New racist anti-choice billboard campaign to target Latinas

Billboard that reads, The most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb

The racist trope regarding abortion rates in African American communities, promoted primarily through billboard campaigns, has expanded to include Latinas.

According to the Daily Caller, the billboard pictured is set to show up in Los Angeles next week, connected to a group called Latino Partnership for a Conservative Principles. Among the board members of the group is Luis Fortuno, the Governor of Puerto Rico.

The message is very similar to the billboard that we fought against in Manhattan earlier this year, with a few exceptions. This billboard is bilingual, which means that in the Spanish version of the statement the word madre (mother) appears, and is emphasized. In the English version that attacked African-American women, the word mother, even the word woman, was entirely absent. It was a shocking contrast to the fact that the ads themselves were actually targeting Black women as the ones putting Black children in danger, even though they never actually mentioned them.

I’m disgusted, but not particularly surprised. Like Steph, as a Latina, I’m angry that my community is being targeted. But I’m not more angry than I was when I saw the first billboards attacking African-American women. I already felt attacked by those original billboards, because these tactics aren’t actually about the communities they target.

They are instead about attacking abortion, trying to race bait, divide the pro-choice community along racial lines. They implicitly make women of color the culprit, the ones responsible for this myth of genocide in our communities. Whether it’s African-American women, or Latinas, or Indigenous women–they are simply using women of color to forward their anti-choice agenda.

Regardless of whether they are attacking your community, they are attacking all of us and we need to fight back.

I’ll keep an eye out for any action items targeting these billboards and post them.

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