Claims about race,
racism, and abortion represent one of several historical arguments recently
emphasized by abortion opponents (see,
e.g., Tracy Thomas, Misappropriating Women’s History in the Law
and Politics of Abortion, 36 Seattle
U. L. Rev. 1 (2012)). In the case of
race, activists debate the legacy left to contemporary discussion by Margaret
Sanger and the early family planning movement. But as I argue in an article forthcoming in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the politics of race immediately
before and after Roe, however, defy
any of the simple explanations on offer in current debate. For many, concerns
about abortion as a means of “black genocide” were real. Thea Rossi Barron, the
head lobbyist for the National Right to Life Committee, told me about the
assistance that Jesse Jackson offered her in lobbying for the Hyde Amendment.
Jackson worried about the ties between the movements for population control and
abortion, particularly, the sterilization abuse epidemic revealed to have taken
place in the late 1960s and 1970s. Women of color like Shirley Chisholm or Frances
Beale instead responded to concerns about black genocide by demanding both
abortion rights and protection against sterilization abuse, and many black and
Chicana women worked within the mainstream movement to reform abortion laws.
Just the same, concerns
abortion and racism reflected real social changes: the emergence of the black
power movement and its new expression of protest and dissent, the rise of a
feminist women’s health movement suspicious of the medical establishment, and
the challenges to the role of population politics in the reproductive-rights
movement. Even in the 1970s, opposing activists contested the history of race
and abortion. Abortion-rights activists reframed their cause and its history,
denying its connection to population control and stressing the importance of
self-determination for women. Abortion opponents offered a very different
historical narrative, highlighting arguments or players shared by the movements
for eugenics, population control, and abortion rights.
In dialogue with one
another, those on each side offered a highly politicized and oversimplified
account of past reproductive politics. As Khiara Bridges has shown, social
constructions of race continue to play an important role in access to
reproductive health care (see Khiara
Bridges, Reproducing
Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)).
We should not be surprised by this, given the uses of history in the abortion
debate. The full picture of the racial politics of abortion is a large and
complex one, and current debate offers little room for nuance of any kind.
