Commentary: Why ThatsAbortion.com billboard is an Ad FAIL

An offensive, incendiary ad went up in Manhattan this week targeting the wombs of Black women. I was not alone in my anger at the ad; media personality and recording artist Free shared my upset. She invited me to provide some analysis on the ad to take the discussion on twitter beyond the emotional reactions the ad sparked. Below is what she posted at Freesworld.com. I’d love to get your thoughts here as well.

On the View- Hot Topic- Abortions, Black Women & Planned Parenthood

Check out the view’s Hot Topic today about the billboard in New York’s Soho neighborhood

Nuff Said

I would plead with my colleagues to reject the Pence Amendment and not to defund Planned Parenthood. And I mean that as a double entendre to not defund the ability of women to plan parenthood.

I know of what the previous speaker, the gentleman, referred, to all those well-meaning people who want to speak about the value of life and not fund contraceptives and not make abortion, which is the law of the land, available if people chose that: I am really touched by the passion of the opposite, to want to save black babies. I can tell you I know a lot about having black babies. I’ve had three of them. And I had my first one when I was 18 years old—at the ripe old age of 18, an unplanned pregnancy.

Reproductive Justice Advocacy Training Day!

We all have personal and community concerns and now is your opportunity to learn how to voice them! In preparation for a day of lobbying in Sacramento Black Women for W…ellness and the Reproductive Justice Coalition of Los Angeles are organizing an advocacy training workshop.

Oakland Effect: Caution should be used when using the word ‘genocide’

This is not what genocide looks like. I saw what it did look like in Rwanda where, in the space of about 100 days in the spring and summer of 1994, between 800,000 and 1 million people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, were hacked, shot, butchered and burned to death in one of the worst orchestrated mass killings — genocides — since the Holocaust.

The Rwandan government, led by the country’s other prominent ethnic group, the Hutus, organized the slaughter with foresight and skill, and with the distinct aim of wiping out the remnants of the Tutsi population altogether. They called this process “exterminating the cockroaches” and it was propagated on state-controlled radio stations by DJs on the government payroll. The military carried out the policy with maximum brutality and efficiency.