An article in the right wing religious conservative LifeSite News about New York City’s high abortion rate unfairly focuses on black and gay neighborhoods.
Arguably the gayest neighborhood in the Big Apple, Chelsea-Clinton on Manhattan’s west side, has the highest rate of abortion in all New York City, an article in LifeSite News professes. Huh? How is that possible? Is there an onslaught of straight and bisexual women (and, conceivably, lesbians,) moving into the gay enclave of Chelsea-Clinton and convincing homosexual men to father their children, only to have abortions later?
“Abortion rate statistics show that the zip code with the highest abortion ratio in the city, 67%, is in Manhattan’s Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood,” writes Jeremy Kryn at the ultra-right wing, religious, conservative, anti-gay LifeSite News, “followed by rates of 60% in two Jamaica, Queens zip codes and in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Central Harlem-Morningside Heights neighborhoods.”
As many readers familiar with New York City’s neighborhoods well-know, Jamaica, Queens and Central Harlem traditionally have a large African-American population, and Chelsea-Clinton and Greenwich Village traditionally have a large LGBT population.
Perhaps Kryn (who, by the way, likes to use the term “homosexual ‘marriage’,” with the word marriage in quotes, as if our marriages aren’t real marriages,) doesn’t know Manhattan very well — or doesn’t bother to delve into facts much. In fact, there are over 100 ZIP codes in New York City, and Kryn focused on the one –Chelsea-Clinton — that happened to have the highest ratio of abortions to live births, but, logically, happened to also have the lowest number of pregnancies: 119; a fact Kryn conveniently forgets to mention. A sampling of the other NYC ZIP codes? 10024, in Manhattan? 1005 pregnancies. 10457, in The Bronx? 2676 pregnancies. 11221, in Queens? 2647 pregnancies. 10018, Manhattan’s very gay Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood? 119 pregnancies.
So, an abortion rate of 67% in Chelsea-Clinton amounts to 80 abortions.
But it’s Kryn’s racially-toned title, “Fascinating site shows New York abortions by Zip Code – 60% of black babies aborted,” that is so offensive. Whatever the facts may be, Kryn doesn’t bother to deliver them in context, and unjustly focuses on one aspect of the data to make blacks and, laughably, gays, appear irresponsible.
Kryn’s article profiles an anti-abortion site — NYC41Percent — created by the ultra-right wing Christian organization, the Chiaroscuro Foundation, which has sculpted and carved the numbers into convenient abstinence-only advocacy.
But let’s just remember that the incidence of pregnancy and subsequent abortions among gay men and lesbians is presumably negligible, and as a percentage of the population couldn’t swing abortion rates up.
“Maybe it is time to reassert the simple fact that the last few generations seem to have tried to deny: sex makes babies,” writes the Chiaroscuro Foundation. “The fact is, sex is an extremely powerful natural force, not easily hemmed in. Contraceptive methods will always fail some percentage of the time. The unplanned, unwanted pregnancies which result keep our abortion rates so high.” They add,
New data on New York City’s abortion statistics reveals an abortion ratio almost twice the national average. The report, provided by the New York City Department of Health at the request of the Chiaroscuro Foundation, a New York City non-for-profit [sic] organization that supports alternatives to abortion, said that of 225,667 pregnancies in 2009, there were 87,273 abortions.
Right wing anti-American extremists like LifeSite News love to portray blacks and gays in a seemingly decadent New York City as abortion-lovers.
What really is nasty is Kryn had to pull out the buried fact (for the sake of argument, we’ll assume, by the way, that all these are facts,) of a 60% abortion rate for blacks in New York City, and use that as the basis of his article’s title.
Why is it nasty?
Because all three comments on Kryn’s little article are about… black people.
Wow. Who knew racism was so easy?
Just pull out one data point.
And you know what else really gets my goat?
What really smacks of anti-science, anti-logic ignorance is that in light of their concern about the higher rate of abortion in New York City — supposedly twice the national average — the geniuses at the Chiaroscuro Foundation on their NYC41Percent site announced last week a new website which is… wait for it… dedicated to taking “a stand against Mayor Bloomberg’s sex ed mandate.”
Because — you guessed it — the way to reduce the abortion rate is to… wait for it… teach abstinence!
Which, dear parents, doesn’t work.
Oh, and lastly, guess who has a higher rate of abortion than New York?