Abortion Laws in Texas and Women of Color

Occasionally there will be a news headline that perfectly aligns with a project I am working on or a topic I had been especially interested in at the time. It’s almost like the gods of chaos and evil manipulated the stars into alignment for this blog post. Truly what are the chances that right as I choose to discuss the healthcare system and how it affects women of color, Texas decides to strip away the freedom of choice from women in their state.

There are a lot of obvious frustrations that came with this news. The consequences of this action are very frightening. The criminalization of abortions not only leads to unwanted children and potentially life threatening situations, but also the inspection of miscarriages. Women all over this country have been arrested and sent to prison after the state thought that there was evidence proving that they had somehow caused their miscarriage, making this already traumatic experience that much harder. One Alabama woman in 2019 was indicted for manslaughter after being shot in the stomach and losing her 5 month pregnancy. This is happening all the time in states that have harsh abortion laws. Another woman, also in Alabama, took half a valium while pregnant to help her sleep. When traces of the drug showed up in her bloodstream (the baby’s tests came back clear) she was facing 10 years of prison time for endangerment and her kids were placed in the custody of her ex-husband without so much as a hearing.

All of this is to say there are very real repercussions to this abortion ban apart from the obvious that get mentioned all the time. White women on twitter have been yelling about their fears of the United States turning into a Handmaid’s Tale. I saw a Tik Tok created by user @rynnstar that recently was able to put into words something that I have thought about every time this issue has been brought up. Wealthy White women will always be able to have access to abortions. Bills like these tend to overwhelmingly affect women of color. Additionally, the things written about in The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t come from fiction. Things that happened in that story have been happening to women of color globally, and in America for hundreds of years. @Rynnstar brings up the point that a lot of dystopian fiction written by white people is just taking actual tragic events that happen to black and brown individuals and imagining that they were happening to white people.

This makes me wonder if violence against women of color has been so normalized that the only way for mainstream media and culture to really empathize with it is to place themselves in these stories. Once these things happen to white people in plotlines, and laws like the one in Texas threaten white bodies, all of a sudden there is an uproar and people begin to actually empathize with the women who are facing these issues.