Genocide by... Abortion?

While perusing the internet during my finals week for news on genocide (as, alas, I am prone to do), I found a post which accuses President Obama of beginning a genocidal policy against African Americans in the United States. What's the argument for this? It is based upon two principal notions: the first is the assertion that the health care provisions Obama is struggling to get would encourage abortions, and the second is that an exceptionally large number of African women already have abortions per year, and encouraging this would be tantamount to genocide.

For the sake of this posting, I want to leave aside the debate surrounding health care and abortion per se. Rather, I wish to focus simply on the alleged relationship between abortion and genocide. This claim asserts that encouraging - not necessarily forcing - abortions among a certain group can constitute genocide. (It was not made clear in the posting whether this allegation is supposed to be taken in context of the historical [and contemporary] oppression of African Americans in the United States. ) According to the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, genocidal acts do include "Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group." This is thus dependent upon the debate I said I would avoid - whether Obama's health care proposals will, indeed, encourage abortions or - more significant to this argument - whether it is intended to do so. I've said that I won't get into this here, and I won't, because I see a larger point here (I'm sure there are many).

The argument presented on the post I am referring to did not refer to the economic situation which does, indeed, lead many African American women to get abortions. I would argue that it is economic class, rather than a 'racial identity,' which fuels high rates of abortion, particularly in young women. Thus, if one wants to argue that imposing situations where abortion is encouraged amongst members of a group constitutes genocide, I think the argument can be better made on the level of class rather than racial categorization. This is somewhat sticky, though, because the Genocide Convention does not list 'class' as a protected group.

This raises the question: do members of groups that are not 'national, ethnical, racial, or religious' not receive protection under the Convention? Are those four groups meant to be exclusionary of other groups, like 'political' or 'economic class'? In the context of the time that the Convention was drafted, this certainly was the case (as the Soviet Union feared that its actions could be perceived as genocide if 'class' or 'political groups' were considered explicitly). Are documents of international law ones whose interpretation is supposed to change over time, or are they supposed to be destined to remain, forever, trapped in the context of their original ratification?