The United States has an extremely ugly history of medical experimentation on black people. The most infamous example is the syphilis experiments at Tuskegee, but advances in gynecological medicine for example, were made through using slave women as experimental subjects.
The anti-choice movement in the U.S. has tried to make headway among black Americans by drawing on this noxious history and alleging that, because black women have a disproportionate number of abortions, birth control is part of a nationwide conspiracy to commit genocide against black people. One of the more frequent elements of this pitch is the idea that most abortion clinics are strategically located in black neighborhoods. Except, as Amanda Hess reports, they aren't:
This month, the Guttmacher Institute, crunched the numbers on race and clinic location. After cross-indexing racial and ethnic information from the 2000 U.S. Census with the Guttmacher Institute's own 2008 census of known abortion providers, researchers found:
* 63 percent of abortion providers are located in predominantly non-Hispanic white neighborhoods.
* 12 percent are located in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods.
* 9 percent of abortion providers are located in predominantly black neighborhoods.
* 1 percent of abortion providers are located in other predominantly non-white neighborhoods.
* 15 percent of abortion providers were located in neighborhoods where no racial group constituted a majority of the population.
The irony is that the people alleging a secret conspiracy to commit genocide against blacks are usually part of the same coalition that argues that it's ludicrous to suggest that racism plays any role whatsoever in terms of limiting people's educational and economic opportunities at least not to the degree that federal protection against anti-discrimination is warranted. Racism in the contemporary U.S. begins and ends with abortion. America is so racist that it wants to kill all black children everywhere, but not so racist that we need affirmative action.
But even if you conceded the point, the most effective way to head off "genocide" wouldn't be to outlaw abortion. It would be to make sure there are fewer unintended pregnancies to begin with -- that means easier access to contraception and reproductive health services, which anti-choicers don't like either. To the extent that they oppose those things, they're complicit in the "genocide" conspiracy they're pushing.