The anti-abortionists’ cynical ploy

JUST WHEN you thought they could sink no lower, the anti-abortion right has twisted history in producing an ugly new attack on women's reproductive freedom. Anti-choice conservatives have launched a series of new efforts that claim legal, safe abortion poses the threat of genocide to African Americans.

Georgia Right to Life, in collaboration with other anti-choice groups, recently erected dozens of billboards in Atlanta emblazoned with the slogan "Black children are an endangered species."

In their propaganda, these groups are hinting at the United States' long-buried history of the abuse of women of color's reproductive rights in an effort to gain Black support. But they ignore both the devastating effects of restricted access to fertility control on women of color and the active participation of Black and Puerto Rican women in the fight to secure abortion rights.

The anti-abortion campaign combines misinformation, hollow references to the civil rights movement, and outright lies to assert that "abortion is the tool [racists] use to stealthily target blacks for extermination."

For instance, Georgia Right to Life's Web site Georgia Right to Life's Web site states that all of Georgia's abortion facilities are located in "urban areas where Blacks reside." In reality, as the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective points out, only four of Georgia's 15 abortion facilities are located in predominantly Black areas, defined as home to 50 percent or more Black residents.

Georgia state legislators are echoing this sort of misinformation with an absurd bill that targets Georgia abortion providers for supposedly "soliciting" women of color to have abortions. Currently under discussion in the Georgia House of Representatives, HB 1155 would also ban abortions chosen on the basis of the fetus' or a parent's race, gender or "color."

In other words, the bill "protects" against practices that are completely unproven to exist. If passed, the bill may endanger abortion providers' ability to supply information about their services and jeopardize doctor-patient confidentiality. But already, the legislation serves as propaganda to promote the conspiracy theory that abortion rights advocates are racists.

GEORGIA IS an important battleground in abortion access because, as SisterSong.net explains, many neighboring states have fewer abortion facilities, and "in the South census region, where Georgia is located, 21 percent of women having abortions traveled at least 50 miles, and 10 percent traveled more than 100 miles. Mississippi has only one clinic that is opened twice a week."

The distances Southern women travel to procure an abortion casts doubt on whether abortions for Black women performed in Georgia are all performed for Black women who live in Georgia. And factors such as improved access to contraception explain recent declines in the African American birth rate in Georgia.

More importantly, the fact that women across the South, including women of color, go to great lengths to access abortions debunks the insulting suggestion that abortion providers "dupe" Black women into having unwanted abortions.

Georgia Right to Life and their allies also cite the fact that 40 percent of all Black pregnancies end in abortion to justify saying that Black abortion rates represent a "human crisis." But they don't mention that four in every 10 unwanted pregnancies across the U.S. end in abortion or that 35 percent of all women in the U.S. will have had an abortion by the time they reach age 45.

Nationally, African American women choose abortion at a rate three times higher than that of white women. But African American women's access to birth control as well as prenatal care, nutritional information and supplements and other vital resources remain limited by deep inequalities in the provision of health care services and education.

Thus, Black women die from complications during pregnancy four times as often as their white counterparts, and mortality rates within the first year of life for Black infants are twice that of white infants.

As the Guttmacher Institute documents, 75 percent of women who state their reasons for terminating a pregnancy site a lack of income to care for a child. Income and employment inequality brings a particularly heavy burden to bear of Black women and mothers. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes:

Unemployment among Black women 20 and older has risen by more than four percentage points since the beginning of the recession, bringing their total unemployment rate up to more than 11 percent--which is 75 percent higher than for white women in the same age range...

A recent report found that 90 percent of Black children are part of families that will use food stamps by the time they are 20 years old. All told, 40 percent of Black children live in poverty, according to the government's official statistics.

On March 9, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on a new study by "a leading economic research group" that found that "even in their prime working years, [single Black women's] median wealth amounts to only $5." The article goes on to explain:

The recession has hit single mothers especially hard. According to a recent report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research and the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, more than four out of 10 families headed by single mothers in Pittsburgh, and more than one in three in Pennsylvania, live in poverty.

In Pittsburgh and across the country, the financial burdens of single parenthood fall mostly on women, but black women are more likely to endure the work and responsibility of raising children on their own.

Rather than propose investment in urgently needed jobs programs and services to poor Black communities to address these circumstances, however, anti-abortion conservatives prefer to attack Black women's access to abortion services.

As the national coordinator of SisterSong and a lifelong advocate of reproductive rights commented:

It is very hard to persuade African American women in the city of Atlanta that this legislation headlined by rural white Republicans is truly about saving black or South Asian children. These are the same legislators when we look at their voting records that have fought against improving our schools, getting guns off the streets, getting children in the SCHIP program--I mean, these are not people whose votes indicate that they care about children of color once they're here.

By contrast, grassroots campaigns for abortion rights have consistently viewed abortion as a part of the larger fight for women's full reproductive rights--every woman's freedom to choose when and whether to carry a pregnancy to term, and the right to the resources she needs to raise the children she has.

STEERING CLEAR of engaging with any real data about abortions actually performed in Georgia, let alone the attitudes and lived experiences of women seeking abortions in Georgia, the anti-abortion right is instead exploiting a dark U.S. history of attacks on the reproductive rights of women of color in order to make their case.

Their propaganda uses Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, as a straw woman for the whole of the reproductive rights movement. Sanger did, in fact, ally herself with eugenicists in her campaign to bring birth control facilities to poor communities, particularly in the South.

But Sanger herself could hardly be blamed for the entirety of the racist eugenics movement, which sought to "purify" society by encouraging reproduction among the "fittest" (white middle- and upper-classes) and restrict reproduction among the poor and communities of color.

In the 1920s and '30s, 21 states passed laws to give incentives for white reproduction or to punish women of color for so-called illegitimate pregnancies and births. In the 1930s, an estimated 20,000 women of color were sterilized against their will.

Nor could Sanger's approach to promoting birth control represent or negate the work of women and men nationwide who worked to legalize and promote family planning resources. The National Association for Colored Women, 150,000 to 200,000 strong in this period, acted as a network for sharing information about contraceptives.

In addition, the Socialist Party advocated birth control as a precondition for women's equality, and Hubert Harrison, one of the leading figures of Black radicalism in Harlem and a pioneer of street-corner soap-box oratory, used to bring crowds of thousands to rapt attention in the streets of Harlem, among other things defending the need for birth control as a woman's right.

In the 1950s and '60s, the language of eugenics was replaced by theories of a post-war "population time bomb" that coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement. Propelled in part by reaction to Black mobilization and self-activity, the theory scapegoated Black women for supposedly having too many illegitimate children and blamed Black "overpopulation" for all manner of societal problems, including crime and poverty.

Even LBJ's "war on poverty" incorporated efforts to move family planning clinics into poor communities of color, motivated in part by assumptions that communities of color had a social responsibility to limit their reproduction. But the methods of contraception on offer--mostly admonitions about abstinence or offers of hysterectomy--failed to meet the demands of these communities.

Loretta Ross notes in Abortion Wars that in 1965, when family-planning clinics moved into Louisiana, Black women were six times more likely than white women to sign up for contraception. But, she writes, "when contraceptives were not available and abortion was illegal, septic abortions were a primary killer of African American women. One study estimated that 80 percent of deaths caused by illegal abortions in New York in the 1960s involved Black and Puerto Rican women."

At the same time, Black, Latina and Native American women faced sterilization without their consent on a mass scale. No legal efforts to institute sterilization as a punishment of illegitimate births ever became law, but sterilization was frequently imposed without consent in hospitals or elected as the only option of women desperate to avoid pregnancy.

As Sharon Smith relates in Women and Socialism, "In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor Black teenagers were sterilized each year in Alabama. A 1970s study showed 25 percent of Native American women had been sterilized and that Black and Latina married women had been sterilized in much greater proportions than married women in the population at large."

Some Black radical men in the civil rights and Black power movements opposed abortion, seeing it only as a government-sponsored effort at limiting Black reproduction. But where men's protests succeeded in shutting family planning clinics, Black women campaigned to reopen them. Women of color organized themselves in feminist groups both outside of and within larger organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to defend, among other things, the concept of abortion as a part of social uplift.

Though largely unsuccessful in SNCC, women actually won over many men originally opposed to abortion and birth control in other groups. The Black Panther Party and the Young Lords agitated for reproductive rights and even organized their own health centers in Black and Puerto Rican communities.

Dorothy Roberts discusses a more recent backlash against Black reproduction. In the 1980s and '90s, Black women faced prosecution for having children while addicted to drugs, particularly crack cocaine, far more often than white women.

These prosecutions, which frequently resulted in children being removed from their mother's custody, targeted Black women not because they consume drugs at rates dissimilar to whites, but because toxicology screening among newborn infants is conducted almost exclusively at facilities that primarily serve communities of color.

The high-profile hysteria over "crack babies" coincided with drastic cuts to programs like welfare and drug rehabilitation services that were justified in distinctly racist terms, and which also perpetuated the conditions that lead people to get and stay addicted to drugs.

THE ONGOING contempt of conservatives toward poor families of color was on full display in January as South Carolina Lt. Gov. André Bauer compared free school lunches to feeding animals, complaining to press that such practices only encourage "breeding."

Trent Franks, a Republican representative from Arizona, where a bill similar to Georgia's HB1155 recently passed, went so far as to tell blogger Mike Stark that the effect of women's legal right to abortion is more damaging to African Americans than slavery was.

He pointed out that slavery is something "we should look back on...with criticism...And yet today, half of all Black children are aborted. Far more Black children, far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery."

Franks' comments obviously belittle the subjugation of millions of people under a cruel regime of forced labor, brutal violence and denial of even the most basic human rights by comparing centuries of slavery with women's ability to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

But moreover, the millions who perished on slave ships--chained in place among living and dead bodies and made to languish in squalor during months of travel--were all living human beings, and their suffering is not comparable to the termination of pregnancies. The vast majority of U.S. abortions take place within the first eight weeks of pregnancy, before a fetus even develops the ability to feel pain.

But it's also worth noting that U.S. slavery entailed its own assault on women's bodily rights--commodifying slave women's reproduction and relying in part on the routine practice of rape as a method of discipline and control to add to the reproduction of slaves as chattel.

A former slave named Lizzie Williams described how pregnant slaves were disciplined in a way that exemplifies how slave owners treated the women who bore future generations of slaves: "Dey would dig a hole in de ground just big 'nuff fo' her stomach, make her lie face down an' whip her on de back to keep from hurtin' de child."

From the days of slavery to the present, those in power have sought to control Black women's reproduction, at times curtailing their right to avoid or end pregnancies, at other times punishing and restricting Black reproduction. Alongside the twists and turns of official policy, institutionalized racism has devalued Black motherhood and neglected Black women, children and families.

But where racist abuse of women's bodies and rights has regularly been enforced through official channels of power, access to birth control and abortion rights have been won through the arduous struggle of black and white women and men.

Rather than oppose the United States' shameful history of racist oppression, the current legislative and organizational focus on the "crisis" of Black women's abortions merely pastes a fresh face onto the same project of controlling the reproductive choices of women of color.