Let's talk about abortion

Issue #483 The Choice Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Sometimes - too many times, actually - the issue of abortion gets mischaracterized as only a female issue. Which then gets mischaracterized as an issue that only affects women. Which then gets mischaracterized as an issue that therefore should only matter to women because only women can get pregnant and it’s their fault if they got saddled with a baby they didn’t want or can’t handle or whatever. Because God says she has to keep it, and that’s that.

Except that it’s not. And quit lyin’ on God like that. I suspect He doesn’t like it.

Let’s start with the fact that abortion is an issue that affects Black women disproportionately more than it does white women by a wide margin, even though you wouldn’t know it judging by the majority of angry white faces you see at both pro and anti-abortion rallies. Judging by what you’re likely to see on the news, wherever you happen to get your news, it looks like it’s most often white folks who are raising all this sand about the unborn.

And yet, according to the Guttmacher Institute, “the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women.”

This holds true even when controlling for income: At every income level, black women have higher abortion rates than whites or Hispanics, except for women below the poverty line, where Hispanic women have slightly higher rates than black women.

This means that not just Black women but Black families are disproportionately affected by the issue of abortion. For that matter, entire Black communities. When viewed through the rational (not tainted by perverse or otherwise twisted and misguided religious views) prism that women should be entitled to control over their own bodies, and then factor in that Black women exercise an extraordinary amount of justifiable control and power within Black communities for a wide range of sociocultural and socioeconomic reasons, the threat to Black communities of destroying that control becomes clear. You threaten a Black woman’s body and you’re threatening the family that comes attached that is attached to the surrounding and extended family and community.

Let’s also remember that the issue is not just abortion itself, but the entirety of women’s health issues. Miscarriage, which is the body’s way of rejecting a fetus, naturally occurs in about 20% of pregnancies, and often an abortion (medical or surgical) is the only way to help the woman completely and safely expel the dead cells.