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| Trenee McGee |
The temptation is to
treat state Rep. Trenee McGee’s protest as a “man bites dog” story. That may be
a serious error in judgment. It is always possible she knows more about inner city life than most
tourist politicians and media savants.
McGee, a Black state representative in West
Haven’s 116th District, “replaced Rep. Michael DiMassa, who stepped down after
an FBI investigation led to charges of stealing more than $600,000 in federal
COVID-19 relief money by billing the city of West Haven for pandemic-related
consulting services that federal officials said he never performed,” according
to a report in a Hartford paper.
Her maiden speech on
the floor of the state House of Representatives during an abortion debate in
April surprised nearly everyone.
McGee said she wanted
to serve as a spokesperson for the urban Black community in Connecticut.
Abortion, she said, has been “destructive to my community.” She wanted to
“speak the fearless truth” about inequitable abortions in minority communities.
“My journey and
quest for racial justice when it comes to reproductive rights began in a
classroom with Black girls who knew about abortion when they were 7 years old
and were taught in their classrooms about abortion,” she recounted.
“They were taught
about abortion as a birth-control method. They were taught that, at any point
in time, when they were 13 or 12 or 15, they can go to a Planned Parenthood and
receive an abortion without their parents knowing. This differed when I
traveled across the state as a teaching artist, and I went into the suburbs,
where there were young white girls who had access to all sorts of preventative
methods, as well as even organizations that helped them to transition their
births to their adoptive parents.”
And then she brought
down the hammer: Black women, she noted, never had problems with access to
abortion. Abortion clinics are within “walking distance of our middle schools
and our homes.”
A Policy Report on “The
Effects of Abortion on the Black Community” from the Center for Urban Renewal and Education tells us
“Dis-proportionally, the leading consumer of the abortionists’ services is the
African-American female. According to the 2011 Abortion Surveillance Report
issued by the Center for Disease Control, black women make up 14 percent of the
childbearing population, yet obtained 36.2 percent of reported abortions. Black
women have the highest abortion ratio in the country, with 474 abortions per
1,000 live births. Percentages at these levels illustrate that more than 19
million black babies have been aborted since 1973.”
The Policy Report
notes that a “recent study released by Protecting Black Life, an outreach of
Life Issues Institute concluded that, ‘79% of Planned Parenthood’s surgical
abortion facilities are strategically located within walking distance of
African and/or Hispanic communities.’”
Such figures do not
make white women in wealthy privileged suburban communities flinch with
indignation, but they are felt within urban Black communities across the
nation. And a felt experience, we all know, is more convincing that abstract
numbers.
McGee’s speech was
exceedingly polite. A more ardent Black pro-lifer might have noted that birth
control was promoted early on in the movement by Margaret
Sanger as a method of reducing
the burden of unwanted poor people, mostly Blacks, but also poor Whites, given
to the mindless production of excess offspring.
"We do not want
word to go out,” Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said about her 1939
Negro Project, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the
minister is the man who can straighten out the idea if it ever occurs to any of
their more rebellious members." Black ministers whom Sanger, a eugenicist,
wanted to recruit to her cause had to be gently persuaded, the recruitment
message over-larded with moral molasses – not too difficult since the inferior
races were, well, inferior.
It didn’t work then
and, McGee suggested, it won’t work now.
McGee’s pro-life
speech was delivered in response to a Democrat bill supported by Governor Ned
Lamont that sailed through the Democrat dominated General Assembly prior to the
Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v
Wade. Ten members of the legislature’s Black caucus voted against the bill,
never a hopeful sign. The Lamont-pro-abortion law will increase the number of
medical professionals allowed to perform abortions in Connecticut, provide a
safe haven for women seeking abortions from more restrictive states, and expand
abortion-related protections regarding lawsuits.
McGee, the daughter
of two ministers, is well spoken, and her anti-abortion speech, regarded as
courageous on both sides of the political divide, was not peppered by opponents
with twitter-like denunciations of the speaker.
The Democrat list of
successes under President Joe Biden is thin. Connecticut Democrats are hoping
they can fashion a recent Supreme Court ruling that returns decision making on
abortion back to the states into a political campaign shoehorn. McGee’s message
is – it won’t work, not in a Black urban community that loves children and,
even in a state supported Babylonian captivity, can hear the whisper of God in
the whirlwind.
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