Racism and racists have been the hue and cry all over the internet since “the Charlottesville Incident.” Words designed to inflame and incite are being lobbed, lines are being drawn, and sides taken. Should confederate monuments be allowed to stand, or should they be torn down? Those who say they should stand are deemed racist — and, if Black, sell outs. Families are being torn apart and the racial gap widened as acts and threats of violence rule.

Racism, a term understood prior to 1964 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act to mean discrimination and prejudice against a group of people based on the color of their skin, is quite something else today. Whether a confederate monument remains in the public square does not quite fit that definition. There is, however, an act that happens every day that is driven by the agenda of getting “rid of the populations we don’t want too many of,” and those acts are racist indeed. Black women are treated differently — in fact, are targeted — based on the color of their skin, and they are living in the midst of a health care crisis directly attributable to the very act they have been told is liberating.

The act is abortion, and 3 percent of America’s women of childbearing age (Black women) get 30 to 35 percent of the them each and every year.

Today, one in nine Black women have breast cancer according to the American Cancer Society. From 2008 to 2012, breast cancer incidence rates increased 0.4 percent per year in black women, and the death rates (from breast cancer) were 42 percent higher in black women than white women. Black women are more likely than other racial/ethnic groups to be diagnosed at later stages and have the lowest survival at each state of diagnosis. The results of 68 worldwide studies, including a recent one from China, reveal a definite link between induced abortion and breast cancer.

The infant mortality rate among black infants is 2.4 times higher than that of white infants, primarily due to preterm birth. Abortion has been linked to premature birth, and in the Black community, the babies are born at 27 weeks or less, the age most cannot survive.

The numbers of women injured in abortion centers are rising, particularly in those centers that are within walking distance of a Black or Latino neighborhood. One example is the Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, which just this week sent their 67th patient to a hospital by ambulance. Though they claim to be a health center, Planned Parenthood is not equipped to treat the most common complication of abortion — hemorrhaging, a life-threatening condition. This same facility had 210 violations of medical and reporting standards identified, including employees’ failing to wash their hands and properly sterilize instruments between procedures.

In 2014, The Huffington Post reported Black women experience major depression at higher rates than other ethnicities. There is scientific evidence abortion leads to depression, including bipolar depression — which Mental Health America reports more than 6.8 million Blacks have.

And there is an increasing number of women that enter these centers only to die as the result of a botched abortion: Cree Erwin, LaKisha Wilson, Tonya Reaves, and Edrica Goode to name a few.

In addition, the sexually transmitted disease rate is at epidemic levels in the Black community. A look at the numbers reveals Black women leading in every disease category, including gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, and HIV.

As the nation focuses on tearing down monuments of men who lost the war, Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project ensures that Black women’s choices are made without recourse to this information. They spend millions of tax dollars to ensure that the only choice for Black women is sterilization (many involuntarily at the hands of their abortionists), birth control, and abortion — discriminatory acts carried out because of their victims’ skin color.

Imagine the terror Tonya Reaves experienced as her life’s blood drained from her body when Planned Parenthood abortionist Mandy Gittler failed to transport her for emergency care. Imaging the terror and unbearable pain Cree Erwin endured after the hospital to which her mother rushed her refused to complete the botched abortion Planned Parenthood Kalamazoo began. And imagine the terror that young, vibrant Black women experience when being rushed to the hospital from the Planned Parenthoods that botch their abortions.

To tear down a monument or not can never be the question in the face of this kind of blatant racism that is erasing an entire people from this nation. America can never be great as long as this bastion of racism stands.

Photo credit: American Life League via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0