(1 Feb 2022) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER:4363889
If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one.
And if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press.
The numbers are unambiguous. In Mississippi, people of color comprise 44% of the population but 80% of women receiving abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.
In Texas, they're 59% of the population and 74% of those receiving abortions. The numbers in Alabama are 35% and 70%. In Louisiana, minorities represent 42% of the population, according to the state Health Department, and about 72% of those receiving abortions.
Why the great disparities? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial support for women seeking abortion, said women of color in states with already restrictive abortion laws often have limited access to health care and a lack of choices for effective birth control. Schools often have ineffective or inadequate sex education.
If abortions are outlawed, those same women — often poor — will likely have the hardest time traveling to distant parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raising children they might struggle to afford, said Roberts, who is Black and once volunteered at Mississippi's only abortion clinic.
Amanda Furdge, who is Black, was one of those women. She was a single, unemployed college student already raising one baby in 2014 when she found out she was pregnant with another. She said she didn't know how she could afford another child.
She'd had two abortions in Chicago. Getting access to an abortion provider there was no problem, Furdge said. But now she was in Mississippi, having moved home to escape an abusive relationship. Misled by advertising, she first went to a crisis pregnancy center which tried to talk her out of an abortion. By the time she found the abortion clinic, she was too far along to have the procedure.
"I knew I was going to have to have the baby because it dawned on me — look at where you are. Look at where you live. Look at the people in positions to either help or hurt and look at what they choose to do," Furdge said.
She is happily raising her now 7-year-old son but continues to advocate for women having the right to choose.
But Andy Gipson, a former member of the Mississippi Legislature who is now the state's agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race had nothing to do with passage of Mississippi's law against abortion after the 15th week. That law is now before the Supreme Court in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
Gipson, a Baptist minister who is white, said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have an "innate value" that starts at conception. Mississippi legislators were trying to protect women and babies by putting limits on abortion, he said, and also said that there are plenty of resources for women across the state to keep and care for babies.
"Whether it's counseling or whether it's medical care, whether it's financial resources or food, in fact, there are networks of support here both in the private and at the governmental level," he said.
"These 'resources' that they speak of — where are they? If they're out here, where are they?" Brewer asked.
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