Donna Brazile is a Black woman with a bachelor's degree in industrial psychology from Louisiana State University.  She's been interested in politics since she was nine years old. When she was a teenager, she was part of a TRIO Upward Bound program.  She's been a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.  She has worked for advocacy groups in Washington, D.C.  She helped make Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday a federal holiday.  With all these achievements, I would think that Donna Brazile would be the last person to say that Black women are incapable of exercising their intelligence, but I would be wrong.

Donna Brazile has just published an opinion piece explaining how a ban on abortion would hurt Black women.  Reading it, one senses that she thinks Black women are not able to use contraception to prevent pregnancy, and that only unfettered access to abortion will prevent a host of health issues that disproportionately affect Black women.

Montage using Birth control by rawpixel and a Donna Brazile YouTube screen grab.

Brazile cites a study that claims that Black women get lower-quality maternal care, can't get good birth control, and face greater pregnancy discrimination on the job while making less money than other, presumably White, women.  Brazile claims, "Women are not baby-making machines with no right to decide how many children to have and when to have them.  The days of slavery are long gone.  We have the right to determine our own futures."

Women, whatever their color, don't need to use abortion as birth control to determine their own futures.  Women can use contraception, or abstinence, if they want to avoid unwanted pregnancies.  In particular, Black women like Donna Brazile should be mindful of the history of abortion and Black women and how abortion hurts the Black community.

Margaret Sanger founded the Negro Project specifically to control the population growth of Blacks.  Sanger knew how her deplorable attitude might be viewed, so she enlisted Black community leaders to assist in her project, saying, "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

Seventy-nine percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are in minority neighborhoods, where new records are being set for abortions.  Margaret Sanger's vision of preventing the birth of Black babies is alive and well, and Donna Brazile is supporting that vision.  I can't help feeling that Black women and children deserve better.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st-century Black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the Old South.