U.S. abortion overturn would affect minorities most, data shows

Black women and Hispanics living in conservative states that limit access to abortions are much more likely to have one than white women.

According to The Associated Press statistics, minority women will be the ones who suffer if the U.S. Supreme courts allows states to ban or further restrict abortions.

The potential impact on minority women became all the more clear on Monday with the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting the court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn the landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Although the draft decision is not yet final, it caused shockwaves across the country. Overturning the Roe v. Wade decision would give states authority to decide abortion’s legality. Nearly half of those likely to ban abortion, mainly in the South or Midwest, will do so quickly.

These numbers are clear when it comes to the effects on women from minority groups. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (which tracks health statistics), Mississippi is home to 44% of Mississippi’s population and 81% of Mississippi’s abortions.

In Texas, they’re 59 per cent of the population and 74 per cent of those receiving abortions. Alabama has a 35% and a 69% rate. According to the Louisiana Health Department minorities account for 42 percent of the population. They also make up about 72 percent of those who receive abortions in Louisiana.

“Abortion restrictions are racist,” saidCathy Torres is an organizing manager at Frontera Fund in Texas, which helps women to pay for abortions. “They directly impact people of colour, Black, brown, Indigenous people … people who are trying to make ends meet.”

Why such wide-ranging differences? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive Director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund which provides financial support to women seeking abortion. saidIn states with strict abortion laws, women of color often live in areas that restrict their access to healthcare and have few options for effective birth control. Ineffective or insufficient sex education is a common problem in schools.

These women, often poor, will have a harder time travelling to distant areas of the country to end pregnancies and raise children. said Roberts, who is Black and once volunteered at Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

“We’re talking about folks who are already marginalized,” Roberts said.

Amanda Furdge, a Black woman, was one such woman. In 2014, Furdge was a single college student who was unemployed and had already raised one child when she learned she was pregnant with her second. She said she didn’t know how she could afford another child.

She’d had two abortions in Chicago. Furdge said that she was able to get abortion providers in Chicago. said. Now she was in Mississippi after having fled an abusive relationship. Insisting on the advertising, she went first to a crisis pregnancy clinic that tried to get her out of having an abortion. When she finally found an abortion clinic, she was far too late to have the procedure.

She’s not surprised by the latest news on the Supreme Court’s likely decision. Most people who aren’t affected don’t consider the stakes.

“People are going to have to vote,” saidFurdge, a 34-year-old mother, is enjoying raising her son, now seven years old. She also continues to support women having the right of choice. “People are going to have to put the people in place to make the decisions that align with their values. When they don’t, things like this happen.”

Torres saidHistory shows that anti-abortion laws have always been written to hurt low-income women. She pointed out the Hyde Amendment of 1980 that prohibits federal funds being used for abortions, except in very rare cases.

She also mentioned the 2021 Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of gestation. She lives near the U.S.-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley. To obtain an abortion, women must travel. They also have to pass through border patrol checkpoints in which they are required to reveal their citizenship status. said.

Regardless of what legislators say, Torres insisted, the intent is to target women of colour, to control their bodies: “They know who these restrictions are going to affect. They know that, but they don’t care.”

But Andy Gipson, a former member of the Mississippi Legislature who is now the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race had nothing to do with passage of Mississippi’s law against abortion after the 15th week. This law is currently before the Supreme Court as a direct challenge against Roe v. Wade.

Gipson is a Baptist minister who was white. said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have an “innate value” that starts at conception. He said Mississippi legislators tried to protect babies and women by restricting abortion. said.

“I absolutely disagree with the concept that it’s racist or about anything other than saving babies’ lives,” saidGipson is a Republican. “It’s about saving lives of the unborn and the lives and health of the mother, regardless of what colour they are.”

Lynn Fitch is a white Republican who claims that forcing women have babies will lead to hardships. said it is “easier for working mothers to balance professional success and family life” than it was 49 years ago when Roe was decided.

Fitch is divorcée and often speaks about her own experience working from home while raising three kids. But Fitch grew up in an affluent family and has worked in the legal profession — both factors that can give working women the means and the flexibility to get help raising children.

That’s not the case for many minority women in Mississippi or elsewhere. Advocates say in many places where abortion services are being curtailed, there’s little support for women who carry a baby to term.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and people in low-wage jobs often don’t receive health insurance. While women can sign up for Medicaid while pregnant, coverage ends soon after the birth.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S. According to the March of Dimes black infants were twice as likely to die in Mississippi during their first year of life than white infants.

The Associated Press analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data across the country and found that fewer Black women and Hispanics have health insurance, particularly in states with strict abortion restrictions. Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and Georgia are examples of states where at least 16 percent of Black women, and 36 percent of Latinas, were uninsured in 2019. These are some of the highest rates of such ineligibility in the country.

In states that lack effective education programs regarding reproduction, problems are made worse. Mississippi law requires that sex education be taught in public schools to emphasize abstinence and avoid the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. Instructors are not permitted to discuss abortion and may not show how to use condoms.

Tyler Harden, the Mississippi director of Planned Parenthood Southeast is a 26 year-old Black woman. She had an abortion five years back and that experience drove her to support pregnant women while protecting abortion rights.

She said when she was attending public school in rural Mississippi, she didn’t learn about birth control. Instead, a teacher stuck clear tape on students’ arms. The girls were told to put it on another classmate’s arm, and another, and watch how it lost the ability to form a bond.

“They’d tell you, `If you have sex, this is who you are now: You’re just like this piece of tape, all used up and washed up and nobody would want it,”’ Harden said.

She knew that she wanted an abortion when she was 21 and became pregnant. Harden was in her last semester at college, without a job or place to call home after graduating.

She saidShe was made to feel shame and fear, as she did during sex classes. She went to the clinic and was told she would be able to have sex with doctors. said protesters told her she was “`killing the most precious gift”’ from God and that she was ”`killing a Black baby, playing into what white supremacists want.”’

Harden’s experience is not uncommon. The abortion movement has often used racial language to describe the fight against abortion.

Outside the only abortion clinic operating in Mississippi, protesters hand out brochures that refer to abortion as Black “genocide” and say the late Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of eugenics, “desired to eradicate minorities.” The brochures compare Sanger to Adolf Hitler and proclaim: “Black lives did not matter to Margaret Sanger!”

The Mississippi clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood itself denounces Sanger’s belief in eugenics.

This argument is not exclusive to white people. Alveda, an evangelist and a niece to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the Black opponents to abortion. They have used abortion for decades as a means of eradicating people of their race.

Tanya Britton is a former president for Pro-Life Mississippi. She often drives three hours to go outside of Jackson’s abortion clinic, praying. Britton is Black and she said it’s a tragedy that the number of Black babies aborted since Roe would equal the population of several large cities. She also saidPeople are too casual when it comes to ending pregnancies.

“You just can’t take the life of someone because this is not convenient, `I want to finish my education,”’ Britton said. “You wouldn’t kill your two-year-old because you were in graduate school.”

But state Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson, who is Black and a mother, suggested there’s nothing casual about what poor women are doing. Receiving little support in Mississippi — for example, the Legislature killed a proposal to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage in 2021 — they are sometimes forced to make hard decisions.

“Women are just out here trying to survive, you know?” she said. “And Mississippi doesn’t make it any easier.”