Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Demographics of Abortion: Race, Poverty and Choice
According to Guttmacher, “The proportion of abortion patients who were poor increased by almost 60%—from 27% in 2000 to 42% in 2008.” As you might expect, the profile of the abortion patient is disproportionately poor, as well as disproportionately Black or Latina.
In the study, poor women’s “relative abortion rate was more than twice that of all women in 2008… and more than five times that of women at 200% or more of the poverty level.” In addition, Black and Latina women were significantly overrepresented, though no one racial group made up the majority. Generally, these proportions remained stable between 2000 and 2008. The “abortion index” rate of Black women appears to have moved somewhat closer to the national average.
It’s not easy to put those statistics in perspective after seeing how race has played into the anti-abortion agendas of lawmakers who evidently don’t think women of color are exploited enough when it comes to reproductive health.
Recently, the Georgia legislature tried to inject a civil-rights meme into a bill that would criminalize an attempt to “coerce” a woman into obtaining an abortion on the basis of race. The legislation cleverly hijacks the rhetoric of the reproductive justice movement to promote interference with the right to choose for all women, especially for poor women of color. (h/t Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Jodi Jacobson)
Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, explained her organization's interest in mixing identity politics with a reactionary ideology: “The black community is being targeted by abortionists,” she told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The abortion industry wants us to believe that we have a greater need. Why should an abortion doctor be able to take a baby because it is black?”
The loaded conspiracy-theory language—in addition to totally ignoring the agency that Black women have struggled to assert over their bodies for generations—masks underlying failures of the health care system. In Black communities, economic disadvantage often overlaps with a lack of reproductive health and family-planning resources and a broken medical infrastructure, leaving many to face unintended pregnancy with few or no options.
In response to the media's racialization of anti-abortion activism, Melissa Gilliam, a professor at the University of Chicago who chairs Guttmacher's board of directors, explained in an op-ed that it's not that Black women are being preyed upon by “abortionists,” but structural racism has eroded their choices and opportunities more globally--which in turn exacerbates historical tensions surrounding the suppression of black women's reproductive freedom.
The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community.There are no easy solutions to these complex challenges. Innovative strategies to reduce entrenched poverty, improve education, and broadly reform health care all will have to be part of the longer-term approach.
Compare that framework to the cruel argument that abortion rates can be “fixed” by restricting access to a basic component of reproductive health care, while punishing poor women of color in the process.
Now we know that the link between poverty and abortion is deepening, just as state lawmakers are pushing laws to limit access to abortion, and while some in Washington have worked to tighten abortion restrictions through health care reform. Maybe there's a conspiracy at work here after all: a convergence of political agendas that quietly seek to maintain America's medical apartheid.
- Posted in
12 Comments so far
Show AllThanks to Obamacare and the anti-abortion gag in it along with Obama's likely pick for SCOTUS, demographics won't be relevant.
With the population of the human race pushing 7 billion...
It's simple, either we control our population, or nature will. If you think abortion is bad, just think about how bad things are going to get if nature has to 'cull the herd'.
Speaking gently, how would these stats compare to the same data gathered at Hull House by Jane Addams, or by Margaret Sanger in the 1920s? (who then sadly flirted with Eugenics).
Although I am pro choice, I regard myself as a lettered social scientist and can smell ideological spin upon research interpretation. A fair clue is the scapegoating of some party for the unfairness of life - which some see as a game, the object of which is to figure out the object of the game. A remark attributed to Abe Lincoln is: "God sure must love poor people, He made so many of them." Abe was one of them.
Logically, the above strikes me as the reverse of the old saw: "Not tonight dear, I have a headache." It implies: "Tonight dear, because I'm ovulating. But if you relieve my oppressive (racist) poverty, I will NOT have sex and get pregnant." No sale to me, a Lefty.
Many people are outraged by a "necessary" connection between Poverty and Crime. And they can point to data that supports the charge. This offends folks from large families who grew up in poverty but not one family member transgressed the law; some clawed their way to an education, and so forth.
The link we Americans are ignoring is that between Christian murder of OBGYNs who performed abortion, and the specialty choice of medical students, who do not want their future children "followed to school". In short time, availability of safe abortion became the victim of domestic Terrorism. "Jesus wants me for a SWAT Team, to snipe for him each day."
Trylon
I think it would be fairly difficult to make accurate comparisons with abortion rates in the 1920's as most were performed in secret and the majority of those who had aborrtions would never admit to it, even to a "researcher" such as Sanger.
I'm glad someone brought this up about abortion. It's been said by people that abortion is "genocide" against black people and plays into black nationalist/supremacist passions i.e. "White people don't want us to outbreed them, because when we do, we shall overrun!"
Meanwhile, telling black women they cannot have abortions is horribly sexist in addition to being racist, and the same people saying that don't really want any woman doing anything but making babies and performing sexual/domestic duties.
Prevention is crucial in regard to this issue. Sex education is vital and must stress that both male and female use something reliable to prevent conception when they have sex. They cannot rely on either the girl/woman or the boy/man using something as is sometimes shown in the movies or T.V. shows.It must be both. There must be a back-up contraceptive in case one fails. Another important part of the education must include knowledge of the enormous responsibility and life change an unwanted pregnancy impacts on both the male and female. This is not as many unmarried clergy call "a little inconvenience" for either party. It is a lifetime of hard work, many believe it is the hardest job on earth, Hundreds of thousands of dollars, emotional, physical, psychological, sacrifices. For poor people, it could mean the difference between food security and hunger, health care and disease, shelter or the street, education or ignorance, a living wage job or a minimum wage- live with your parent- job, for you and your off-spring for a lifetime. For the female there are the health issues that can arise if pregnancy complications are a result of poor nutrition, no prenatal care, or just imperfect nature. It is the very people who want to force girls and women who have a crisis pregnancy to give birth or go to prison who don't want to help them with food stamps, affordable health care,affordable education, day care ect.
Teach the children all they need to know, to make the right choice about sex and procreation.
It's common for anti-feminists from the left, center and right, to say that abortion is a "white middle-class women's issue." White middle-class women know different. We can usually find a way to control our bodies, before and after pregnancy. We are adamant about abortion because we understand it is the key to women's freedom everywhere. I am so bloody tired of being told white middle class feminsts are racist.
The fact that the Obama Administration hijacked abortion rights to get that toxic piece of "Obamacare" legislation passed is a total disgrace.
Update: To clarify--Gilliam was chair of the board at the time the article was written, but she is now a regular board member.
The FDA can't protect our food and drug supply so they try to deny Hospice patients the right to concentrated morphine.
Nobody would use that foul tasting stuff for recreational purposes.
My mom had two abortions in the 1930's, before I was conceived. She spared two from birth into grinding poverty. Ask a female fetus in Congo if she wishes to be birthed into famine, raised in fear and hunger, gang raped at age nine, mutilated with machetes, and executed by having a rifle fired up her vagina.
Ask any thinking human if he'd live his life again..
Ask any thinking fetus if it wishes to be birthed into this kind of nation. Ask any thinking adult if it would live its useless, stupid, empty life again. Women who love CHILDREN abort their fetuses. Anyone who loves children would never demand they live through this awful life
"The death of a child is never really to be regretted, considering how much he has escaped." (Thomas Hardy)
godistwaddle-That's an incredibly fatalistic, misanthropic viewpoint you have there. Yes life is too hard for most people, but it doesn't have to be that way, and there are measures we can take to improve the human condition.