The ban on contraception funding
doesn’t have a marital status clause. Phillips and
her ilk want to punish women who are sexually
active. We are back in the 1950s, an era when
“bad” girls had to live in shame and be punished
too.
What happens to poor black women
in Missouri who need birth control? They must
either find a way to pay for it themselves, take
their chances with unprotected sex, or
practice abstinence that isn’t required of anyone
else.
How do politicians get away with
depriving citizens of medical care? In part
because too many Black people feel comfortable
living up to the phony image of bible thumping
church goers who forsake sex and oppose abortion.
The fact is that black women have abortions at a
disproportionate rate and will therefore suffer
disproportionately whenever efforts to limit
access to birth control and abortion succeed.
Black women suffered disproportionately
when abortion was illegal. Before abortion was
legalized in New York in 1970, black and Puerto
Rican women accounted for 80 percent of deaths
from illegal abortions. In Georgia between 1965
and 1967 the Black maternal death rate due to
illegal abortion was fourteen times that of white
women.
In 2000, the abortion
rate for black women (30 per 1,000
women) was 3.1 times the rate for white women (10
per 1,000 women). Those are strange numbers for an
anti-abortion group. Denial is not a river in
Egypt.
Dr. Joseph Booker and his colleagues
in Mississippi work under the strictest abortion
laws in the nation. All patients must undergo a 24
hour waiting period before the procedure can be
performed. If they are willing and able to travel
from great distances to get to the only clinic in
Jackson, they must then be willing to brave an
ugly crowd of protesters. Seventy-three percent of
women who enter that clinic are black.
Louisiana is following in its
neighbor’s footsteps. It has voted to end abortion
in anticipation of Roe v. Wade being
overturned. State Senator Diana Bajoie is a
Democrat and a founder of that legislature’s black
caucus. She wants to outlaw abortion, with no
exceptions permitted, not even to
save the life of the mother. “If you believe in
life, that’s what it should be.”
Bajoie thinks that abortions
performed to save the mother’s life are wrong
because the mother could decide that she wants the
baby to live instead of herself. Phony melodrama
about women willing to die in childbirth is the
product of a sick mind. Hurricane Katrina must
have addled Bajoie’s brain.
Bajoie proves that black women must
be willing to speak up with their own voice, their
own race and their own gender. Female politicians
like Phillips and Bajoie need to be reminded, by
their female constituents, that no one has to vote
for them.
Hopefully the pro-life forces will
begin to speak up for the lives of those who have
already been born. Maybe they will tell President
Bush not to incinerate Iranians with nuclear
weapons. If they don’t, perhaps the rest of us
will speak up in favor of medical care for all,
even medical care for women who dare to have
sex.
