Thread by @TravelingNun

Abortion in America is racist. Set aside the pro-life v. pro-choice debate for a minute and sit in that reality. Abortion is racist. Let’s talk about why. [Thread]

The white feminist movement excluded the needs of women of color from the get-go. White women wanted the freedom to work outside the home. Women of color had *been* working outside the home for generations.

White feminism started from the premise that women needed liberation from the family. It never considered that women of color had *never* been given the freedom to be home in the first place...to focus exclusively on the needs of their family without working *all day long*

White women wanted the freedom to not have to raise children if they didn’t want to, to go out into the world & be “equal to men.” WOC were *already* out in the world working for all those white women and raising white women’s children as well as their own children on top of it.

This is the reason why white middle-class women experience abortion as a “choice” even as poor and minority women almost always experience it as having *no choice.* They get abortions because they see their life situation permitting *no other option.*

Our social structure functions to restrict poor women and WOC from the freedom to raise children and build a family without working and working and working 24/7 but still in the throes of abject poverty.

Society gives white women the choice to have children. It gives women of color abortion. When a WOC gets an abortion, it is *often* because she sees herself forced into doing it. This is not choice.

Let’s just say it. Abortion was *never* about women’s choice. It was about *white* women’s choice. Women of color were *never* considered, their needs completely ignored, their struggle to raise children even mocked and stereotyped.

Then you have the icing on the cake. Abortion grew up out of eugenics. Margaret Sanger is on record appealing to eugenicists and discussing the ways in which abortion and birth control could reduce the population of “undesirable” demographics. nyu.edu/projects/sange…

Contraception was developed by experimenting on Puerto Rican women and forcing them to get sterilized w/o their consent. My grandmother called it “la operación.” Many Puerto Rican women were lied to and never told its consequences.
history.com/news/birth-con…

White feminists literally tie themselves up in knots trying to explain away this history. They try to show that Margaret Sanger really did care so much about Black people and immigrants etc etc etc

It’s honestly insulting. Margaret Sanger was a white woman forcing her own white ideas about women’s liberation onto Black and Brown women whose needs were completely different than her own but of course she knew what they needed, and she appealed to eugenics to do it.

You can acknowledge this history and not make excuses for it even as you advocate for pro-choice causes.

You can defend a woman’s right to choose even as you recognize that abortion is *often* not a choice for women of color but something they see as their only option. And *this is bad.* This is not choice.

Do pro-life people often try to weaponize this information? Of course. It’s disingenuous to pretend to care about racism in the abortion conversation when a whole lot of pro-life people don’t care about it in any other context.

If you are pro-life and reading this, take a hard look at your allegiances and ask yourself whether you support Black and Brown life in any meaningful capacity on any other issue outside of abortion.

BUT... it’s also disingenuous to say you’re “pro-choice” if you continue to explain away the ongoing history of abortion, contraception, and sterilization being forced onto WOC. This is not women’s liberation. It is white women’s liberation. And it’s not okay.

This is the reason why the pro-life v. pro-choice debate needs to shift to talking about *reproductive justice* and what that looks like for poor, Black, and/or Brown women, not just white middle-class women.

Reproductive justice is about more than abortion. It’s about the diverse needs that women of reproductive capacity experience across the spectrum of lived realities. As long as pro-choicers & pro-lifers only talk about abortion, they aren’t talking about reproductive justice.

This might rankle people, but pro-lifers and pro-choicers can agree on a whole lot of things related to reproductive justice even as they disagree over abortion. And those agreements will do a lot more to move the conversation forward for women than focusing on abortion alone

Is abortion an important issue to discuss and take a stand on? Of course. But in the meantime, women are suffering because reproductive justice is MUCH BIGGER than just abortion. And we need to talk about that too.

To answer questions and provide further resources, yes! feminists are finally talking about this. I’d suggest starting w/ the feminism for the 99% movement and reading this book as a primer.
amazon.com/Feminism-99-Na…