Last month, Renee wrote about the “Black children are an endangered species” billboards. Now the New York Times has picked it up, in a story about how the anti-abortion movement is using race and accusations of genocide as a way to “court” supporters of color to a traditionally white, long-racist movement. The anti-choice strategy has been to hire a handful of women of color to travel around the country telling African-Americans that abortion is part of a decades-old conspiracy to kill off black people.
The tactic seems to be working, at least to a point. And it works in large part because there is a long history of trying to curtail the reproductive capacities of men and women of color. The term “black genocide conspiracy” might be met with a lot of eye-rolling from white people, but there is a legitimate back-story that enables such a theory to take hold and to grow, and there are legitimate concerns about population control and the targeting of families of color. Tuskegee. Puerto Rico. Mississippi appendectomies. Women’s bodies were used as vessels to increase the slave population, and enslaved women had no legal right to their own children. After slavery, the reproductive coercion flipped, and people of color in the United States (or people wanting or forced to come to the United States) faced anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigrant policies, mandatory sterilization and the wide embrace of eugenics. Through the 20th century and into the 21st, the bodies and reproductive capacities of women of color were used as political warning signs — Reagan’s welfare queen, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and on and on.
And it’s not all “history,” either. Louisiana, last year. Criminal courts today. Women are paid to be sterilized, or otherwise coerced out of reproducing if they’re the wrong color or the wrong socioeconomic class, or if they’re addicted, or if they’re disabled.
All women face attempted infringements on their reproductive rights. But women of color in the United States have faced those infringements in a very particular way, and that’s in part why the “abortion is genocide” argument resonates.
But of course, the curtailing of reproductive rights and options for women of color (and for all women) is another piece of a long history of not allowing women to make the best reproductive choices for themselves. As Pamela points out in a really great take-down of the abortion-is-genocide argument, women of color in the United States are sorely under-served when it comes to reproductive health care (and health care generally), and it’s literally killing them. From her article:
-Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with cervical cancer at a later stage and are more likely to die of cervical cancer.
-Black people make up 13 percent of the population in the United States yet account for more than 49 percent of AIDS cases. AIDS is the leading cause of death for Black women between the ages 25 to 34, and the second leading cause of death for Black men between the ages 35 to 44.
-Black and Hispanic women have the highest teen pregnancy rates.
-Forty percent of Black Americans report being uninsured at some point from 2007 through 2008.
-Black women continue to die from breast cancer at alarming rates and a recent study found that half of Black teenage women reported having had one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases.
The anti-choice solution is to shut down Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides healthcare to under-served and low-income communities, and to try to outlaw abortion and even birth control. Only 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related; the vast majority of what the organization provides involves pre-natal care, STI screening, sexual health information, gynecological care, birth control prescriptions, even flu shots. When you shut down Planned Parenthood, you aren’t ending abortion — you’re cutting off access to some of the most in-need women and men. But the anti-choice logic is that no women (and especially no women of color) should be allowed to make their own choices when it comes to their reproductive lives. Oh and also that black women are perpetuating genocide by terminating pregnancies.
That logic doesn’t just apply to abortion. Anti-choicers are also trying to cut off access to contraception, so that women won’t even be able to avoid unintended pregnancy. Programs that pay low-income and drug-addicted women to be sterilized? Funded and run by anti-choice, “pro-family” Republicans. Some of the biggest voices in the anti-choice movement still go around saying that Chinese people eat babies, for Pete’s sake. “Pro-life” Republicans oppose health care reform that would help women and babies; they oppose funding organizations that provide reproductive health care; they regularly oppose funding for pre-natal and well-baby care, for day care, and for aid to families with dependent children. In a nutshell, “pro-life” organizations oppose the things that prevent abortion, and then oppose the things that would make it easier for women to choose to give birth, and then oppose things that improve the lives of mothers, families and children.
But they would like to outlaw abortion and legally compel you to carry pregnancies to term.
Miriam notes that no one needs that kind of condescending “help,” and that the divide-and-conquer strategy to curtail women’s rights is not going to work. Women of color have long worked for reproductive justice — whether that’s securing abortion rights or pushing back against environmentalist population control arguments or fighting against welfare reform. To suggest that abortion rights are genocidal and that women of color are either sitting idly back or killing their own children erases all the work that women have done to secure rights for themselves.
What women — all women — actually need is access to reproductive health care and education (and go read that link, it’s a phenomenal piece). The fact that women of color have significantly higher abortion rates than white women should give us pause; so should the fact that the United States has a much higher abortion rate than countries in Western Europe where the procedure is widely accessible. Abortion isn’t shameful, but it is something that most women would like to avoid. The crucial piece to a low abortion rate, world-wide, is access to contraception. It also doesn’t hurt to have universal health care and family-friendly policies that enable women to bear and raise children without facing poverty, job loss or total life upheaval.
There are long-standing systematic blockades in the way of women in the United States accessing a full range of reproductive rights. Women who fall outside of the white/heterosexual/cisgender/able-bodied/middle-or-upper-class identity face even taller barriers to access. Eliminating those barriers, though, takes work. It takes dedication to women’s health and women’s lives. And dedication to women’s lives? Is not something that anti-choice organizations do.