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It’s Time to Talk About Racism in the Anti-Abortion Movement
Women of colour are disproportionately impacted by restrictions to abortion – and those restrictions are fuelled by racist ideology, argues Dr Pragya Agarwal
The decision in Texas to implement a so-called “heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion after six weeks and empowers private citizens to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion after a foetal heartbeat has been detected is unscientific and inhumane.
Women don’t seem to have any agency in these decisions which deny their rights to their own body. Their bodily integrity is hindered by emotional manipulation and any rational decision on the right to abortion is skewed by pre-formed moral views enforced by society at large.
When we discuss abortion, we tend to focus solely on women’s healthcare and human rights. However, access to safe, legal abortion is not just about gender justice, but racial justice too.
Race and the Anti-Abortion Movement
The links between reproductive justice and racism are not new.
In the US in particular, racist origins of the anti-abortion movement date back to the ideologies of slavery. Just like slavery, anti-abortion efforts are rooted in white supremacy, the exploitation of black women, and placing women’s bodies in service to men.
Racism and reproductive coercion have been central to the US Government’s efforts to control population growth and to justify slavery and oppression of black women for many decades. This includes eugenics programmes that targeted women from marginalised communities during the 20th Century.
Of the 7,600 women who were sterilised by the state between 1933 and 1973, about 5,000 were African Americans. As Angela Chaplin has observed: “During the same time that Roe v. Wade granted mostly white women more bodily autonomy in the 1970s, approximately 25,000 Native American women were forcibly sterilised by the US Government — between 25 and 50% of the female population.”
There are also unmistakable links between anti-abortion campaigners and white supremacists which stem from the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory – the racist belief that rising immigration and low birth rates amongst white people are causing a crisis for the white population by ‘replacing’ the white race across America and Europe.
Its adherents believe that one ‘solution’ to prevent a so-called ‘white genocide’ is to actively canvass against women’s bodily autonomy and restrict abortion – along with incentivising procreation.
Much of extreme right-wing anti-abortion rhetoric and policies are therefore less about religion or faith, and instead increasingly based in this belief that white women need to have more white babies in order to stop the demographic decline of the white (superior) race.
Unequal Access
As well as being based in a racist ideology, barriers to accessing abortion disproportionately impact women of colour.
Medical evidence has shown that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot. Yet abortion remains heavily restricted in states across the country.
There is a long history in the US of social conservatives attacking funding available for abortions. Cuts, and so-called TRAP laws which apply a state’s standards for ambulatory surgical centres (ASCs) to abortion clinics administering pills, have forced clinics to close.
This can make reproductive healthcare inaccessible for women from minority and marginalised communities who are more likely to be poorer and dependent on Medicaid than their white peers.
Women of colour are more likely than white women to be low-income and to be enrolled in Medicaid in the US. As data from American community surveys (for women aged 15 to 44 enrolled in Medicaid) from the Guttmacher Institute shows, more than 52% of the seven million women on Medicaid and of reproductive age were women of colour. 31% are black women and 27% are Hispanic women, compared to 16% of white women.
Laws restricting late abortion also disproportionally affect women of colour. This is because women from racialised communities can struggle to access early abortion due to costs, inability to arrange time off work or childcare, as well as face social or religious stigma which can delay them getting support.
These are the women who have to choose between putting food on the table for their family or paying for an abortion – and women who, due to other systemic inequities including reduced access to contraception and sex education, experience unintended pregnancies at five times the rate of their more affluent peers.
This choice can involve pawning jewellery and personal items or scraping together money by any means possible; or continuing the pregnancy against their will and better judgement because they cannot find the money or get to a clinic in time.
Any woman who is less financially privileged and legally protected does not have similar access to choice. It is often on their bodies that abortion policies are forged – all while being continually ignored by policy-makers.
Feminism, Racism and Anti-Abortion
Some of the racialised attitudes towards abortion have historically come from within the feminist movement itself, which has led to feminist arguments being co-opted by the anti-abortion movement to further their white male supremacist aims.
Margaret Sanger, an early feminist activist for women’s reproductive rights, has faced accusations for her support of eugenics by promoting the use of contraception to control the population of minorities who she deemed “undesirables”.
In 2015, a number of Republicans campaigned to have Sanger’s bust removed from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In July 2020, the Planned Parenthood office of New York removed her name from their Manhattan clinic because of her harmful connections to a movement that believed in selective breeding and targeted people of colour, immigrants, disabled people and other vulnerable groups.
Sanger was not alone. Many of the early first-wave white feminists were against abortion. Some also supported eugenics and racial segregation.
The radical feminists Susan B. Anthony (who shares a name with an active anti-abortion advocacy group) and 19th Century suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Revolution newspaper, which included articles referring to abortion as “child murder” and “infanticide”. Editorials claimed abortion would burden both a woman’s “conscience in life and soul in death”, and were a means of exploiting both women and children.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, also quotes Elizabeth Cady Stanton saying: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States in 1849, wrote in her autobiographical sketches in 1895 that “the gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation”.
Their positions continue to be contested by many feminist groups, which claim that there are no facts or evidence that support the idea that these women were explicitly against abortion. However, these women have been adopted as poster-children for the anti-abortion movement.
They have co-opted feminist arguments by claiming that abortion is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy, whereby men can use women as playthings and discard them without any accountability.
Conservatives and Republicans continue to lay their own stake on the suffrage legacy, and the anti-abortion groups manipulate these views and choose quotes from select suffrage pioneers to bolster their claims that the anti-abortion movement is a feminist movement. They have also co-opted the Black Lives Matter rhetoric for their purposes.
Women of colour, and those on the fringes of the society, are often relegated to being a footnote in the discussion around reproductive justice. But reproductive equality can only be achieved when we take an intersectional approach to women’s autonomy and agency, recognising the impact of race and class on women’s ability to access her reproductive freedoms.
Pragya Agarwal is a behavioural scientist, author and founder of the consultancy, The 50 Percent Project. Her books ‘Sway’ (Bloomsbury) and ‘Wish We Knew What To Say’ (Dialogue) were published in 2020. Her next book ‘(M)otherhood’ (Canongate) is published on 3 June 2021