Anti-Abortion Crusaders

("You Are a Mighty God" playing) CROWD: ♪ You are a mighty God ♪ ♪ You are a mighty God ♪ ♪ You are a mighty God!

♪ ♪ A mighty God ♪ ♪ Mighty God, yes, you are ♪ (cheers and applause) CLENARD CHILDRESS: Glory to God.

What we do as a church.

We edify one another.

African American people of color have been targeted.

It is a woman's right to choose.

Well, first of all, to the Christian, the Bible says you've been bought with a price and ye are not your own.

It is not your body.

God says, "It's mine."

CHURCHGOERS (murmuring): That's right.

ALICIA CULLEY CHAMBERS: I have 15 children.

I have gotten abortions in the past.

When the abortion was over, I felt that I had done something wrong, and I felt that something was literally missing.

I remember saying, "God, this is not right."

CHILDRESS: Amen, our women are being lied to and victimized and you're trying to get me to calm down.

How do you calm down over genocide?

And here I am, a shepherd supposedly guarding the flock not warning them!

I'm gonna tell you right now, if you shed innocent blood, it will pollute the ground.

♪ ♪ Father, we thank you for our fellowship.

Bless our young people as they continue their pursuit...

In Jesus' name.

Everybody say, "Amen."

ALL: Amen!

CHILDRESS: My name is Reverend Clenard Childress Jr., I'm a senior pastor of the New Calvary Baptist Church in Montclair, and I'm assistant to the national director of L.E.A.R.N.-- the Life, Education, and Resource Network.

This weekend is our annual youth retreat.

I believe in mentoring and preparing the next generation of activists.

We need more African Americans informed on the best kept secret in America, and that is the black genocide: the targeting of the abortion industry of African Americans.

(distant): ...increasing the knowledge of God.

Eugenics is systematic... STUDENTS: Systematic.

CHILDRESS: ...targeting... STUDENTS: ...for exterminating... CHILDRESS: ...their population.

STUDENTS: ...their population.

(muffled educational video playing) CYNTHIA GREENLEE: I am a historian, and I study African Americans and abortion.

You can't go a day without hearing a story about abortion being black genocide.

At least if you're me.

I have a Google alert set up and I literally get an email every day.

It's a potent argument because the history of racism-- and particularly medical racism-- is real.

And African Americans are very aware of that and we're aware of the history of sterilization abuse that, you know, a lot of our public health officials and legislators often wanted to make sure that we didn't reproduce.

CHILDRESS: All right, now, we're gonna talk about the notorious Planned Parenthood.

You're being told to go to Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood has a plan for you.

Especially you, young ladies.

♪ ♪ The Ku Klux Klan, still active today, is not our problem.

Planned Parenthood has taken it far beyond what the Ku Klux Klan ever thought they could possibly take it.

MAN (on TV): What events in your life made Margaret Sanger a crusader for birth control?

I came from a large family.

My mother died young.

I saw women who asked to have some means whereby they didn't have to have to have another pregnancy.

CHILDRESS: Margaret Sanger, brilliant woman, brilliant strategist.

She came up with the Negro Project, a plan to reduce the numbers of African Americans and target them for sterilization, abortion, and the essence of that is "the Negro is a problem."

GREENLEE: Margaret Sanger is the lightning rod.

In the late 1920s, Sanger started what was called the Negro Project, which she started with the collaboration and support of a coalition of black leaders, to open some birth control clinics in African American communities, mostly in the South.

People like W.E.B.

Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell, and others.

But Sanger was a racist in that she believed that black people were ignorant and unable to make choices without some intervention.

So what eventually happened is that people in the present interpreted the Negro Project as a targeted program that wasn't... something similar wasn't being done in white communities, which was not true.

Hi, I'm Dr. Raegan, nice to meet you.

How are you doing today?

WOMAN: Doing well.

McDONALD-MOSLEY: Good.

So what brings you in today?

WOMAN: I'm just trying to explore some new options for birth control.

I'm not really sure what's best for me.

McDONALD-MOSLEY: It's really important that we don't let these efforts that are spreading false narratives around Planned Parenthood decrease access, especially for black women who rely on Planned Parenthood for care.

Have you ever heard of that?

WOMAN: I have heard about the implant.

It scares me, I've heard some things... McDONALD-MOSLEY: Most of what we provide is related to comprehensive preventive medicine services.

And for many people, especially many of the young people we see, we're the only medical provider that they see in a given year.

The anti-abortion movement, they're fixated on this one issue in regards to shaming black women and controlling the bodies of black women, whereas there are all these other healthcare inequities that they're not paying attention to.

They're not marching in the streets and protesting about the fact that we are almost 20 times as likely to acquire HIV.

Or that maternal mortality is on the rise, and 3.5 times higher among black women than it is among white women.

Which leads me to believe that they don't actually care about black women.

They don't care about their lives or their children, but they're fixated on trying to shame black women.

WOMEN: ♪ Lord you're Holy ♪ ♪ Lord you're Holy.

♪ GREENLEE: It's impossible to know how many people are members of or represented by African American anti-abortion groups.

And that's largely because these groups have done a great job of getting their message out.

(indistinct chatter) Our goal is to see abortion completely eliminated.

You know, that's our goal, to eliminate, overturn Roe v. Wade.

I want to give you one of our brochures too, that talks about our organization Sisters For Life.

Here are the facts: the number one cause of death in the black community is abortion.

Not only that, but black women only make up 13% of the America's population, female population, okay, but yet we're having about 40% of the abortions.

And then...

The phrase that comes to mind is "fuzzy math."

But what I think that both pro-lifers and reproductive righters can agree on is that black women have a larger number of abortions than you would expect when thinking about their share of the population.

Where we differ is the interpretation.

It's really misguided to focus just on the statistics without looking at the root cause of poverty, and lack of access to education, and lack of access to quality healthcare.

We're talking about individuals making a choice about what's best for their lives in the context of the full complexity of their lives.

And that's what we should be focused on, not just what percentage of women are having abortions.

("Life Talk" theme playing) Hello, welcome to "Life Talk," I'm Mark Crutcher, and I'm joined by my trusty sidekick Renee Hobbs-- hello, Renee.

- Hello.

GREENLEE: Life Dynamics is a Texas anti-abortion organization that's run by a man named Mark Crutcher.

He has created compelling anti-choice media that has reached into a lot of different parts of American society, including African American communities.

CRUTCHER: And joining us now from New Jersey is Pastor Clenard Childress-- hello, Clenard, how are you, sir?

CHILDRESS: Oh, doing great, and good to be with you again.

I've been in this over 35 years, I can tell you we've never had participation by the African American community like we've seen in the last just three, four, five years.

It has been amazing to watch.

CHILDRESS: We are a network that's growing.

You have Angela Minter there from Kentucky, you have Walter Moss there from Canton, you have Johnny Hunter from Durham...

The anti-abortion movement was historically pretty white.

(crowd chanting) There have been efforts for outreach to black communities probably for a number of reasons.

They probably do want to increase their ranks and diversify their ranks, and bring more African Americans into the mainstream anti-abortion movement.

We just came out with a new project-- I mean a new product-- and it's this little business card.

The theme of this is "All Black Lives Matter."

We've sent about maybe 3,000 of 'em to Clenard Childress.

They're starting to see more and more black people waking up to this.

Blacks are starting to figure out that they've been lied to, they've been played for fools.

♪ ♪ MAN: What would you say is now the number one cause of death in the African American community?

Heart disease?

Diabetes?

MAN: What if I told you the real answer was abortion?

GREENLEE: Life Dynamics produced the film "Maafa 21," and "Maafa" is, for people who don't know, is a Kiswahili term that means kind of the struggle, the slavery, that's how people usually define it.

And so it's a documentary that talks about the history of African Americans from slavery to the present, and talks about abortion as if it's a part of that continuum of racism and mistreatment.

CRUTCHER: When we look at this issue of civil rights leaders who sell out, even when they clearly know that birth control and abortion are being used for black genocide... ("Maafa 21" playing on projector) GREENLEE: It was distributed everywhere.

Reverend Childress, as well as other organizations, have been promoting "Maafa 21" since its release.

They certainly do reinforce each other's messages.

CHILDRESS: Watch his response.

Watch his response.

MAN (on projector): In 1975, Jesse Jackson called for... ♪ ♪ REPORTER: This massive billboard standing tall over a busy street reads: CHILDRESS: "The most dangerous place "for an African American to be is in the womb of their African American mother."

Very proud, yes.

Of course.

(laughs) WOMAN: Did you come up with that phrase?

Absolutely.

GREENLEE: Anti-abortion billboards have popped up in lots of cities and states.

The message is clear that black people deserve to be put on blast for their reproductive choices.

And particularly black women.

JOYCE: There were a lot of black women's reproductive justice organizations that began to speak out, talking about how offensive it was to propose that their wombs were the most unsafe place for black children.

MONICA SIMPSON: ♪ We must fight for freedom ♪ CROWD: ♪ We must fight for freedom ♪ SIMPSON: ♪ We must fight for justice ♪ CROWD: ♪ We must fight for justice ♪ SIMPSON: ♪ It will take all of us ♪ CROWD: ♪ It will take all of us ♪ SIMPSON: ♪ To get to the other side ♪ We are here today to stand for our right to make our own decisions for our bodies, and to make our own decisions for our families, and to make our own decisions for our lives.

We have to trust black women to make their own decisions for themselves!

There's a lot at stake for black women.

I think the anti-choice community, they're really savvy, right?

And I think that they use every possible way that they can think of to divide the black community.

(cheering) GREENLEE: It's hard to know how many people are behind the propaganda and publicity, but I think the larger point is it's not about the numbers, it's about how far the ideas have traveled in American society outside those groups, and they've travelled very far.

I listen to Black Lives Matter, talk about how police and law enforcement are targeting African Americans.

But we don't hear them talk about is how their communities are targeted in abortion.

Rhetoric around abortion and race has trickled into our lawmaking.

You know, the number one cause of death for black people, is abortion.

GREENLEE: We see Ben Carson, talking about Planned Parenthood, we see, in 2015, anti-abortion black pastors were protesting at the Smithsonian asking for people to remove the Margaret Sanger bust in one of the museums.

The woman was a racist.

She was a genocidal figure in America and in human history.

GREENLEE: So these narratives are seeping into so many different parts of American culture-- pop culture, but also politics.

CROWD (chanting): Roe v. Wade has got to go!

Hey hey, ho ho!

Roe v. Wade has got to go!

WOMAN: Roe v. Wade, you guys remember life from before then?

WOMAN 2: Your people are dying.

WOMAN: They're dying at whose hands?

WOMAN 2: Planned Parenthood, genocide...

CROWD (chanting): Pro-life!

Pro-life!

We were here in the blizzard last year.

I expected people to even come out even more this year, because they have so much hope.

MINTER: It's the day after election day, we have a new president-elect, in Mr. Donald Trump, but in addition to that, the Republicans are controlling the House, and we are going to be able to get through some pro-life legislation.

That's what Sisters for Life is rejoicing about today.

But we want to hear from you.

CHILDRESS: And she was a founding mother of Planned Parenthood, the leading killer of African Americans.

GREENLEE: They have a long game, which is making sure that abortion is not going to be legal.

The question is how close are we to that endgame?

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪