Imagine a world in which the former abortion provider Kermit Gosnell was not an aberration. According to a group of black anti-abortion activists, clinics similar to the criminally negligent facility where Gosnell performed abortions for decades — largely to women of color — can be found everywhere.
“We’re saying this is not the exception, it is the rule, and it has been, and because these facilities are located in black communities and in poor communities, the regulation is non-existent, and these facilities are not shut down,” Pastor Stephen Broden, senior pastor of the Fair Park Bible Fellowship Church in Dallas, told theGrio.
Broden, along with dozens of other leaders of the black anti-abortion movement, gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to draw attention to the Gosnell case. This consortium of African-American anti-abortionists, called the Black Pro-Life Coalition, says it unites hundreds of member organizations, although specifics about how many people are in each organization were not disclosed.
Broden told theGrio that his church has 150 members, and his anti-abortion group is larger.
Anti-Abortionists gather on Capitol Hill
Organized by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), which was founded by conservative pundit Star Parker, the event attracted a mix of black pastors and activists from across the country who are abortion rights opponents.
Details of the Kermit Gosnell case spurred the Black Pro-Life Coalition to call for a Congressional investigation into the conditions of women’s clinics across the country, in the belief that there are many doctors like Gosnell operating undetected. The organization also criticized mainstream black groups, such as the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus, for supporting pro-abortion initiatives and legislation.
RELATED: Kermit Gosnell lived in ‘squalor,’ had fleas in home
Gosnell was convicted and sentenced last week for three murders committed in the process of performing illegal late-term abortions, during which he delivered living infants and snipped their spinal cords. In the process of investigating his case, Philadelphia authorities, where his women’s clinic was located, came to describe it as a “house of horrors.”
Allegedly, unsanitary conditions, the performance of illegal medical procedures by unqualified staff, and the storing of infant corpses were routine there.
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While 67 percent of African-Americans do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned (the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal), these black anti-abortionists say they represent important perspectives in the African-American community.
“The media has basically ignored the black pro-life voice completely,” Broden said. “It has been left out of the discourse, when [a higher percentage of abortions] are taking place in our community. We find that odd and unusual. For some of us, we believe it’s deliberate.”
Black women receive 30 percent of all abortions provided in the U.S., while African-Americans represent 12 percent of the population. White women receive 36 percent of all abortions, compared to 25 percent of Latinas, and nine percent of women of other races.
Calling attention to the media’s racial bias
These anti-abortionists also used the press conference to address the lack of media attention the Gosnell trial has received, a phenomenon that has been reported on in depth by The Atlantic, a liberal publication.
“We all came together to talk about this as something that you just don’t hear very much about, abortion in the black community, especially in regard to the Gosnell case, because it was just not covered,” Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union, told theGrio. Her participation in Tuesday’s press conference was in part fueled by observing the media’s treatment of other murder cases, such as the Casey Anthony trial, which dominated headlines.
“All of these horrible things have happened to young women, and children, and babies across the country, and of course as much as it hurts, we know that there are black counterparts, where children are missing, are abducted, are killed, are abused — that’s happening to black children also,” Garnder said. “And we don’t see that. That’s one of the things that I think it’s necessary to point out.”
Could there be more Kermit Gosnells?
Like most who attended the press conference, Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and director of African-American outreach for Priests for Life, believes the conditions at Gosnell’s clinic are widespread. “Interestingly enough, everyone who spoke could point to a Gosnell-like facility in their state,” she said of event attendants.
[Editor’s note: In a recent Washington Post story on the Gosnell case, a former leader of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s abortion surveillance branch states that the problem of sub-standard clinics that provide abortions has become so rare in recent years, that the CDC shut down the surveillance operation. In addition, the CDC said 10 people died of abortions in 2010, the last year for which there is available data, compared to 793 people who died in bicycle accidents. The same report described the fact that abortion clinics are regulated in different manners in different states.]
When asked to provide evidence for this belief, King, Gardner and Broden recounted personally-related stories of women who suffered abortion complications, some lethal.
In one account, a doctor allegedly left a fetus head inside a woman’s uterus after a botched operation. In another, one woman’s uterine wall was allegedly perforated and her intestines eviscerated.
Abortion considered very safe by experts
Yet, adverse medical experiences through abortion have an extremely low occurrence according to various sources. Less than point three percent of women who receive abortions, if there are complications, need to be hospitalized for such outcomes.
Researchers in the U.S. and Britain have found no link between breast cancer, other cancers, or mental health issues with incidences of abortion.
While the risk of death from abortion increases as a pregnancy advances, the death rate is one per million abortions for those performed at or before eight weeks.
RELATED: Kermit Gosnell’s wife and former staff receive a sentencing date
Women who seek abortions after eight weeks have often been forced to delay the operation in order to raise the funds necessary to procure the procedure, a fact sheet about abortion in America by the Guttmacher Institute states.
Who are these women? The poor, women of color, and those dependent on social services that will not provide funds for abortion. These are the type of women Kermit Gosnell often secured as clients.
“Women need and want abortions and will hurtle any barriers to get them,” Jennifer Boulanger, M.Ed., told theGrio. The director of communications for The Women’s Centers, a group of clinics where abortions are performed operating in various cities including Philadelphia, believes: “Gosnell was providing these services to a population who may not have known that there were other options.”
She and her colleagues fear that the media coverage that has trickled into the mainstream so far will further stigmatize abortion, making the process of seeking a competent abortion provider more taxing.
Plus, anti-abortionists may use any related sensationalism to create more political friction.
“I’m not sure how the Gosnell trial will affect the relationship of those groups who are pro-choice and anti-choice,” said Leah Chamberlain, an administrator at the Philadelphia Women’s Center, in a statement to theGrio. “I would hope that we could both rally behind the prosecution of someone who was providing subpar medical care to women. It doesn’t appear that this is the case and the anti’s are using the Gosnell trial as a means of lumping all abortion providers into the Gosnell category. From my observation this situation seems to be drawing clear divisions between the two camps and there’s a lot of yelling at each other rather than listening.”
Black anit-abortionists take a stronger stand
“We strongly feel that you do not help the population by killing off the population,” said King of pro-abortion rights beliefs.
She added that, “there are those who are fully supportive of abortion, and they feel that if they regulate or inspect, or enforce laws that require that they at least have the same modicum of care that a nail salon does, or a dentist office — and they don’t — that they feel as though if they do regulate, or enforce, and inspect that the conditions will cause those clinics to shut down. And then they tell the lie that Gosnell is a throwback to before Roe vs. Wade. He’s not. Because there are too many clinics and facilities operating like that in America right now.”
Gardner agreed saying, “every single abortion clinic should be inspected, because they’re all filthy, and they’re dirty,” adding “they don’t do any good at all to women and for women.”
Broden also said that Planned Parenthood is an institution that only performs abortions, although it is also known for providing various health services to both men and women. He believes patients seeking other types of care are referred to outside institutions, and challenged the media to investigate the organization.
Supporting statements for these claims by King, Broden and Gardner included information related by former staffers within clinics where abortions are performed, they said.
Black anti-abortionists: Certain abortion is not safe
The Black Pro-Life Coalition plans to continue spreading its perception that abortions are not safe.
Gardner said, “the whole abortion industry really has to be exposed for what it is so that people around the country understand exactly what’s happening, and that’s what we’re doing, and that’s how we are moving forward in the future.”
To such perspectives, Boulanger countered that it is critical to “recognize that women have always and will continue to do anything they need to do to end a pregnancy they do not want — including risk their lives, their well-being and subject themselves to criminal providers,” such as Kermit Gosnell.
Abortion rights advocates move focus to women’s healthcare
To Boulanger and many others, Gosnell’s verdict is not a watershed moment in the anti-abortion/pro-abortion rights debate. It is a critical opportunity for American society to discuss the unequal access to quality health care many women experience, particularly poor women of color, not only when faced with the need to terminate a pregnancy, but also in various other important spheres of life, including when seeking to plan and sustain a family.
If handled responsibly, these abortion rights advocates hope the Gosnell trial spurs a meaningful examination of how American society treats women, leading to improvements in access to all forms of reproductive health care so that another “house of horrors” cannot occur.
Follow Alexis Garrett Stodghill on theGrio at @lexisb.
This article has been updated.