women.

Diane Riggs with the North American Council of Adoptable Children says adds this from adoption.com:

Black families who want to adopt often are at a disadvantage because of the expenses involved in a public adoption, including a minimum of $1,500 court costs, Riggs says. Another barrier is that “in the African American culture, there is a belief that it should be a family-to-family thing, a community effort, that a child is not something you should pay for,” she says.

But critics of race matching say there is a darker side involving whites with lingering racist beliefs against mixing races. They argue that children are hurt most by the practice.
“One of the problems with race-matching policies,” says Donna Matias, a lawyer with the Institute of justice, “is that it leaves the children in the system to wait. They are thrown into a vicious cycle where the chances plummet that they will ever get adopted.”

I’m also confused because the Radiance Foundation’s website is, on one hand, to heal racial tensions with statement like “life is better in color” (from one of their videos), yet the emphasis is on and billboard campaign only about unwanted black children? And honestly, while the information about Margaret Sanger is troubling, it’s certainly no more troubling the what we as black people know and have experienced in threat of our lives long before Planned Parenthood.

So, keeping continuing the thread started at www.toomanyaborted.com to offer “no hype, just truth”, SPARK Reproduction Justice Now, along with SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective have released some information of their own about abortion in the black community that also worth reading to obtain more insight on this situation.

Ultimately, believe this is a racial wedge in the issue of reproductive choice and it’s one that we who are involved in LGBT liberation need to pay attention to because it affects our families as well.