San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Alito draft perpetuates damaging racial myths
In the now-confirmed 98-page draft opinion that could overturn Roe v. Wade, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito argues that the Constitution “makes no reference to abortion,” thus the Roe decision was “egregiously wrong” and has had “damaging consequences.”
The latter can be said about the myths — rooted in right-wing propaganda about abortion and the Black population — Alito evoked in one of the draft’s footnotes.
In small print on Page 30, Alito opines that “some” Roe supporters have been “motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American
population,” and it’s because of Roe that a “highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.”
Peddling such a dangerous political fiction, without unpacking the few seeds of truth within it, only serves to further delegitimize the health care needs and experiences of Black women in America. And it puts the historically marginalized group at the center of a multi-pronged conservative power grab that has been years in the making.
“They’ve been planning this day for years,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, told me the day after the leaked Alito draft was reported by Politico. “They’ve been electing people, appointing judges, everything as part of their master plan to erode democracy and set up a new system in this country that allows for them to be — and I hate to say the dictator — but that’s the plan. It’s nothing new.”
In Alito’s footnote, he suggests a link between supporters of abortion access and those who may have wanted to “suppress the size of the African American population.”
Antiabortion advocates have long claimed the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a racist intent on eradicating Black people. It’s a purposeful oversimplification of the complicated person Sanger was. She embraced eugenics, the junk philosophy that only genetically “superior” people should reproduce, and engaged the Ku Klux Klan in conversations about birth control. But there’s no evidence that she wanted to eliminate the African American population, or supported the sickening way in which the Nazis approached eugenics.
Alito drops this incendiary reference in the footnote, without context, before ending it
with a literary wiping of his hands: “For our part, we do not question the motives of either those who have supported and those who have opposed laws restricting abortions,” he writes.
He’s equally concise in his reference to how a “disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses” in America are Black.
The most recent abortion data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is from 2019. It shows that of nearly 630,000 abortions reported by 47 states and the District of Colombia, Black women accounted for 38% of the procedures. White women accounted for 33% and Hispanic women 21%. (Unfortunately, California stopped providing abortion data to the CDC in 1998.)
When compared with Black people’s roughly 13% share of the U.S. population, the abortion statistics do show an overrepresentation.
Alito didn’t unpack the reasons why. That’s because brevity is key in perpetuating flawed narratives.
A 2017 survey by PerryUndem, a research firm that focuses on public policy issues, found that only 39% of Black women age 18 to 44 could afford birth control if they needed it that day, even at a cost of $10 or less.
The disproportionate abortion rate belies broader economic and health inequities that will only get worse in the future that Alito and his conservative colleagues on the bench envision, says Monica McLemore, a tenured professor at UCSF’s School of Nursing.
“I got very upset about that very racist talking point, that Black fetuses are overrepresented among those that are aborted without any discretion around that fact that even for Black pregnant people who want to become parents or maintain pregnancies, we already have a Black maternal health crisis,” McLemore, a reproductive justice advocate, told me. “It’s disingenuous to say we would save more Black fetuses if abortion was banned, without completing the sentence.”
Completing that sentence means looking more closely at how the draft opinion could cause the dominoes to fall on lower-income women in half the country.
There are currently 13 states with restrictive abortion laws that will go into effect if Roe is overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Nine other states have “unconstitutional postRoe restrictions” that courts may no longer be able to block in Roe’s absence. And seven more states plan to restrict abortion access to the “maximum extent permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court” if Roe is struck down.
Some states are even considering legislation that would make it illegal for women to obtain abortions in states where the endangered constitutional right remains protected, providing us a glimpse at how the far right plans to criminalize women’s bodies.
Lee saw the writing on the wall in early September, when Texas passed its six-week abortion ban except in lifethreatening situations. A few weeks later, during a special panel by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Lee bravely shared her own abortion story from the pre-Roe 1960s. Back then, she was an honor student in her teens who had never been offered a sex education class. She got pregnant and obtained what she called “a back-alley abortion in Mexico.”
Lee considered herself lucky for surviving the procedure.
“A lot of girls and women in my generation didn’t make it,” she said last fall. “In the 1960s, unsafe septic abortions were the primary killer of African American women.”
In Louisiana, one of the “trigger-law” states, my mom, Natalie Phillips, has spent the past two decades working as a family physician, ob-gyn and emergency room doctor. What she told me in response to the Alito draft echoed what both Lee and McLemore said hours earlier.
“This is about body autonomy,” she said. “We’re in a dangerous moment where that could be taken away. Honestly, Black women saw this coming a long time ago.”
Jason McDaniel, political science professor at San Francisco State University
“Voters will be looking to the mayor and looking at the (crime) situation, and that will be part of their calculation they make as to whether to support the mayor.”