"What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?"

O RLY? How about, "Every __ minutes, our next possible leader is incarcerated, gunned down, flunked, raped, given a black eye, impregnated, refused a job, denied benefits, evicted, exposed to industrial waste from next door, and otherwise cut down by the society that presumes to tell her, or tell his/her mother, what to do"? 

It seems we have not yet finished with the ludicrous gaggle of racist billboards, springing up from coast to coast, which chastise black women for "endangering" their own race (well, they use the creepy word "species") or for depriving the world of "our next possible leader" (weirdly, they say this although Obama's mother was white). Since this gaggle refuses to fade from our visual diet just yet, I wanted to at least offer you the following as a sort of curricular complement to it* (with thanks to NNAF who pointed it out to us).

One last thing: notice the date this speech was given. Yes, 1989. "Black women endanger their unborn children" is not a new insult, and the fact that black women's challenges to it have been consistent over time and remain unsatisfied to this day speaks volumes about the intentions of those who would tell them what to do about their pregnancies.


What Can the White Man Say to the Black Woman?
By Alice Walker, address in support of the National March for Women’s Equality and Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., 22 May 1989


What is of use in these words I offer in memory of our common mother. And to my daughter.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

For four hundred years he ruled over the black woman’s womb.

Let us be clear. In the barracoons and along the slave shipping coasts of Africa, for more than twenty generations, it was he who dashed our babies brains out against the rocks.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

For four hundred years he determined which black woman’s children would live or die.

Let it be remembered. It was he who placed our children on the auction block in cities all across the eastern half of what is now the United States, and listened to and watched them beg for their mothers’ arms, before being sold to the highest bidder and dragged away.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

We remember that Fannie Lou Hamer, a poor sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, was one of twenty-one children; and that on plantations across the South black women often had twelve, fifteen, twenty children. Like their enslaved mothers and grandmothers before them, these black women were sacrificed to the profit the white man could make from harnessing their bodies and their children’s bodies to the cotton gin.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

We see him lined up on Saturday nights, century after century, to make the black mother, who must sell her body to feed her children, go down on her knees to him.

Let us take note:

He has not cared for a single one of the dark children in his midst, over hundreds of years.

Where are the children of the Cherokee, my great grandmother’s people?

Gone.

Where are the children of the Blackfoot?

Gone.

Where are the children of the Lakota?

Gone.

Of the Cheyenne?

Of the Chippewa?

Of the Iroquois?

Of the Sioux?

Of the Mandinka?

Of the Ibo?

Of the Ashanti?

Where are the children of the Slave Coast and Wounded Knee?

We do not forget the forced sterilizations and forced starvations on the reservations, here as in South Africa. Nor do we forget the smallpox-infested blankets Indian children were given by the Great White Fathers of the United States government.

What has the white man to say to the black woman?

When we have children you do everything in your power to make them feel unwanted from the moment they are born. You send them to fight and kill other dark mothers’ children around the world. You shove them onto public highways in the path of oncoming cars. You shove their heads through plate glass windows. You string them up and you string them out.

What has the white man to say to the black woman?

From the beginning, you have treated all dark children with absolute hatred.

Thirty million African children died on the way to the Americas, where nothing awaited them but endless toil and the crack of a bullwhip. They died of a lack of food, of lack of movement in the holds of ships. Of lack of friends and relatives. They died of depression, bewilderment and fear.

What has the white man to say to the black woman?

Let us look around us: Let us look at the world the white man has made for the black woman and her children.

It is a world in which the black woman is still forced to provide cheap labor, in the form of children, for the factories and on the assembly lines of the white man.

It is a world into which the white man dumps every foul, person-annulling drug he smuggles into creation.

It is a world where many of our babies die at birth, or later of malnutrition, and where many more grow up to live lives of such misery they are forced to choose death by their own hands.

What has the white man to say to the black woman, and to all women and children everywhere?

Let us consider the depletion of the ozone; let us consider homelessness and the nuclear peril; let us consider the destruction of the rain forests_in the name of the almighty hamburger. Let us consider the poisoned apples and the poisoned water and the poisoned air and the poisoned earth.

And that all of our children, because of the white man’s assault on the planet, have a possibility of death by cancer in their almost immediate future.

What has the white, male lawgiver to say to any of us? To those of us who love life too much to willingly bring more children into a world saturated with death?

Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know; it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.

To make abortion illegal again is to sentence millions of women and children to miserable lives and even more miserable deaths.

Given his history, in relation to us, I think the white man should be ashamed to attempt to speak for the unborn children of the black woman. To force us to have children for him to ridicule, drug and turn into killers and homeless wanderers is a testament to his hypocrisy.

What can the white man say to the black woman?

Only one thing that the black woman might hear.

Yes, indeed, the white man can say, Your children have the right to life. Therefore I will call back from the dead those 30 million who were tossed overboard during the centuries of the slave trade. And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging from trees.

I will recall all those who died of broken hearts and broken spirits, under the insult of segregation.

I will raise up all the mothers who died exhausted after birthing twenty-one children to work sunup to sundown on my plantation. I will restore to full health all those who perished for lack of food, shelter, sunlight, and love; and from my inability to see them as human beings.

But I will go even further:

I will tell you, black woman, that I wish to be forgiven the sins I commit daily against you and your children. For I know that until I treat your chil dren with love, I can never be trusted by my own. Nor can I respect myself.

And I will free your children from insultingly high infant mortality rates, short life spans, horrible housing, lack of food, rampant ill health. I will liberate them from the ghetto. I will open wide the doors of all the schools and hospitals and businesses of society to your children. I will look at your children and see not a threat but a joy.

I will remove myself as an obstacle in the path that your children, against all odds, are making toward the light. I will not assassinate them for dreaming dreams and offering new visions of how to live. I will cease trying to lead your children, for I can see I have never understood where I was going. I will agree to sit quietly for a century or so, and meditate on this.

This is what the white man can say to the black woman.

We are listening.


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Maybe you should ask, "Why did we make her wait so long?"

I'd wanted to write a good solid post expanding on my last one -- about why some women "wait so long" to have an abortion -- and connecting the dots to social justice. It is Martin Luther King day, after all, and while we ought to be carrying his goals of racial and economic justice in our minds every day, it always helps to describe the links aloud. But: I've been getting sick this weekend and today I woke up with puffy eyes and that underwater feeling in my head and it's making me feel dizzy. I'm going to limit this to my research summaries, because you're smart and insightful enough to connect the dots yourself, and because I can't see my keyboard very well. 

*

In 2008 researchers at ANSIRH published an unusual study of delay in obtaining abortion care [PDF]. For purposes of analysis, they divided the process into three stages -- between the first missed period and the first pregnancy test; between the first pregnancy test and the first call to an abortion provider; and between that first call and actually having the abortion -- and then identified the circumstances that were closely associated with longer time for each stage. The factors associated with delay varied based on stage. In the first stage, significant delay before the pregnancy test occurred for women who were obese, weren't sure of the date of their last period, were assessed as being in denial about pregnancy or "afraid of an abortion," abused drugs or alcohol, or had had a second-trimester abortion in the past. (A lot of these seem logical, don't they?) 

However, these were not significantly associated with delay in the second stage; rather, women had a longer stage 2 if they had had trouble obtaining MediCal (California's health insurance for low-income residents, which includes coverage for in-state abortion care), and if they had "had difficulty with their decision to terminate this pregnancy." In the third stage, delay in having the abortion itself was associated with (again) having had a second-trimester abortion in the past; having been initially referred to some other clinic than the study site; having an unsupportive partner; and having had difficulty coming up with the money to pay for an abortion. 

So logistical barriers emerge in stage 2 and 3, and especially economic ones. Social/emotional barriers are still present, but different from in stage 1. (Understandably you might delay your call to the clinic if you're having a hard time deciding what to do with your pregnancy; you might try to reconcile a reticent partner to your decision before you head to the appointment -- or your partner might be actively trying to prevent you from getting there!) 

(Additional interesting findings from the last stage: what shortened the time between calling a clinic and having an abortion? (1) Nausea and vomiting [heh, shocker]; (2) having had “difficulty deciding” to seek an abortion. That is, if a woman struggled with her decision, she was likely to have a longer time than other women between taking a pregnancy test and calling a clinic, and a shorter time than other women between calling a clinic and having an abortion.) 

*

From several of the same California researchers, a 2006 multivariate logistic regression study: "Delays in suspecting and testing for pregnancy cumulatively caused 58% of second-trimester patients to miss the opportunity to have a first-trimester abortion. Women presenting in the second trimester experienced significantly more delaying factors, with logistical delays occurring significantly more frequently for these women (63.3% versus 30.4%). Factors associated with second-trimester abortion were delay in obtaining state insurance, difficulty locating a provider, initial referral elsewhere, and uncertainty about last menstrual period." Interestingly, second-trimester abortion was associated with both having had a prior second-trimester abortion and never having had an abortion before. 

*

In 2006 the Guttmacher Institute published a study on timing and reasons for delay [PDF] as well. They broke the process into more steps, and measured median time for each. 

-From the last menstrual period to suspecting pregnancy: 33 days (which makes sense if you imagine the average 28-day cycle then add about a week for your first missed period); it was a week longer for minors than for adults (which also makes sense if you consider how irregular most young people's cycles are)

-From suspecting pregnancy to confirming pregnancy (pregnancy test or sonogram): 4 days

-From confirming the pregnancy to deciding to have an abortion: zero days

-From deciding to have an abortion to first attempting to obtain abortion services (calling to make an appointment): 2 days

-From first attempting to obtain abortion services to obtaining the abortion: 7 days

...So that's 48 days right there (and that's just adding up medians, meaning half of women have a longer delay in each of these steps), yet I think somehow a lot of people hear "seven weeks" and think that's a really long time to "wait." I saw an actual published writer write that abortions should only be legal up til six weeks because "forty-two days is plenty of time to decide to have an abortion." Reality to actual published writer, please come in. 

58% of women reported that they would have rather had the abortion sooner, and these women were asked about the reasons for the delay they experienced (women could give multiple reasons). Most commonly, these respondents said: 

-It took a long time to find out about the pregnancy: 36%

-It took a long time to decide to have an abortion: 39%

It took a long time to make arrangements: 59%. Poor women were about twice as likely to be delayed by difficulties in making arrangement. (This includes money, referrals, appointments, transportation, judicial bypass for minors, legally required waiting periods, etc.) 

Patients mentioned a lot of other reasons, including:

-As partial response to Frances Kissling's question, 0.2% stated they found out late about a fetal anomaly (but this isn't broken up by trimester or week; I still think the later abortion patients she was asking about would give this response more often). 

-Only 2% said they "didn't think it was important to have it earlier." (Granted, this doesn't include possible similar answers from the 41% of women who didn't say they'd have rather had the abortion earlier, but I imagine a lot of those 41% had theirs quite early. I wish I could see a full data set on this.) 

I highly recommend reading the rest of this article because it has a section on qualitative findings from in-depth interviews that I just couldn't do justice here. Among other things, it shares the words of women who "knew right away" that they were decided on seeking an abortion, and of  women who found it a "hard decision" and took longer to feel firm in their choice.** 

*

What about demographic characteristics? Poor women with no insurance coverage for abortion, black women, and young women are likely to have later abortions than other women. However, being poor and lacking insurance coverage disproportionately co-occur with being black and being young. In some studies, each of these effects persists even after controlling for the others; in other studies, they confound one another and only the poverty/insurance effect remains significant. 

I think you can guess what I was going to say about all that. To make a long story short: justice in healthcare access must include attention to reproductive matters. If you care about making a more just society, please express support for public funding for contraception and abortion; donate to your local abortion fund; work to reduce stigma against both abortion and pregnancy; combat racist, ageist and classist stereotypes of appropriate motherhood; and learn about domestic violence and sexual assault prevention. 

**If you want to read more about abortion decision-making, here are some articles to try [unfortunately a few only give the abstract for free]: 

2010: Kjelsvik M. Pregnant and ambivalent. First-time pregnant women’s experience of the decision-making process related to completing or terminating pregnancy – a phenomenological study. 

2005: Finer LB et al. Reasons US women have abortions: quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

1985: Faria G, Barrett E, Goodman LM. Women and abortion: attitudes, social networks, decision-making.

1984: Friedlander ML, Kaul TJ, Stimel CA. Abortion: predicting the complexity of the decision-making process. 

(And if anyone can find the following in English, let me know:) 

1999: Tornbom M et al. Decision-making about unwanted pregnancy.

1990: Ytterstad TS, Tollan A. The decision process in induced abortion. 

Want to talk about black women and abortion? Here, have some facts. (Or, I Can't Believe We Have To Say This Again.)

Edit 2: I made a couple late-night errors (swapping "birth rate" for "pregnancy rate" and writing 180% when I meant 87%) which have now been fixed, at lines marked with **. Thanks to @mjbyars for prompting a re-check. 


Hey everyone, happy Monday! How was your weekend? Mine was great, except then I read about something stupid. So, remember those Atlanta billboards reading "BLACK BABIES ARE AN ENDANGERED SPECIES"? The ones that caught the attention of the nation for being so fucking dumb and offensive?

Apparently, the first round of ads were "so well received" that the Radiance Foundation and Georgia Right to Life have decided to roll out Phase 2, namely, Operation Yet More Offensive Billboards!

You know, "Black and Unwanted" is the kind of slogan that should accompany a campaign against employment discrimination, or racially-biased adoption practices*. Do these valiant anti-racist crusaders really want to waste a good catchphrase on fallacious insinuations that black women have abortions because they don't want their children to be black? The claim is absurd.

As Anti-Anti wrote last week, people who make this argument are also making a number of inaccurate and offensive errors. Most clearly, they're saying that by having reproductive rights, black women are colluding with racists to harm "black people" (which i suppose really leaves only black men). Or that they are harming themselves, too, and that someone else knows how best to handle their lives and particular situations. There's lots of wrongheaded stuff in their position, in terms of philosophy and rights, all of which were said before; but for a fun change why don't we take a look at its factual underpinnings this go-round?

Yes, let's talk real-live, grownup statistics for a minute. The Radiance Foundation's website claims its work is needed because of the fact that 13.5% of the US population is black, yet 38.5% of the abortion-having population is black. So black women have abortions disproportionately; fair enough! But they omit several other statistics that add a lot more complexity to the situation. I even made you some pictures, so have a look:

-13.5% of the US population is black, yet 21% of the pregnancy-having population is black.

-13.5% of the US population is black, yet 30.9% of the unintended-pregnancy-having population is black.

-13.5% of the US population is black, yet 26.6% of the unintended-birth-having population is black.

-Among women facing an unintended pregnancy, 60% of black women had an abortion, compared to 50% of white women, which is not necessarily a huge difference (I couldn't calculate statistical significance from the figures available):

-Among women who gave birth, black women were 1.87 times as likely (87% likelier)** to consider the birth unintended compared to white women:

-Black women have both a higher total pregnancy rate (1.65 times as high, or 65% higher) and a higher unintended pregnancy rate** (2.79 times as high, or 179% higher) than do white women. Their intended pregnancy rate is 20% lower:

And here's a view of the overall distribution of pregnancy outcomes by race (excluding miscarriages since I didn't have that info -- though black women are at higher risk for miscarriages than white women, something like twice as much [!], so it'd be nice to get miscarriage data too for completion's sake):

So you know, I calculated all these figures using data from a 1998 Guttmacher spreadsheet, simply because it was something I already have on my computer, but today's rates and proportions are similar. (I've been having internet connection problems, but if I can get the latest data sometime this week, I'll update this post.)

The fact is, although black women have more abortions on average than white women, they also bear more children on average than white women. PLUS, they also carry more unintended pregnancies to term on average than white women do. So...maybe black women are actually extremely pro-baby!

Or -- and this is just a crazy thought, I mean really it could be anything else, it could be that black women are stupid and slutty and hate black babies and enjoy seeking abortions, it could be that Zombie Poltergeist Anthony Comstock is flushing black women's pills down the toilet, but let's just consider this idea for one moment -- maybe black women have less power on average to control their own reproductive destinies than white women do. (Maybe it's related to having worse access to safe and reliable methods of birth control, maybe it's related to being more at risk for sexual coercion, maybe it's related to having diminished resources and external support for raising a family, maybe you should have done your homework and included these on your website.) And maybe (just bear with me here), maybe THAT'S a symptom of racism that everyone should be billboarding against. Fuckers.


---
Edited this morning because I had more to say (if you don't want to see me ranting, pretend that was the end of the post):

About six months ago, the Radiance Foundation's website even claimed that "14 out of 14 clinics in Georgia are located in majority-black neighborhoods," which they must have gotten by counting up 14 clinics in majority-black neighborhoods and then stopping at 14, because the implied truth (that the same goes for 100% of the state's clinics) is categorically untrue and I can disprove it in a heartbeat. But I can't find it on the website anymore, and it's been replaced by less categorical sentences like this one: "The majority of Georgia’s abortion clinics are located in urban areas where blacks reside, which reflects the national trend (94% of all abortion clinics are located in urban areas)." This "accusation" strikes me as hilarious: do they think clinics should be located only in suburban areas? Or only in whatever urban areas are home to no black people? No shit you're going to locate your clinic in a place where many people need access to a clinic, like maybe a densely populated area! It would be fucking unjust to do otherwise. (And that's why we need clinics in the country AND the city. And in the suburbs too, of course.)

Then they say some bullshit about how therefore, the Guttmacher Institute and the rest of us are lying when we claim there's a disparity in access -- the clinic is right down the street, you'd have to be stupid not to be able to "access" it! Har har. Then they say it's "intellectually insulting" to say that women have a hard time affording birth control, since they have "more than enough money to pay the $400-5000 for an abortion."

Fuck them. Fuck them fuck them fuck them. I dare them to spend a day observing the calls that come in to an abortion fund's hotline, stories about how you're pregnant because you couldn't not buy diapers for your baby girl and you thought maybe for one month you could get her dad to wear condoms when he came around. Or whatever. Shit that people shouldn't have to deal with. Fucking Radiance Foundation and Georgia Right to Life think that just because they've got one biracial man in their midst who was lucky enough to be adopted and survive into (presumably) a healthy adult, they know just how everyone else's life is. Fuck them for not even taking the time to truly listen to people who aren't just like them. Speaking of which, here's the first news report I've seen about the new ads. It actually interviews a real live black woman who isn't on the payroll of fucking Georgia Right to Life. They should try that!



*Actually, I think there's a lot of complexity that gets erased when people talk about adoption practices, including when some pro-choicers say that antis "should adopt black children languishing in foster care" if they are so gung-ho about adoption. (A) it would suck for a kid to get adopted by an anti just to prove they were totes anti-choice enough; and (B) the majority of families in a financial position to formally adopt are white, and transracial adoption can be extremely difficult for adoptees; and also (C) it's really not as simple as whisking away a foster kid and calling him yours, or at least it shouldn't be. For a much more comprehensive perspective on this thorny issue, you can start at Harriet Jacobs' blog.

Psycho Babble

Why pro-life? Because black children deserve to eat pizza!

You know what's boring? The whole black genocide conspiracy theory. It's hardly worth talking about, except as a person of color I feel obligated to defend against such ludicrous proselytizing. I don't understand how blacks, by and large, can support affirmative action on the premise that black folks in this country need a leg up, but are horrified that there are minority funds for abortion care.

IT'S THE SAME THING!

If poor black women should not be allowed funding for abortions, neither should they be allowed funding for higher education. But heaven forbid the NAACP should stop providing scholarships, or HBCUs recruit non-black students. All hell would break loose. But if you fund an abortion for a poor black woman such that she can actually attend school, you call black babies an endangered species. Stupid.

I have pretty much come to terms with the fact that I went to a pretentious school on a hefty grant only because I checked a certain box on my application, and because the historically white institution wanted to shake things up a bit. I get that, yet it doesn't anger me. Because I have a funny sounding name, and because I went to a public school, and because I never studied Latin or ancient philosophy, most elites are wont to turn up their noses. But I was given a chance to see and do things that I had never done before, all because a nice group of white folks wrote a little mutt from Nowhere, USA, a check.

I wonder how pervasive this movement is. Not very, at least in my neck of the woods. Seems like a kooky southern/rural thing to me. But if this thing starts making serious progress on the anti front, it might indicate a poor outreach mechanism in black communities. Who knows. Do you think a change in strategy is in order?

What Do C-Sections Have To Do With Abortions? Working toward a reproductive-justice perspective

the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, environmental and economic well-being of women and girls, based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights

don't we all deserve to decide our reproductive future? 

Recently I was going through patients' charts at the end of the clinic day, and was struck by the number of times I saw "MEDICAL ISSUES: c-sections." The details would list how many and how long ago.

I'm happy and proud to be associated with a clinic that can take on patients with all sorts of medical histories. All of our patients with prior c-sections did have the abortion they sought that day. But in other places, this might not necessarily have happened.

Why? Because cesarean sections can increase your risk of placental problems in future pregnancies, and those can make an abortion more technically difficult or risky. In placenta previa, the placenta covers the cervical opening; if there is complete previa, an abortion may require a hysterotomy. In placenta accreta, the placenta is too deeply attached in the uterine wall, which can cause hemorrhage during an abortion. Hemorrhage is also a risk if the placenta is growing embedded in an old c-section scar.

All of these risks are much GREATER if the woman carries to term and goes into labor, actually! But doctors often prioritize the individual, treatment-specific risk, and not in comparison with the alternative treatment if that alternative will be under a different doctor. It happens in all specialties, I think by the nature of the medical profession.

So some doctors will say "In light of your two c-sections, we'll need you to have a special ultrasound done at the local imaging center," and a woman might pay $200 for that ultrasound and if it shows a placenta accreta, the doctor might say "I'm sorry but we don't have hospital admitting privileges at this facility" and refer you to a hospital, and the hospital will say "We don't allow abortions at this facility," and the nearest non-Catholic hospital is three hundred miles away, or the nearest abortion clinic that is also an ambulatory surgical center may say "we can provide your procedure but must charge an additional $300 high-risk fee," and at some point the woman will run out of time and out-of-pocket funds and be stuck with a pregnancy that is more dangerous to her than the abortion she was seeking in the first place.

I tell you all of this as one example of why birthing rights are an abortioneers' issue. Even those of us who expect to never want children should care -- and many of us already do! -- about unnecessary c-sections and the right to attempt vaginal labor. You already know that reduce the c-section rate (which is triple what it ought to be in the US) will improve the health of birthing women and their children; it will also improve access to abortion care.

And I tell you that as one example of the interrelationships that "reproductive justice" is concerned with. Here's another:

Under the newly-passed health insurance reform law, immigrants have to wait five years before they can be eligible for insurance on the public exchange (yes, all immigrants, not just the undocumented who were used as the boogeyman to restrict coverage). Yet, as Public Health Doula explains, in some states with underfunded "pregnancy Medicaid," this means that pregnant women will suffer unhealthy pregnancies and give birth to less-healthy children -- who we'll then turn around and fully insure because they're American citizens, even though their care will now be costlier because we couldn't be bothered to care for their mothers.

Then there is the cruelty with which pregnant women are
-thrown in jail for struggling with a drug addiction (when many detox centers turn away pregnant women because of the liability!);
-arrested for falling down the stairs while ambivalent about their pregnancies (after a doctor violates confidentiality and a nurse lies about you to police, natch);
-detained in a hospital to compel them to follow bedrest orders;
-jailed for being HIV positive;
-forced to remain handcuffed to the bed while giving birth. If you live in Phoenix, Arizona, your sheriff publicly prides himself on the shackles thing, as well as on denying inmates pregnancy care and delaying emergency care that would have saved an infant's life.

What about those who can't even get pregnant? Lesbian or single women barred from assisted reproduction (adoption too), or women who can't get the endocrine-disruptor-spewing factories out of their neighborhoods?

And don't forget that until the 1970s, some states continued to perform unconsented sterilization -- the "Mississippi appendectomy" -- on women of color, poor women, and disabled women because they were presumed bad parents and bad genetic stock. That may be illegal today, but we still have lawmakers proposing to offer substantial-yet-insulting amounts of money to poor women to be sterilized (Brilliant! Why didn't we think of this before!) while white women's large families get the fascinated media treatment. We all have the right to have children, yet not even Nadya Suleman has experienced contempt like the average black mother of four black children (but did you know black women are far likelier to be infertile than white women?).

So there you have it. Just a few examples off the top of my head of why my commitment to abortion care goes hand-in-hand with concern for the rest of the spectrum of reproductive needs, rights, decisions, and battles. We all have our own expertise and area of advocacy, but together we can defend all women's right to decide whether, when and how to parent.

Please also check out this awesome article on black women's complicated relationship with fertility control by Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body; and these two papers explaining the origin, significance, and priorities of this "Reproductive Justice" business, courtesy of Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and SisterSong, two of the coolest grassroots groups around.

Black People are Endangered

Race seems to be a reoccurring them on the blog lately. I have touched on the relationship between reproductive choice and race in a few of my blogs. However, it’s a subject that I have avoided in my writing. I have avoided writing about it because race and racism are controversial subjects. Thus, trying to write about race as it might relate to another controversial subject like abortion feels extremely challenging to me. In my mind I have very clear thoughts about how the two issues intersect and yet I have not put forth the effort to try and relay these thoughts.

Most recently upon reading about the bill boards stating "black babies are an endangered species" in Georgia I was reminded that it’s a subject I should take the time to write about.

Black people are endangered in America. Systemic racism is rampant, and more importantly hard to identify because it is so deeply entrenched in the social fabric of this country. When slavery was abolished it abolished slavery except in prisons. There is now an obscene discrepancy between the numbers of black people incarcerated in comparison with white people. Does this have anything do directly with abortion? Not entirely. But if anti-abortion folks are going to start blaming women who practice their right to choose abortion for the danger black folks in America are in then they are misplacing blame to say the very least. I could analyze every single systemic structure in the U.S. and provide examples of racism. Institutions in this country were physically built by black people to serve white people and that origin is not completely null and void because history has progressed.

Poverty in the United States can not be isolated from race. All black people are not poor however one cannot examine poverty without taking race into account. Black people, as a collective not necessarily individuals, do have less access to institutional resources. Information is power and in this country information is controlled by people with money. For some reason white people in this country tend to have more money then black people. It might be because our (I’m white) ancestors are still benefiting from hundreds of years of profit created on the backs of enslaved Africans.

I don’t think I need to present facts to support the notion that the more money, information, and access to education one has the broader choices they have. Choices are about access. When someone needs a job they don’t have to take a job that won’t pay them their worth if they have access to other opportunities. On the other hand, if you don’t have other options you take the job regardless of what they will pay you, because you don’t have any choice. When a woman is faced with an unintended pregnancy, the choice she makes is often based on a whole bunch of life factors some of which may be related directly or indirectly to race, socio-economic factors, and culture. Race does not play a direct factor but it might be one part of the reason any person finds themselves in their current life circumstance.

I live in the south, I’ve helped provide abortion care to people in and from the south, and I’ve also helped provide other social services to people in the south. Slavery, and more importantly institutional racism is not some ancient past it has shaped the social fabric of the United States today. Any danger that black people are in is not a result of a woman, or many women, choosing to have an abortion. It’s much more likely that she chooses abortion because of her current life circumstance which very well might have a lot to do with race.

Racism kills black people of all ages, living breathing people, people with families to care for. The nature of racism, particuarly interpersonal racism is changing daily, racism affects the lives of a lot of people who do not identify as black or white. However, the results of racism in the United States cannot be reduced to blaming black women who have abortions for making personal choices about their lives and families.