 In an article published by the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, the Black Panthers asserted that as high as 20% of black women in the United States had been sterilized.Additionally, the party shifted their rhetoric to emphasize the importance of health care and legal abortion in black communities.Despite their anti-birth control views in the 1960s, in later decades, the party adopted birth control and abortion rhetoric that later played into the reproductive rights movement.