You’d think an asteroid was hurtling toward Earth judging from the outraged coverage on abortion the past three weeks after Politico announced on May 3 that the Supreme Court may be poised to reverse Roe v. Wade.
If the coverage was measured, even-handed and inclusive, I could deal with it. In that case, we would be talking about a standard journalistic response to a major story.
But no, what we are seeing — in commentaries and even in news reports — is a mash of “The Handmaid’s Tale, “ the imminent end of civilization as we know it and white supremacy because — as we all know — male white nationalists are behind all this.
So, when I saw this Washington Post piece on how black Protestants view abortion (curiously, Catholics were totally left out of the piece), I figured I’d get a fresh look at the issue and some crucial information. Black women are 13% of the female population but 30% of those who abort their young. Yes, this is an important issue in black churches and communities.
One would think. And the headline said black churches were “conflicted” over the possibility of abortion access being curtailed, so I read further, hoping the article would air the views of black church leaders and believers on both sides of the issue.
I can’t say they did.
When a draft Supreme Court opinion leaked indicating that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, the Rev. Cheryl Sanders felt conflicted.
The senior pastor of D.C.’s Third Street Church of God personally doesn’t support abortion but is weary of the politics around being labeled “pro-life” and is grappling with how to address the issue before her predominantly Black congregation. “If you understand that in the politicized term, it’s fraught with problematic racial views and exceptions and blind spots,” she says. And Sanders doesn’t want to align herself with far-right conservative activists she disagrees with on many social issues.
But what does the Bible say?
It’s “absolutely pro-life,” Sanders says, “but not in a political way. It’s a theological perspective.”
Which means — what? Like politically you can take a child from its mother’s womb, but theologically you can’t?
The primary reporters writing this piece were not religion specialists, and it showed. One of the Post’s religion reporters did contribute to this story; I am still scratching my head over the blind spots therein.
Let’s keep reading:
In his draft opinion, Justice Samuel Alito has also made race an issue. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” the draft stated. “Some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.” He also cited an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas in the 2019 case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky: It is in the states’ “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” Thomas argued.
“He’s being intellectually dishonest,” the Rev. William H. Lamar IV of D.C.'s Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church says of Alito’s draft opinion. “They don’t care about Black babies. You can’t care about Black babies and gut pre-clearance in the Voting Rights Act.”
Even the loudest pro-abortion-rights voices in the comments section on this piece were puzzled at the above quote. Like, what did pre-clearance have to do with black babies? Maybe this minister got the connection, but readers didn’t and the reporters could have helped clarify.
One would expect the article to then reference how Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger didn’t care about black babies either and that her “Negro Project” was aimed at eliminating black births. Pro-lifers had been saying this for years and got mocked for it until the agency itself admitted Sanger’s racist legacy in July 2020.
But no, nothing of that sort was mentioned, which made me wonder how much research was done. Were these reporters and editors simply choosing sources with beliefs that the journalists personally embraced as the truth? Most people they talked with said there were other issues more pressing than abortion among blacks and that even black clergy themselves have been pretty silent about the topic.
The latter may be true — but it helps to reach out to conservative black Pentecostal and evangelical churches and denominations. And, of course, there are black activists who have not been silent and they are easy to find online.
Those folks who did not get interviewed. Did the reporters bother to ring up anyone at the Louisville-based Sisters for Life?
How about the folks at BlackGenocide.org? Its founder, the Rev. Clenard Childress, Jr., wrote a 2021 op-ed in the Washington Times that is very findable on Google. Childress was helpful during times I covered blacks and abortion and he has a lot to say. You can also find him at the Life Education And Resource Network (LEARN) site.
Childress is famous for his quote: “The most dangerous place for an African American to be is in the womb of his African-American mother.”
Or did these reporters ring up Cherilyn Holloway, founder of the organization Pro Black, Pro Life?
Or perhaps media personality Gloria Purvis?
Purvis’ column on finding better solutions than abortion has been atop the Newsweek website for several days now. There are black leaders out there who would have denounced abortion in much more forceful terms than anyone quoted in the Post article. I found these people via Google and a 2018 Vox piece that did a far better job of hunting up voices on both sides.
Finally, there’s the Rev. Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, who’s been opposing abortion for years. She’s very easy to locate.
Any of these folks would have provided much more of a push back on the Post’s black-churches-on-abortion piece than the personalities these reporters unearthed. With multiple reporters working on the piece, there should have been a rich tapestry of opinion and information from which to choose.
Yet, there wasn’t.
I don’t think it’s just sloppiness. The neglect felt intentional, as if the writers didn’t want to air both sides. I found contact information for these more conservative personalities with a few seconds of work on Google. They could have, too. Or the person editing this piece could have sent it back, telling them to get serious about diversity and listening to “stakeholders” — an important Poynter.org term — on both sides of the story.
There’s a lot more to say about Black churches and abortion. Believe me, the Post didn’t cover it all.
FIRST IMAGE: Drone shot of “black Preborn Lives Matter” slogan painted on a street in Baltimore, posted at the StudentsForLifeAction.org website.