Getting real about abortion in Wisconsin

The Too Many Aborted campaign, sponsored by The Radiance Foundation and Pro-Life Wisconsin, features 13 billboards in Milwaukee with the messages "Black Children are in Danger" and "Black & Beautiful." The campaign positions adoption as the only option for unwanted pregnancies and accuses abortion clinics of having a secret agenda to eliminate African-American babies. Here's a look at the real numbers, issues and solution concerning abortion in Wisconsin.



The real numbers

PolitiFact Wisconsin analyzed Pro-Life Wisconsin's claim that in Wisconsin, "6.2 percent of the population is black yet 24 percent of all state abortions are on African-Americans," which wrongly compares the overall African-American population to that of African-American women of child-bearing age.

PolitiFact's research shows that in 2009:

• 88.3% of women ages 15 to 44 in Wisconsin were white and white women accounted for 69% of the abortions performed in the state.
• 7.5% of women ages 15 to 44 in Wisconsin were African-American and African-American women accounted for 24% of the abortions performed in the state.

PolitiFact concluded that "socioeconomic factors, rather than race, have been identified as key contributors to the higher abortion rate among black women."


The real issues
In a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel op-ed, Sarah Noble, Managing Director of Milwaukee's Reproductive Justice Collective, an organization led by women of color, responded to the billboards: "Black babies not only deserve to live; they deserve to live healthy lives in healthy families and in healthy communities. Ensuring the health of black babies means addressing the current state of black families: impoverishment, lack of education and joblessness, at crisis levels in Wisconsin."

Statistics from the op-ed:

• Milwaukee's poverty rate is the fourth-worst among the biggest cities in the nation.
• African-American males in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) have a 31% graduation rate, African-American females in MPS have a 46% graduation rate, and white males in MPS have a 66% graduation rate.
• In 2009, Wisconsin's unemployment rate was 9.4% overall and 33.3% among black males.
• In Wisconsin, a black baby is three times more likely to die before his or her first birthday than a white child. Moreover, Wisconsin's infant mortality rate is among the highest in the nation.

"These billboards- and the groups behind them- say and do nothing to address these dire disparities," said Noble. "Instead, they aim to distract us from addressing the structural, institutional, economic and political barriers that lead to poor health outcomes for black women and black babies."


The real solution

To decrease the need for abortion services, all women need access to reproductive health care including comprehensive sex education and contraceptives that prevent unwanted pregnancies.

"If you really care about shrinking the number of abortions, and if you care about women, then you'll be happy to give them the medicine that will prevent an abortion down the road," said Pema Levy on Change.org's Women's Rights Blog. "But it's not about abortion, it's about control. And the more they try to police women's bodies, the more they endanger women's lives."