What Would Shirley Do? Greenhouse

The news that 41 percent of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion was eye-catching enough, but what really caught my eye in a report on the statistic were the comments of a New York legislator, State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr. “They might think that we will take over, and that they’ve got to stop us,” Senator Díaz was quoted as having told a group of fellow anti-abortion ministers last month. “What they did, they are killing black and Hispanic children.” . .

Shirley Chisholm, a leading black politician of her day and the first black woman in Congress, devoted a chapter of her fascinating 1970 memoir, “Unbought and Unbossed,” to “Facing the Abortion Question.” She wrote that she was drawn to the cause of abortion reform because of the suffering she had seen inflicted by the back-alley abortion practitioners to whom desperate women turned. But she viewed a leadership role on the issue as politically risky “because there is a deep and angry suspicion among many blacks that even birth control clinics are a plot by the white power structure to keep down the numbers of blacks, and this opinion is even more strongly held by some in regard to legalizing abortions.”

Then she went on to say: “But I do not know any black or Puerto Rican women who feel that way. To label family planning and legal abortion programs ‘genocide’ is male rhetoric, for male ears. . .

“Such statistics convinced me that my instinctive feeling was right,” she wrote. “A black woman legislator, far from avoiding the abortion question, was compelled to face it and deal with it.” In 1969 — more than three years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade — Shirley Chisholm became honorary president of Naral, the initials of which then stood for National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/what-would-shirley-do/?ref=opinion