BET.com--Remember that racist anti-choice billboard in New York City that misused a stock photo of a 6-year-old black girl, Anissa Fraizer, to sell the slogan, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb”?
Well, according to similar billboards sponsored by the Latino Partnership of Conservative Principles (LPCP), Latina wombs are lethal, too!
Using pictures of really cute babies and the slogan, “The Most Dangerous Place for a Latino is the Womb,” the boards popping up in Los Angeles advertise a Spanish-language medical distortion site, unidosporlavida.org. An eponymous anti-choice confab is slated for Sunday at the L.A. Arena.
I’m not going to re-debunk (is that a word?) the billboards. They’re silly, racist, cynical and misleading. Go here and here for why.
I’m more interested in how LPCP—which appears to consist of a couple of brown folks fronting for the ridiculously homophobic American Principles Project—has been sangin’ in the chorus of anti-choice Christians trying to gut Planned Parenthood.
In a March 4 discussion on NPR’s “Latino USA,” executive director Alfonso Aguilar made the familiar claim that the health care provider uses federal dollars to perform abortions, which would be illegal under the Hyde Amendment.
“The truth is that the Latino community—Latina women—are under attack. Twenty two percent of abortions in the United States are performed on Latina women. Latina women are 2.7 percent more likely to have an abortion than non-Hispanic white women. And clearly these organizations go to our communities to promote abortion. Most of the federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives, whatever they say, the truth is that it goes to abortion.”
Aguilar also claimed that the organization’s non-abortion services aren’t compatible with Latino values:
“The Latino community is a socially conservative community. … There are s*x education programs where [Planned Parenthood] is promoting a specific idea about s*x that goes against the very values of the Latino community. They promote, for example, values exploration programs in K through 12. So you’re going to kids, perhaps kids that come from Catholic backgrounds and Planned Parenthood is going directly to them and asking them to question their core beliefs.”
Silvia Henriquez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, valiantly attempted to inject research into the discussion:
“We know from polling and also from personal experience and our work on the ground for the past 15 years that while some Latinos are Catholic, they welcome conversations about safe s*x and want to be able to be open with their familes and want to be able to engage in these conversations. They do in fact rely on medically accurate s*x education and want their children to have the same type of information. Women are the pillars of their families and their households and women want to [have access] to the full range of reproductive health care services.”
But given LPCP’s sponsorship of the sensationalist billboards, they have not been moved. Because this ain’t about facts. It’s about s*xist ideology. Latinas are just the pawn-du-jour.
Posted By: Siebra Muhammad
Friday, June 10th 2011 at 11:25AM
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