What the End of Roe v. Wade Could Mean for Black Women

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And next, the ongoing aftershocks from the social and political earthquake rocking the United States this week. That is the leak of that Supreme Court draft opinion which would overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling giving women the constitutional right to choose. Many fear this would disproportionately impact minority communities. Farai Chideya is an award-winning journalist. And she’s host of the podcast “Our Body Politic,” which focuses on how women of color experience and shape major political events. And here she is speaking to Michel Martin about it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN, CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Christiane. Farai Chideya, thank you so much for joining us.

FARAI CHIDEYA, HOST/CREATOR, “OUR BODY POLITIC”: Thanks, Michelle. Really grateful to be here.

MARTIN: So you have had a long career as a journalist. And in your latest work, you have been digging in particularly on the issue of black women in our public and civic life. The one statistic that’s always jumped out is the fact that black women tend to be more likely to get abortions than other demographic groups are in the United States. I mean, in 2019, like 38 percent of the abortions that were done in America were done on black women, who are only 13 percent of the population; 33 percent were done on white women or were obtained by white women, and 21 percent by people who identify as Hispanic. Why do you think that is?

CHIDEYA: It’s money, pure and simple, and medical access. There are many people, who when they go in for the occasional reproductive health check, whether it’s related to an unwanted pregnancy or just in general, that might be one of the few times that they see a doctor. The lack of medical access in America is unparalleled in any other developed nation. And it really fluctuates by income. And so, if you are someone — black Americans have one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans in the best of times. It’s gone up to — the racial wealth gap at times is 13 times less wealth, less likely to have jobs with benefits. You’re living in a country where your health benefits are often indexed to your job. And so, simply, a lot of people don’t have primary health care providers. And by the time they realize they’re pregnant, they haven’t had like, a long discussion of, like, what birth control are you on? Do you want to have kids? And then there really are — I’m just going to get personal here. I grew up black and Catholic. And my family has a lot of social conservatism. But I know, within my Catholic community, there were many people who were ambivalent about birth control, but then, when they had an unwanted pregnancy, they would go have it terminated. And so there’s a lot of, I think, internal — in addition to the economic factors, which I think are the number one issues of health access — the health disparities track with economic disparities. But I think there’s also sometimes an ambivalence about, what does it mean to deal with the fact that you are of childbearing age and fertile, and you don’t really want to deal with it? A lot of people, not just black people, but a lot of people who have cognitive dissonance, end up putting their head in the sand and then having to face tough choices later.

MARTIN: Well, to your — and here’s one of the studies from the Guttmacher Institute, which is one of the premier research institutes that studies this issue, that 49 percent of abortion patients live below the federal poverty level, and 59 percent of abortions are obtained by women who have children. So that kind of tracks with your point.

CHIDEYA: Absolutely.

MARTIN: The other data that stands out here is that some of the states with the greatest percentage of African-American women obtaining abortions are also the states with the most restrictive abortion policies. And those are also the states that are the most reluctant to extend health benefits through programs like Medicaid and Medicare to the general population. How does that all fit together?

CHIDEYA: Yes, I mean, I would refer to the incredible book “Dying of Whiteness,” which talks about the ways that the expansion of the Affordable Care Act was really restricted by institutional and structural racism, including the idea that, if white Americans are loyal to the cause of American democracy and to how whiteness operates, and that they will themselves be willing to give up health care in order to prevent what one person interviewed in the award-winning book called the Mexicans and the welfare queens. So, people who are lower-income whites in some states are literally denying themselves lifesaving care out of this misguided notion that you have to play defense against the hoards of brown people. That then trickles down onto black and brown women, who don’t have access to primary care providers, don’t have a mechanism to guard their reproductive health. And, also, I think that one thing that we see is that people who believe that they have things to do in the world in addition to raising children, doesn’t have to be opposed to raising children, will really try to guard their ability to go to college have time to develop a career. And there’s an intergenerational nature to the lack of access to health care that really does come out of slavery. There was no such thing as reproductive rights, obviously, during slavery, and during the many years that followed racial terrorism. I have met people whose relatives died in the mid-1900s from abortions on black farms, people trying to self-abort. People had no access to abortion rights. And when people’s bodies were used in chattel slavery to reproduce more farmhands and more laborers, I think a lot of people just pass down a history of trauma around what it means to care for your body and who owns it. Do you own it? Does some larger superstructure own it? And a lot of black women are heavily traumatized by their experiences in the medical system. And so then you have a rupture between women who need to be seeking regular care, in which they might have more control over reproduction, other than abortion. But if it all comes down to the 11th hour, and it’s a go/no-go between being someone who might add another kid to a family that already can barely afford to survive, women are making tough choices. And I think that, within the black community, there’s also an idea of some — and some people feel trapped. It’s like, there’s this idea of voter capture. White evangelicals effectively have been captured by the Republican Party, black Americans often captured by the democratic Party, because if you are a black person who is a social conservative, but who does not want to erode voting rights, what are your choices? And so a lot of people don’t feel like they have a home in the medical care system. And they also feel like they don’t have a real home in politics. And all of that cognitive dissonance makes it harder to make choices sometimes.

MARTIN: Except that — I take your point about the level of social conservatism among African-Americans, which is something that I think kind of the white political analysis framework doesn’t necessarily capture. But if you look at some of the black women in Republican politics today, they are some of the most outspoken opponents of abortion. So how do you understand that phenomenon?

CHIDEYA: I mean, first of all, it — there should be room for black anti- abortion organizers. I mean, that is the promise of America, is that you don’t have to be — when we really believe in the promise of America, we should have a wide range of political opinion. But — and it makes perfect sense to me. But what we can’t do is use those fierce, passionate advocates for what they believe in, which is ending access to abortion, we can’t confuse that with the majority of black opinion. Black Americans are more likely to support abortion rights than white Americans. I believe it was a Gallup study that showed that it was 50 percent — 57 percent of white Americans supported abortion rights, 67 percent of black Americans. So it makes perfect sense that there’s fierce organizers, and there is a history of — some people call abortion black genocide, which is really a misnomer, counterfactual, sort of half-factual. But there certainly has been a strain of eugenics in America, where black women were forcibly sterilized. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, was sterilized against her will, indigenous women sterilized against their will. So there have been many abuses of the control of black women’s reproductive systems. But whether you were forcing a black woman during slavery or after to bear a child against her will or sterilizing her against her will, it’s a question of choice and consent. That is really what we need to get down to. Black women should feel free to advocate against abortion or for abortion rights. So I’m very much in favor of that, but we can’t mistake the passion and the urgency of black anti-abortion organizations for majority black opinion. it is not.

MARTIN: Well, one of the things that I think you have pointed out is that — is that the social conservatism of African-Americans may extend to their own personal choices.

MARTIN: But that does not mean that they wish to impose their personal, you know, moral choices on other — moral and religious choices on other people through the — through law.

CHIDEYA: Yes.

MARTIN: And that is kind of a — sort of a nuanced position that, I think, used to be common, right? In —

CHIDEYA: Yes.

MARTIN: — going — behavior. But seems to have shifted quite substantially among some white — among white conservatives.

CHIDEYA: Yes, I mean that — thanks for bringing that up because that was a big part of my reporting during the 2016 election. So, I did a series called, “The Voters: where I looked at different demographics of voters through a mix of field reporting and data. And I really understood the potential for candidate Trump to become President Trump while reporting on white evangelicals in South Carolina. Because the evangelical community, at the beginning of the primary season, was very much opposed to Donald Trump. And the family I interviewed basically said that one could not be a good Christian, not just a good voter, but a good Christian and support a man like Donald Trump. And by the end, they voted for him because it was a tactical vote about changing the playing field of abortion. They were single issues voters. Black conservatives, in general, are not single-issue voters. And when they are, it’s not about abortion. It might be about voting rights. You might be, you know, a black conservative or a black liberal who’s a single-issue voter, like who’s going to preserve voting rights. Because without voting rights, you have no choices politically. You can’t decide about abortion. You can’t decide about anything. And so, I think that when we look at the role of black Americans in the abortion landscape, black Americans simply are not the kind of single-issue voters who would choose abortion as the litmus test for candidates.

MARTIN: According to the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, black mothers in the U.S. die at three to four times the rate of white mothers. They’re 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes. And one of the other things about this reporting that really emerged in the last couple of years is that you know wealth is not a protector. Education is not a protector of this. I mean — I think that people may remember Serena Williams nearly died in childbirth because people weren’t listening to her when she told them what was going on with her and what she needed. And I just don’t — how do you even wrap your head around that? And what does that say?

CHIDEYA: Yes, I mean, I would also — you know, the Serena Williams example is really key. And then another one I would urge people to read, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s book, “Thick” which is a compilation of her essays. And she’s a socialist who lost her daughter, late in — you know, very close to what should have been the end of a healthy pregnancy because she was sent home bleeding. She was literally bleeding in the doctor’s office and they sent her home. And she subsequently lost her child. And she talks about how no amount of credentialing meaning education, wealth, makes some medical professionals believe black women. How does this relate back to the question of abortion? Very directly. Because if abortion access ends, it is quite likely that the lifetime risk of a black woman dying from childbirth will rise from one in a thousand, which is already — you know, one in 1,300 which is already massive to one in a thousand. You know, so more black women will die if they’re asked to carry to term pregnancies that they would choose not to have. And let’s also be clear about choose not to have. I tried to adopt three times, as you know. We talked about it. The women who were the potential, you know, parents who would put their children up for adoption. It was all economic. One was Latina, two were black. They were poor. They really wanted to raise their children, which is why I ended up not being able to adopt those children. So, there is if we could, as a country, pull up on poverty, we would have more women who did not want to get an abortion, you know. And who did not want to put their children up for adoption but who could make choices about how to bear and raise their own children. It is part of a cycle of economic deprivation that harms both the women who, you know, feel like they have to have an abortion when they would love to have a child but they don’t have, you know, a safety net. They don’t have paid leave. They don’t have sick leave. When I look at the big picture, women are shamed for being poor and having children. So, if you are a lower-income woman and you get pregnant, you’re either going to be shamed for seeking an abortion or you’re going to be shamed for being a mother. That’s a terrible thing to do. That’s a terrible, terrible thing for a country to do to people.

MARTIN: Why do you think it is though that the reality of poor maternal outcomes. The reality of black women dying at such high rates is not a bigger part of this conversation, about this issue. It’s just — and the reason I say that is that it, finally, in the last election, in the 2020 election, it did become an issue that was discussed on the campaign trail. I mean, a number — Elizabeth Warren, Kristen Gillibrand surfaced this issue in a very, you know, powerful way. And yet, somehow it doesn’t seem to be part of this current discussion around abortion rights at all.

CHIDEYA: I do think people are talking about this. But what I’ll also say, as someone who’s, you know, spent years as a field reporter, a lot of times it is viewed as detrimental to keeping white voters to raise the issues facing black and Latinx or Latino people. It’s seen as, you know, toxic to — for example, you know, some people in the Democratic Party really are trying to backpedal on racial justice as a central issue of the Democratic Party because they fear losing white voters. And I don’t think that that’s completely inaccurate. The Republican Party has managed to find a way to hold their coalition together in ways that the Democratic Party hasn’t. And I think that affects the nature of the debate over reproductive justice, over health care, et cetera. People are afraid of, in some cases, talking about saving the lives of black and brown people. I mean, it’s horrible to say, but it’s viewed as tactically unadvantageous to focus too much on it. And as long as that’s the case, you’re going to have a real hard time building an active coalition to preserve the lives of black women who are of childbearing age and who are fertile, and who need reproductive care. I also do think, very much, that — you know, I saw this coming. I saw the end of Roe coming from a long way off. In part because of my reporting during the 2016 cycle and beyond. And I think that many white Americans who want abortion rights for themselves and their daughters did not view it as a possibility. That they would be denied abortion rights. They were like, oh, yes, maybe there’s those poor people who live in that State where they can’t get to whatever. But me in my State, I’m cool. And so now we see things like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in Michigan, filing suit to preserve abortion rights if Roe ends. Because there’s an old statute on the book, and there’s 18 States that have these statutes where abortion rights could immediately end in those States if Roe V. Wade is terminated. And now, I’m going to be real, white women have a firelit under their behinds. In a way that was not true when black or brown women, for years, had been sounding the alarm. And poor white women, for years, had been sounding the alarm. Like, we can’t get any reproductive health. Like, what’s going on here? A lot of people didn’t think it was their fight. They didn’t think that they’re — they had skin in the game. And that’s how we ended up here, among many other things.

MARTIN: Farai Chideya, thank you so much for talking with us today.

CHIDEYA: Thanks, Michel.