Abortion Explained!
Race Selective Abortion Bans
People of all races and ethnicities have abortions. It’s a common medical procedure. And the majority of people who have abortions are people of color. But, because of disparities in access to healthcare, contraception, and prenatal care, some racial and ethnic groups are more likely to need abortions. At the same time, the United States has a dark history—and current practice—of medical racism, where white supremacists, eugenicists, and government leaders have forcibly sterilized, denied healthcare to, and forcibly impregnated Black and Brown people to be able to control their fertility. Unfortunately, people who want to ban abortions pervert this history to try to deny us access to contraception and abortion care today. No matter what, we deserve the freedom and autonomy to decide what’s best for our lives, families, and futures.
The majority of people who have abortions are people of color, due to a disproportionate lack of access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare and contraception access. In the United States, Black people obtain 30% of all abortions, while Latinx people obtain 25% and people of other races account for 9%. White people account for 36% of abortions, the single majority. However, because Black people and people of color access abortion at a disproportionate rate, people who seek to ban abortion push the idea that Black and Brown people having abortions is tantamount to slavery, genocide, and racism against their own embryos and fetuses.
While the theory behind these so-called “race selective” abortion bans don’t quite make sense, the general idea is that they believe Black people, in particular, are having abortions simply because their embryo or fetus is Black. They also argue that we are unable to make decisions about our pregnancies on our own and that we’re being coerced into abortions by abortion clinic workers, while at the same time arguing that Black people have such a callous disregard for life that we’re aborting our pregnancies with abandon and that our bodies are ‘the most dangerous place for a Black child,’ as a series of anti-abortion billboards claimed. It’s ridiculous and doesn’t make sense at best, deep horrific anti-Black racism at worst.
Similarly, racist tactics have been deployed in Latinx communities proclaiming, “El lugar mas peligroso para un Latino es el vientre de su madre,” translated to mean “The most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb.”
There is no evidence backing up any of these arguments, but that hasn’t stopped anti-abortion lawmakers from trying to pass legislation that—while cloaked in the language of ‘nondiscrimination’—targets Black people who want abortions and it seeks to deny us access by forcing providers to interrogate our reasons for our abortions. If enacted, this policy forces abortion providers to racially profile their own patients and violate their 14th Amendment rights. Meaning, if a person seeking an abortion discloses to their provider that the reason for their abortion is somehow related to the race of the fetus, the abortion would be denied. Still, it’s important to remember that these situations don’t actually exist and that they were created to push a decades-long anti-abortion agenda in a new way that contributes to the systemic racism in our country. But, what is scary is if a patient makes an offhand or misinterpreted remark, a provider could deny them their abortion.
The myth of race selective abortions seeks to push a narrative that Black and Brown people having abortions is somehow more egregious and racist than white people having abortions. It is offensive that politicians use these laws to make derogatory claims that Black women would intentionally harm our families based on race, and equate us to slave owners and White supremacists.
Fun fact: Margaret Sanger did not support abortion unless in the cases of medical emergency and Planned Parenthood did not provide abortions until after her death.
Supporters of race selective bans point to cultural circumstances in countries where terminating a pregnancy on the basis of gender has occurred, but fail to acknowledge that not only is the ideology behind sex and race-selective bans racist itself, it’s completely wrong. And although most people who have abortions are people of color, opponents twist this fact by creating a narrative that says abortion providers intentionally target communities of color, often citing Margaret Sanger, the since-denounced problematic nurse, birth control advocate, and founder of Planned Parenthood.