Fannie Lou Hamer was one such woman.
A heavily biased write-up in the December 20, 1969 Free Lance-Star gives some of the details: “Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, a militant black leader from Mississippi and one of the handful of bona-fide poor invited to the conference, denounced voluntary abortion as ‘legalized abortion’ and made it clear that she regards it as a part of a comprehensive white man’s plot to exterminate the black population of the United States.”
Forced sterilization of black women, as a way to reduce the black population, was so common that Mrs. Hamer later coined the term “Mississippi appendectomy” to describe the eugenic travesty.
It would likely not surprise Fannie Lou Hamer that today 72 percent of all abortions in her home state are committed on black babies – even though African Americans comprise only 37.4 percent of the population in Mississippi.
Despite suffering so many grave injustices during her life, Fannie Lou Hamer never gave up fighting for a better world.
