In New York City in 2007, 87,527 abortions were performed, with 43,568--or 49.8 percent--of the aborted babies being black, according to the CDC. The number of white babies aborted in 2007 in New York City was 37,870--or 43.3 percent. 6,089, or 7 percent, were babies of other races, according to the report.
According to the Census Bureau, there are 8,302,659 people in New York City, of whom 2,085,514--or 25 percent--are black. Thus, black babies in New York City were aborted at a rate that is twice the black share of the municipal population.
A report released in December by the New York Department of Health indicated that that black babies represented an even higher percentage among those aborted in New York City in 2009. That report said about 41 percent of pregnancies in the city ended in abortion in 2009 and 59.8 percent of those abortions were of black babies.
Those statistics led a pro-life group to pay for a message on a billboard in Manhattan noting that the womb was a dangerous place for African Americans.
The billboard message, sponsored by the pro-life Web site thatsabortion.com, was taken down last week by Lamar Advertising. A company spokesman cited “public safety” concerns after workers in a building adjacent to the billboard were targeted by billboard critics.
The CDC's Abortion Surveillance Report does not include the numbers of abortions in all 50 states because there is no federal mandate for reporting abortions, and several states, including California, the nation's most populous state, did not provide abortion numbers to the government in 2007.
According to the CDC report, among the states that reported, New York had the most abortions overall in 2007: 87,527 in New York City and 33,041 in the remainder of the state for a total of 120,568 abortions.
Texas ranked second, with a reported 80,628 abortions.
Aside from race, other categories for abortion in the report include gestation, or number of weeks of pregnancy, age, and whether the abortions were surgical or non-surgical. – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report on Feb. 25 indicating that almost half of the babies aborted in New York City in 2007--the latest year in the report--were black. This was the case even though blacks represent a quarter of the city's population.
