Right-wing, anti-abortion organizations have launched several new offensives directed against Black women. These initiatives include establishing fake “crisis pregnancy clinics” in Black neighborhoods, attempting to build alliances with African American ministers and distributing scurrilous leaflets comparing Planned Parenthood to the KKK.
This fundamentally racist campaign targets Black women because, while representing 13 percent of the overall population, Black women receive 37 percent of the abortions performed each year.
Fake clinics
“Often the inner-city, the immigrant and minority populations are invisible when we think of the whole abortion issue,” said Peggy Hartshorn, president of Heartbeat International, which runs nearly 900 antiabortion “clinics” across the nation—almost all in mostly white suburbs.
Heartbeat last year began to establish its presence in urban centers, where abortion clinics tend to be located. “It’s only recently that we’ve realized we need to be there,” Hartshorn said.
Another similar organization, Care Net, which runs more than 1,000 suburban crisis pregnancy centers, has recently opened 19 urban centers—in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and Indianapolis. It plans to set up centers soon in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla.
“Crisis pregnancy centers” are the centers, which, similar to authentic reproductive health centers, offer free or low cost pregnancy tests. These centers advertise in student newspapers and on billboards with slogans like, “Pregnant? Need help?”
When women facing unwanted pregnancy call the centers, they are pressured by “counselors” to carry the pregnancy to term. Some crisis centers also connect pregnant women to adoption agencies or give away free baby supplies.
Of course, such services are also provided by legitimate reproductive health care providers, without the pressure and the anti-abortion propaganda.
‘Klan Parenthood’ or racist propaganda?
Anti-abortion activists have also launched a campaign to defame Planned Parenthood by describing ‘s founder, Margaret Sanger, as a racist intent on eliminating people of color. One flier, recently mailed to 10,000 homes in Waco, Texas stated, “Lynching is for amateurs,” and compares “Klan Parenthood” clinics to Nazi death camps.
It is well known among anti-racists in the reproductive rights movement that Sanger welcomed an alliance with proponents of eugenics, the racist philosophy that only genetically “superior” people should be able to reproduce. But Sanger did not herself support coerced birth control or forced sterilization of women of color.
Sanger, a nurse, was moved to political action when she experienced first hand the suffering of working-class women who attempted to end their unwanted pregnancies. She fought for women to have access to safe, legal birth control methods.
Initially a socialist, Sanger moved to the right after breaking with the working-class movement. Instead of focusing on women’s right to prevent or plan their pregnancies, as a part of the overall liberation of women within the context of the working-class struggle, she began to articulate arguments for birth control based on the idea that large families cause poverty. From this stance, she began to form an alliance with the eugenics movement.
One might imagine that the demand of access to birth control and abortion would unite all women: after all, the ability to become pregnant would appear to be a nearly universal characteristic of being born female.
However, racism and class status affect how women experience their reproductive abilities.
In the early days of the birth control movement, upper-class women wanted to limit family size in order to pursue higher education and professional careers. For working-class women, unwanted pregnancies could prevent them from caring for the children they already had, and force them into the back alley for illegal abortions, leading in many cases to permanent injury or death.
Before abortion was legalized by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, Black and Latina women accounted for 80 percent of the illegal abortions performed in New York.
One way in which birth control has been used in a genocidal way directed against Black women and other women of color is through forced sterilization and dumping of low quality birth control pills in oppressed communities.
The struggle against forced sterilization continues; however, Planned Parenthood and other comprehensive providers of women’s health care services have not been implicated in instances of forced sterilization.
Certainly, to compare Planned Parenthood—an organization that today is often the only provider of comprehensive women’s health services in inner city neighborhoods—to the KKK, is outrageous.
Black women under capitalism
Abortion is always a personal choice made by an individual woman in the context of her own life.
It is still worth asking—what conditions lead Black women to choose abortions at a rate so disproportionate to their representation in the general population? The impact of racism and capitalism cause the life conditions that lead African American women to terminate unplanned pregnancies at such a high rate.
For Black women, lower-wage and less-secure jobs are much more common than for white women.
Most Black women workers toil in technical, sales and administrative support jobs. The majority of these jobs do not pay a living wages, may be temporary and rarely offer a full range of benefits such as health care. (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, 1996)
Another primary factor that cannot be ignored is the racist criminal justice system that leads to high incarceration rates for African American men, the partners of Black women and fathers of Black children.
Reproductive rights
Under capitalism, working-class women, especially women of color, are denied their reproductive rights as a result of poverty and racism. For Black women in the United States, infant mortality rates are 13.5 deaths per 1,000 births, while the overall U.S. infant mortality rate is 6.7. Under the socialist system in Cuba, the rate is 5.8.
All women need reproductive rights. This means not only the right to terminate or prevent unwanted pregnancies, but also the right to choose to have children and raise those children under decent conditions.
Reproductive rights include access to pre-natal care, adequate nutrition, housing, healthcare for the entire family and a living wage job or income.
We need to fight for these rights each and every day. But the capitalist system profits from the racist and sexist super-exploitation of African American women. Only socialism can permanently create the conditions that will ensure reproductive rights for all women.
