Why — and How — We Need to Talk About Racial Disparities in Abortion Rates
For low income women, particularly in communities of color, they are more likely to have had no other choice — and, contrary to what some cynics may say, it is not a “casual” choice. CDC figures also show that Black women are more than three times as likely as white women to die of pregnancy complications.
Yet, when Justice Samuel Alito mentions race in his 98-page draft opinion, it is in reference to abortion rights supporters who are “motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”
In that vein, he also cites an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas in the 2019 case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky. It is in the states’ “compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics,” Thomas argued, referencing old racist movements to “improve” the country by reducing the nonwhite population.
He is not alone among Black Americans who have voiced that concern. When Roe was decided, polls showed Blacks were less likely than whites to support abortion. Such civil rights leaders as Fannie Lou Hamer and Whitney Young denounced the procedure as a form of genocide.
Jesse Jackson called abortion “murder” in his early days of activism but later moderated his view along with numerous other African Americans who gained prominence in Democratic Party circles.
One of the laws the Supreme Court justices are considering is a Mississippi law that makes most abortions illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy, about two months earlier than Roe and later decisions allow. Mississippi lawmakers last year rejected a bill that would have let mothers keep their Medicaid coverage for a year after giving birth, up from the current two months.
Once again, we see in Mississippi a sad case of “right to life” advocates whose concern for the unborn appears to evaporate as soon as they’re born.
The likely result is to make abortion unsafe, illegal and even more tragic.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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