For WORLD’s January Roe v. Wade issue, I’m working on a story about the disproportionate effect of abortion on black Americans.

Thirteen million African-American babies have died in the womb since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. That number is more than 2.5 times the total number of deaths among blacks from AIDS, cancer, accidents, heart disease, and violent crime combined.

 

And although African American women make up only 13 percent of the population, one-third of all abortions are performed on black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Meanwhile, three of every five black babies die in the womb.

 

Rev. Clenard Childress, founder of www.blackgenocide.org, provides more startling statistics:

 

Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 blacks were lynched in the U.S..

 

Now, 1,452 African-American children are killed each day by abortion. That means that today, in the post-Civil Rights era, the number of black Americans killed by other Americans surpasses the total number of lynchings during the Jim Crow era every three days.

I’ve been exploring the roots of this tragedy, and today spoke by phone with Tijuanna Adetunji, 38, a delightful woman who lives in Montgomery, Alabama. Tijuanna grew up in the Montgomery projects where, she said, black girls and women grew up mainly without fathers and spent their adolescence looking for love. They found it in the beds and back seats of men who gave “love” to get sex.

The result — epidemic out-of-wedlock pregnancy — routinely fulfilled a hated stereotype: the black Baby Mama giving birth to welfare brats.

 

Back then, Tijuanna said, it was a mark of status if you could afford an abortion.

 

“The white girls could get an abortion because they had access to money,” she explained. “We looked bad because we had the babies. The only reason we didn’t get an abortion is because we didn’t have the money. At the same time, when you had the baby, you weren’t going to college, you weren’t going anywhere. You were exactly what everyone said black girls from the projects were: Nothing.”

Tijuanna aborted two of her own children after leaving the projects at age 15. Today, she works to make African-Americans aware that abortion is so rampant among them that it has actually reduced the number of blacks in proportion to the U.S. population, while other minorities have increased their numbers.

She believes the Baby Mama stigma persists even today. It is not the only cause for the high abortion rate among blacks, she said, but among women in particular, avoiding the stereotype looms large.

“We want to get away from the projects,” Tijuanna said. “It’s like the Enemy has duped us into believing we must kill our own children to do so. We just want to get away from it at all costs. It’s like we haven’t progressed at all.”