We need to trust black women
In spite of the reproductive rights victory won this summer with the success of Whole Women’s Health against Texas’ HB2, abortion access remains precarious under the Trump administration, especially with his appointment of Gorsuch and the possibility of additional appointments during his presidency. While there’s a lot of rhetoric surrounding the “pro-life” anti-abortion advocates, there’s one argument I heard recently that I’ve not often encountered but which gave me pause. That argument was that abortion providers kill Black babies.
The charge that abortion providers specifically target the Black community to curb reproduction, while possibly incendiary, is not without historical basis or current statistical fact. The US has a fairly recent history of explicit eugenics programs targeting Black, Latinx, and Asian American people, as well as impoverished White people, for forced sterilization. While these explicit legal programs may no longer exist, forced sterilization of inmates occurred in the US as recently as 2010. And while White women comprise the majority of female inmates, Black women are incarcerated at twice the rate of White women, meaning that inmate sterilization also targets the Black community. In addition to this campaign of forced sterilization targeting the Black community, the CDC found in 2006 that the abortion rate among Black women was almost twice that of White women.
Given these factors, it’s certainly possible that organizations providing abortion would direct their marketing to target communities of color, and given our history of eugenics, the recent rise of overt White supremacy, and the general social antagonism towards Black people in general and Black women in particular, it’s not even unlikely. But ultimately the assertion that abortion providers and legal abortion access are to blame for the high rate of abortion among Black women is an oversimplification. The truth of the matter is that abortion is a direct result of an unintended pregnancy. While 45% of all pregnancies are unintended, the rate of unintended pregnancy is highest among Black people. So the question then becomes why are unintended pregnancies occurring at such increased rates in the Black community?
The most common reasons cited for women seeking abortions are economical: they are unable to care for a dependent based on work and/or education restraints, or they are unable to afford a dependent. This economic piece, while just the tip of the iceberg, goes a long way in explaining the disparity in abortion rates in the Black community compared with other groups. Black households on the whole are living in lowered economic status compared to Whites, who have 20 times the median income of Black households, not to mention that Black people are the second highest demographic to be living in poverty. Moreover, 25% of adult Black women live in poverty.
Another factor contributing to the rate of unintended pregnancy relates to access to health care. Black women are more likely to be uninsured, or at least they were pre-ACA: 22.4% of Black women compared to 12.8% of White women were entirely uninsured. Unintended pregnancies may result from a lack of access to birth control, particularly long term contraceptives like IUDs. Long term contraceptives are among the most effective and convenient forms of birth control. One study showed that other forms of birth control were 20 times more likely to fail than long term contraceptives. IUDs, however, are significantly more costly up-front, ranging from $500 to $1000 compared with the $15 to $50 monthly cost of oral contraceptives. This difference in price point along with the rate at which Black women are uninsured means that these effective forms of contraceptives may only be accessible to high income individuals.
Another factor is the prevalence of intimate partner violence and reproductive coercion. Black and multiracial women experience some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence: 45.7% of Black women and 53.8% of multiracial women have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner. Furthermore, experiencing intimate partner violence makes unintended pregnancy two or three times more likely to occur. This correlation is connected with the rape, fear of negotiating contraceptive use, and other forms of reproductive coercion that occur with intimate partner violence. Reproductive coercion is a means of exerting power and control by interfering with or sabotaging the contraceptives of a partner. In addition to the high at which Black women experience intimate partner violence in general, Black women are also twice as likely to experience reproductive coercion than White women.
And as illuminating as this data is, it’s also incomplete. Much of the data available regarding abortion rates, insurance coverage, poverty, etc., are not capturing data about trans and gender nonconforming individuals. And although there isn’t a wealth of information on the topic, a recent study found that trans youth experienced the same rate of unintended pregnancy as cis youth. Trans people are also nearly four times more likely to be living in poverty that cis people, compounding the factors contributing to the higher rate of abortion in the Black community.
This complexity has resulted in women of color rejecting the reproductive rights movement following Roe v. Wade and instead creating the Reproductive Justice movement. Rather than focus on a legal right to abortion pursued by reproductive rights organizations, the Reproductive Justice framework instead examines the context of people’s lived experiences and reconnects abortion to issues that impact communities of color: “issues of economic justice, the environment, immigrants’ rights, disability rights, discrimination based on race and sexual orientation, and a host of other community-centered concerns.” These issues directly affect an individual’s decision-making process, and are therefore a vital component of any movement that seeks to empower individuals making reproductive decisions. Because social justice issues and reproductive autonomy are so deeply interconnected, Reproductive Justice organizers recently partnered with the Black Lives Matter movement in recognition that the state violence experienced by Black communities is inherently connected with the autonomy of Black people to decide where and when and how to reproduce and raise families.
In order to fully confront and challenge the reality of the increased rate of abortion in the Black community, we need to meaningfully engage with the idea that we certainly have a history — and present, for that matter — of hostility to the idea of Black reproduction, while also recognizing that supporting anti-abortion rhetoric and limiting legal access to abortion does not accomplish the goal of undoing the harms of that hostility. Rather, it ignores the larger social context of Black lives and in fact robs people of their bodily autonomy in the name of addressing the state violence and hostility that Black people suffer daily in the US. We need to protect the right of access to abortion while moving beyond the rhetoric of life versus choice to fully engage with the realities of poverty, intimate partner violence, and state violence faced by the Black community that prevent individuals from exercising autonomy. As Monica Raye Simpson put it, we need “to understand that it’s time to trust Black women, and…to make real investments in Black women’s health, in quality education (including comprehensive sex education) and in faith and healthy communities.”
