JACKSON — As state and national controversy swirls around U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s comment about a “public hanging” in her race against an African American opponent, Gov. Phil Bryant opened a press conference this morning implying that black women are participating in “the genocide of 20 million African American children” through legal abortions.
“See, in my heart, I am confused about where the outrage is at about 20 million African American children that have been aborted. No one wants to say anything about that. No one wants to talk about that,” Bryant said, with Hyde-Smith and National Right to Life President Carol Tobias standing nearby.
Bryant’s use of the abortion-as-genocide conspiracy theory about a woman’s right to choose a legal abortion, a trope popular with white conservatives, comes amid a state and national outcry after it went viral Sunday that Hyde-Smith had made a comment about “public hangings” at a campaign stop in Tupelo. She is in a run-off to keep her U.S. Senate set on Tuesday, Nov. 27, against former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, who would become Mississippi’s first African American senator since Reconstruction, should he win the race.
Anti-abortion activists, white and black, often point to black women choosing abortion as a form of “genocide” of African Americans. “Look at African Americans,” Bryant said Monday morning. “According to Wikipedia, had those (black) children not been aborted, the African American population would be 48 percent larger in America. Forty-eight percent larger. We can play with those numbers, and we can look at statistics, but the cold, grim truth is, children are being murdered.” (At press time, we had not located the Wikipedia page Bryant referred to.)
The “black genocide” charge draws heavy criticism from African American women who work to increase better health and reproductive care for Mississippi mothers.
“It is absurd that a governor in a state that has one of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, where it is one of the most dangerous places for women to give birth—black women to give birth, specifically—would talk about abortion being black genocide,” Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund Executive Director Laurie Bertram-Roberts said today.
“First of all, black women are not committing genocide when the same women he’s talking about are the mothers of black children,” she said. “To commit genocide, you have to be trying to eliminate a race of people. By definition, that cannot be black mothers. The majority of women who have abortions are also mothers. … Number two, Phil Bryant has never made a policy or endorsed a policy that helps black babies in this state.”
Bryant, who was the chairman of the failed Personhood initiativein Mississippi in 2011, takes the most extreme views on abortion. Personhood would have banned not only the abortion procedureitself, including in cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother, but also forbidden the use of birth-control pills (considered “abortifacents”)and even limited the ability of families to use in vitro fertilization.
Bryant emphasized that Hyde-Smith is the right choice to ensure that women must give birth regardless of the circumstances.
“Cindy Hyde-Smith is fighting for those children. This Christian woman, this mother, this wife has fought hard to protect those unborn. And she will do so in the United States Senate as she continues,” Bryant said.
Full Article: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2018/nov/12/governor-calls-abortion-black-genocide-defends-hyd/
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