This article in the LA Times details how anti-abortion activists and so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” are targeting women of color (and black women in particular). There’s so much to say about this that I’m not sure where to start, but numbers are probably a good place:
“Often the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue,” said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 antiabortion counseling centers across the nation — almost all in mostly white suburbs.
Huh. Heartbeat International alone runs nearly 900 anti-abortion centers. In total, there are 2300 of these anti-choice centers across the country. The grand total of abortion providers in the United States is 1,819. Just something to consider.
It’s no big secret that conservatives are hostile toward non-white motherhood, and want white women to have as many babies as possible. Conservatives have pushed for laws which, in violation of our own Constitution, would deny citizenship rights to children born in the U.S. by illegal immigrant parents. They’ve succeeded in “reforming” welfare, making it much more difficult for poor women (and disproportionately women of color) to survive and provide for their families — and they’ve even gone so far in some states to deny additional benefits to women who have children while on welfare, effectively coercing them into abortion. Conservative icon Ronald Reagan played on the racist ideology of the Welfare Queen in order to wage war against the poor — and the Welfare Queen was, without a doubt, a black woman. Black women are routinely blamed by conservatives for the dissolution of the black family, which, conservatives argue, is the primary cause of inner-city crime, gangs, teenage pregnancy, and on and on. It’s no surprise that the targeting of black women and “The Negro Family” began just as African-Americans achieved legal equality, and racist white conservatives needed another social justification for continuing to oppress them.
But these anti-choicers are trying to help black women, right? They can’t possibly be hostile towards black motherhood if they’re trying to convince black women to have more babies, right?
Wrong. The history of attempted state control over women’s reproduction is a long one, and one which has impacted women of all races — but black and brown women in particular have had their rights compromised and attacked in ways that white women and wealthier women simply haven’t had to face.
You’ll have to excuse my verbosity on this topic — I’m in the process of writing a massive paper (a thesis, essentially) about criminalizing drug addicts who give birth, and making an equal protection argument (among others) using an anti-subordination model, which argues that black women as a class have had their reproductive rights compromised for centuries, and that black motherhood has long been devalued and demonized. Now, the vast majority of women who are prosecuted for using drugs during their pregnancies are black and Latina, despite the fact that white women and women of color use drugs at roughly the same rates during pregnancy (with white women using them slightly more often). I argue that given the history of black motherhood and reproductive rights, there is a legitimate argument to be made that these cases infringe upon black women’s rights to equal protection under the law. Anyway, there are several other arguments against criminalizing drug-addicted pregnant women which I also make, but I think the equal protection one is the most interesting, as it requires us to really look at the history of race, gender and class-based oppression that black and Latina women have always faced in this country.
And that’s why the crisis pregnancy centers are troubling — not just because, from the outset, they’ve targeted white women and encouraged white women to give birth, but because they’re part of a broader movement which is fully and unapologetically about giving the state control over women’s reproduction. White women have been at the forefront of the movement to have the right to limit their own reproduction, and we’ve had the most success — see contraception, abortion, etc. But, while contraception and abortion are obviously valuable rights for everyone, women of color have also long been trying to assert their very basic right to have children. For a simple illustration of how the control of black women’s bodies has long been a part of black women’s experience in America, see this description, offered by professor Dorothy Roberts in a Harvard Law Review article:
The method of whipping pregnant slaves that was used throughout the South vividly illustrates the slaveowners’ dual interest in Black women as both workers and childbearers. Slaveowners forced women to lie face down in a depression in the ground while they were whipped. This procedure allowed the masters to protect the fetus while abusing the mother. It serves as a powerful metaphor for the evils of a fetal protection policy that denies the humanity of the mother. It is also a forceful symbol of the convergent oppressions inflicted on slave women: they were subjugated at once both as Blacks and as females.
The ideology which protects the fetus over the woman is, in a nutshell, what the “pro-life” movement is entirely about. And does the interest in workers and child-bearers sound familiar to anyone else?
Back to the crisis pregnancy centers:
The intensifying outreach to African Americans is not a coordinated strategy but a series of projects by independent ministries. Heartbeat focuses on steering one woman at a time away from abortion. The black activist group LEARN tries to rally political outrage by touring colleges with the Genocide Awareness Project — giant murals that juxtapose photos of aborted fetuses with images of slaughter in Rwanda.
I cringe whenever I hear abortion being compared to the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide because of its blatantly racist connotations — that an embryo, a zygote, a fetus is the full moral equivalent of a Rwandan or a Jew or a Jehovah’s Witness or a gypsy or any of the other people who had families, homes, hopes, dreams, jobs, friends, lives and were systematically slaughtered. Abortion is not the same as killing 6 million Jews. It is not the same as killing nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. It is not the same as killing between 200,000 and 400,000 Sudanese and displacing 2.5 million more. It is not the same as killing 8,000 Bosnian people in Srebrenica (and killing 200,000 people, while raping or otherwise torturing tens of thousands).
Abortion is just not comparable. To argue otherwise is contemptible and revolting.
A single statistic underlies all these efforts: African Americans make up 13% of the population but account for 37% of all abortions in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
…and so the solution is to make it illegal for women to terminate their pregnancies.
It is indeed telling that African American women have a disproportionate number of abortions, and it’s not brain surgery to figure out what that statistic is saying. Just look at the reasons women give for abortion:
The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%).
Three-quarters of women who terminate their pregnancies do so because of social and economic constraints. If anti-choicers, conservatives and Republicans are actually interested in decreasing the abortion rate and making it easier for women to choose birth, then they need to take a good hard look in the mirror and recognize that their social policies push women into making certain decisions. They might recognize that more women would be able to choose to have children if we actually did something about poverty, health care, the social safety net, access to education, childcare, etc etc.
But nah. Instead, we’ll just give women fewer choices, and force them to have children they can’t support and don’t want.
“When you go to African American communities — even myself, an African American woman — you’ll find they don’t trust pro-life people,” said Lillie Epps, a vice president of Care Net, which runs more than 1,000 suburban crisis pregnancy centers. “They look at us as a group who cares very little about what’s going on in the inner city, the poverty and all the other issues.”
Well I wonder why. Anti-choice conservatives don’t care about poverty or communities of color. They care about sexual and social control — after all, they aren’t lobbying Congress for universal health care or poverty relief or more public school funding, and they don’t even offer their own clients contraception or information about safer sex. They just tell them that they should abstain, give them a pack of diapers, and promise to help for the first year of the baby’s life — which means a couple bottles and some nappies.
In the last three years, Care Net has opened 19 urban antiabortion outposts — in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Indianapolis — and Epps hopes to set up centers soon in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla. “But it’s been very tough,” Epps said.
“I’m just being honest with you. When they hear ‘pro-life,’ the first thing they think is ‘white Republican.’ “
And so we’re shocked to learn that black women, contrary to popular conservative belief, are not idiots.
I actually do like the idea of crisis pregnancy centers, it’s just a shame that in practice they’re so terrible. Low-income women who want to give birth should have a place to go where they can find social support, help in filling out applications for social aid, baby supplies, recommendations for doctors who accept Medicaid, etc. But they also need non-judgmental support for any choice they make and full information about their bodies, their pregnancies, and how to prevent unintended pregnancy in the future. They aren’t getting that at crisis pregnancy centers. They’re hustled in, tested for pregnancy, made to sit and watch an anti-abortion propaganda video while they wait, congratulated on their new baby, pushed to get an ultrasound, told lies about the supposed horrors of abortion (it causes breast cancer, you’ll be infertile, you could die, you will be depressed, you could commit suicide) handed some diapers, and told that they will absolutely be supported. But they won’t, and as soon as that pregnancy is over — or, at best, as soon as that cute little baby isn’t a cute little baby anymore — they’re on their own. I would love to see some of these centers (and there are thousands) dedicate their resources to supporting pregnant mothers without a judgmental, anti-sex agenda, and without lying. But that isn’t what they’re doing.
And there’s another racist and classist piece of this whole thing: Many of these centers are run by religious fundamentalists who believe that even contraception is a sin, and will only counsel women to abstain from sex until they’re married. Which presumes, basically, that poor women have less of a right to sex and sexual pleasure than their wealthier sisters.
Certainly, that was LaToya Yarbrough’s perception when she became pregnant six months after her first child was born out of wedlock.
Yarbrough, 28, had seen the ads promising help for crisis pregnancies, but those clinics were a long bus ride away, out in the suburbs. Plus, that was a white woman’s world, she thought; how could they understand?
“I had this view … that I’d be saying, ‘I can’t afford this, I can’t afford that’ and I’d be looking at [the counselor] and thinking, ‘You can, because you probably have a husband at home who’s a doctor or a lawyer,’ ” she said.
So Yarbrough started dialing abortion clinics. At one, a secretary sensed her despair and referred her to the Family Care Pregnancy Center, run by a black megachurch in south Dallas.
Kinda throws a wrench in the tired argument that abortion providers will push women into terminating their pregnancies, eh? No, this is what choice is about — but if a woman walked into a crisis pregnancy center and was adamant about terminating her pregnancy, you can bet they wouldn’t refer her to a local clinic. They will, however, tell her a whole bunch of lies:
Antiabortion activists are fighting back with their own appeals to black pride. In particular, they target Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, as a racist intent on eliminating people of color. One popular flier — recently mailed to 10,000 homes in minority neighborhoods in Waco, Texas — declares, “Lynching is for amateurs” and compares “Klan Parenthood” clinics to Nazi death camps.
Sanger did associate with proponents of eugenics, the philosophy that only the most worthy should be allowed to reproduce. But she did not support coerced birth control; civil rights leaders, including King, embraced her work.
Of course, anti-choice religious nuts remain completely out of touch with the needs that communities of color identify for themselves:
In national surveys on race and politics, David Bositis asks blacks an open-ended question: Name your top three concerns for the country.
“I’ve done 15,000 interviews over the past 15 years, and I doubt if abortion has come up in five of them,” said Bositis, a senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C.
When he asks African American pastors, they talk about police brutality, elder care, jobs for released convicts. “Their agenda is not the same kind of moral agenda you often get with white churches,” Bositis said. “Abortion doesn’t show up.”
How much do you want to bet that police brutality, elder care and jobs for released convicts aren’t going to show up as talking points for the Moral Majority anywhere in the near future? When the right stops demonizing and marginalizing people of color for political gain, maybe I’ll believe that they care two bits for the rights and the lives of pregnant black women. Until then, I’m going to go with the conclusion that this is just one small part of a centuries-old pattern of attempts to control the reproductive rights of women in general, and women of color in particular.