Blacks Backing Pro-Choice Add a Compelling Voice

Black women, long the sleeping giant in the reproductive-rights struggle, have officially come off the sidelines. This may well mark the turning point in pro-choice’s battle for America’s hearts and minds.

Many black activists are personally pro-choice. Black organizations, however, have largely been absent from the fight for abortion rights. For example, few black women and almost no black organizations participated in the April 9 march on Washington that brought out at least 300,000 pro-choice demonstrators. And, while the NAACP held a silent march to protest the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling, it ignored the court’s Webster decision that gave states the right to restrict abortions--though the rulings came within a few days of each other.

But this situation changed radically on Wednesday. African-American Women for Reproductive Rights, an informal coalition of the leaders of nearly a dozen major black women’s organizations, held a press conference to declare themselves pro-choice. Representing major groups such as the National Council of Negro Women, Operation PUSH and several sororities, and backed by Barbara C. Jordan and Shirley Chisolm, they brought the moral authority of the civil-rights movement squarely down on the side of protecting a woman’s right to choose.

There are several reasons why the entry of these women into the abortion debate could be critical. First, they bring pro-choice forces a grass-roots civil-rights organization with considerable political clout--particularly in the South, where many of the fiercest battles will be waged.

Second, it will make it much more difficult for anti-abortion groups, such as the militant Operation Rescue, to claim legitimacy by comparing their efforts to the civil-rights movement. Recently many civil-rights activists signed a letter saying, “Perhaps it is more accurate to compare Operation Rescue demonstrators to the segregationists who fought desperately to block black Americans from access to their rights.”

Third, by defining reproductive rights to include the right to receive effective prenatal and medical care, these women--most of whom have solid credentials as child advocates--can rightly say they defend interests of mothers and children as well as women who want abortions. This is no small feat. White feminists are often labeled “anti-motherhood.”

But most important, black women can produce a fundamental shift in the question of who speaks for the victim in the abortion debate. Abortions weren’t legalized because most Americans believed they were good, but because women dying from back-alley abortions made such procedures the greater of two evils. The recent success of the anti-abortion movement is to some extent due to its claims to speak for the new victim--the unborn fetus.

Now, with the black civil-rights activists, the pro-choice movement has gained the voice of those most likely to be victimized if states adopt tighter restrictions. It is a powerful voice, full of anger.

“The anti-abortionists took a very cowardly and racist approach to achieving their agenda,” said Loretta Ross of the National Black Women’s Health Project. “First they attacked women who were poor, and now they are attacking those who are too young to vote. It is black women who were most hurt by limiting Medicaid abortions and it is teen-age black women, who are more likely to be from single-parent families, who will be hurt by so-called parental notifications laws . . . . Black women are also least likely to be able to afford a lawyer, or be believed if they have to persuade white judges that their pregnancy was a result of rape or incest.”

Statistics bear Ross out, according to Pat Tyson of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. “Before abortion was legalized in this country,” Tyson said, “49% of the pregnancy-related deaths in New York were due to illegal abortions. Of these deaths, 50% of the women were African-American and 44% Puerto Rican. In Georgia, 88% of women who died from illegal abortions between 1965 and 1969 were black.”

In addition, black and Latino women are four times more likely to have AIDS. If abortions are outlawed, they have the greatest chances of facing the horrifying prospect of being forced to suffer through the birth of a child condemned to die.

With the consequences of reversing Roe vs. Wade so devastating to black women, why have black organizations been so slow to support pro-choice?

One answer is priorities. With black communities besieged--by AIDS, drug wars, double-digit teen-age unemployment and judicial attacks on affirmative action--most civil-rights groups had little time to devote to an issue they thought was settled years ago. “But the Webster decision changed all that,” Planned Parenthood President Faye Wattleton said. “Now we have to mobilize.”

In many cases the commitment to that mobilization is sparked by a clear understanding of just how many of the problems plaguing Afro-America are exacerbated by black teens having children they are unable to care for. This perpetuates a multigenerational cycle of poverty and violence.

Another factor in the black community’s passivity on pro-choice is what Byllye Y. Avery, president of the National Black Women’s Health Project, called “the conspiracy of silence about abortion in our lives.” Part of that conspiracy is the often-cited belief that blacks are against abortions or birth control. This persists despite the fact that, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, black people are pro-choice by a margin of at least 2-1 and minority women have more than twice as many abortions as whites. One explanation for the myth’s durability is that it is easy to identify the thousands of pregnant black women, particularly teens, who don’t have abortions, and difficult to identify those who do.

But a better explanation is that the black leadership traditionally came from the church. Many ministers, such as Louis Farrakhan, maintain abortion is white-inspired genocide. Rep. Floyd H. Flake (D-N.Y.), who is also a minister, said “Abortion is an attempt to control the population growth of blacks as Pharaoh did by ordering midwives to kill male Jews.”

Given the ministers’ prominence, many activists feared taking a strong pro-choice position would splinter the civil-rights Establishment. That fear is largely ungrounded. Black leaders such as Jesse Jackson, David N. Dinkins, Julian Bond and Vernon E. Jordan Jr. have taken pro-choice positions. This weekend the Congressional Black Caucus--which includes four ordained ministers--is scheduled to honor Wattleton.

Understanding the black response to abortion requires realizing that for the vast majority of Afro-Americans there is no contradiction between being personally against abortion and also pro-choice when it comes to whether the government should force women to bear children against their will. Flake offered a good example of this when he recently voted against an amendment that would have prohibited the predominantly black District of Columbia from using its tax dollars to fund Medicaid abortions.

Ultimately, African-Americans who struggled so hard to control their lives cannot abide denial of freedom. As Jewell Jackson McCabe, president of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, said, “It is not simply a matter of abortion. It is the right to choose--choice being the essence of freedom.”

Black women can produce a fundamental shift

in the question of who speaks for the victim

in the abortion debate.