[US] Abortion and poverty

from The Kansas City Star

A campaign aims to curb high abortion rates in heavily black and Hispanic inner cities.

By DAVID CRARY
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON | On a street once known as Murder Row, a teen center founded to steer youths away from drugs and crime has become an outpost in another crusade.

The campaign involves crisis pregnancy centers, whose counselors seek to dissuade women with unplanned pregnancies from having abortions. There are more than 2,300 centers across America, yet relatively few in inner cities where abortion rates are typically highest — in heavily black and Hispanic inner cities.

Now the two largest networks — Care Net and Heartbeat International — have launched initiatives to change that equation. Their sometimes awkward efforts rely on unlikely alliances, as an anti-abortion movement led mostly by conservative, white Republicans interacts with overwhelmingly Democratic, black communities.

“This crusade has been very difficult — having to educate community leaders as to what’s really going on without being offensive, without having a political agenda,” said Lillie Epps, the only black member of Care Net’s senior staff and director of its Urban Initiative.

In Washington, the key players say all has gone smoothly in a year-old partnership between a Care Net affiliate, the Capitol Hill Crisis Pregnancy Center, and a teen center in the Anacostia neighborhood called The House DC.

One reason for the harmony: The teen center’s black leaders and the whites running the pregnancy center share an evangelical Christian faith.

Steve Fitzhugh, co-founder of The House, is a former pro football player active with the Kansas City-based Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He’s mentored boys later killed in gang shootings, and girls as young as 12 who carried pregnancies to term.

“I don’t care if it’s conservative dollars or liberal dollars we get,” Fitzhugh said. “We’ve got to save these kids.”

Critics contend that pregnancy centers routinely mislead women seeking neutral advice on their options. A report in July from congressional Democrats said center counselors often overstate the medical risks posed by abortion.

Skeptics also argue that the white conservatives supporting urban anti-abortion initiatives oppose social policies that might help minority single mothers and their children.

“These predatory fanatics don’t lift a finger to help the children who are born unwanted and unplanned,” said Jatrice Martel Gaiter, head of the Washington-area Planned Parenthood chapter.

“In these centers of deception, they leave young parents at best with a box of Pampers and a prayer,” she said. “They leave people even more vulnerable than when they walked through the door, without any information about how to avoid a future unintended pregnancy.”

The quest to open more crisis pregnancy centers in inner cities is fueled by statistics showing that nearly 90 percent of women who get abortions live in urban areas, and the majority are poor.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which compiles abortion data, black women are almost four times as likely as white women to have an abortion, and Hispanic women are 2.5 times as likely.

Care Net says it has opened 13 urban centers since 2003, with 15 more under development in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere.

In central Houston, there had been no full-fledged pregnancy center until one opened in 2004 in a poor, minority neighborhood. Although many of the Fifth Ward Pregnancy Help Center’s financial backers and volunteers are from white areas, its executive director, Sylvia Johnson, is black.

“This is hard territory,” she said. “We try to be nonpartisan, to let our service speak for itself. We can’t fix all the problems.”

Among the clients was 28-year-old Karry Ann Morris. A single mother with a 3-year-old son, she got pregnant again last year after her boyfriend’s condom broke. She ended up at the Fifth Ward center along with the boyfriend, who was suggesting abortion.

Morris, a hairstylist, didn’t know what to expect. But she became determined to keep the baby — now a 4-month-old girl named Mikaila — after seeing ultrasound images. “As much as I didn’t want to be pregnant, when I saw her heart beating at six weeks, I knew,” Morris said.