Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

New York, NY, Feb. 16…A citywide bus side advertising campaign urging Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to address the alarming ratio of viable pregnancies aborted in New York City each year (41% in 2009) – began rolling out of New York City Transit Authority (TA) bus depots today.   The ads are being funded by the New York City-based Chiaroscuro Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that supports alternatives to abortion.  

The bus-side billboards, reading: "41% of Viable Pregnancies End in Abortion in NYC. We Need a New Strategy, Mr. Mayor", will appear on TA buses citywide for the next month.  

The bus ads come following a month during which the Mayor gave no response to the foundation's well covered January 6^th news conference highlighting the alarming abortion statistics in the city, nor to a February 2nd letter requesting the Mayor's leadership and assistance in addressing the crisis.    

Moreover, the only public comments the Mayor has made on the abortion issue over the past month confirm that he is not focused on this crisis, the group says.  When asked by a WNYC reporter what he thought of the 41% abortion ratio in the city, the Mayor replied, "I have no idea if that's an accurate number or not. I just don't know." The figure publicized by the Chiaroscuro Foundation was confirmed by the Guttmacher Institute to the reporter.

"We held a news conference to highlight the city's 41% abortion ratio; we wrote the mayor asking for his leadership and assistance.  And, the mayor's only response to date suggests that he is not prepared to address the City's abortion crisis," said Chiaroscuro Foundation Executive Director Greg Pfundstein. "We sincerely hope the bus ads will elicit a response from the Mayor and that he will take a leadership role in addressing this problem."

The magnitude of the problem should be sufficient to merit the Mayor's attention: nearly half of all pregnancies in the Bronx (48%) were aborted, and 60% of all African-American pregnancies were terminated in 2009.   

According New York City Department of Health data:

·         There were 225, 667 pregnancies in New York City in 2009.  They resulted in 126,774 live births and 87,273 abortions.

·         Among non-Hispanic blacks there were far more abortions than births, 40, 798 to 27, 405, or 60%.   For every 1,000 African-American live births, there were 1,489 abortions.

·         Among Non-Hispanic black teens, the number of terminated pregnancies was far greater – 13,614 abortions to 4,878 live births, or 74%.  So, for every 1,000 live births among African-American teenagers, there are 2,791 abortions.  (Among teens of all other ethnic groups, the numbers are 13,540 abortions to 10,510 live births, or 1,288 abortions for every 1,000 live birth, or 56%.)

·         10% of all pregnancies in New York City – but 16% of abortions – were with teen mothers.

·         54% of abortions were with mothers in their 20's;

·         30% of abortions were with mothers in their 30's or 40's;

·         14% of abortions were with married mothers.

The Chiaroscuro Foundation urges Mayor Bloomberg to publicly address this issue and devise a new strategy to significantly lower the abortion ratio in the five boroughs.  

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