Category: Racism

British author Fran Amery wrote about how in England:

“In the 1970s…women frequently reported encounters with unsympathetic and patronizing doctors who would not refer them for abortions.

Yet in 1977, the feminist magazine Spare Rib reported on the case of a black woman who found it easy to access an abortion through her doctor, only to later discover that the same doctor consistently refused abortions and hormonal contraception to white women and was known to want to keep the black population from rising.”

Fran Amery Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020) 34

British Pro-choice author Fran Amery admits:

“The drive for reproductive rights has historically been interwoven with racist and ablest ideologies. Early birth control advocates utilized the language of eugenics in order to legitimize the movement, arguing that unrestrained reproduction would result in “racial decay.” Contraception was figured as a way to prevent the “unfit” from breeding. Margaret Sanger herself gradually shifted away from her initial feminist defense of contraception towards advocacy of contraception as a means to control poor, minority, disabled and immigrant populations.

Similarly, the British contraception campaigner Marie Stopes espoused an outright eugenicist position, advocating against the right to reproduce of the “feebleminded” and “racially negligent” among others. Such moves by contraception advocates lent legitimacy to the forced sterilization campaigns imposed on minority women.”

Fran Amery Beyond Pro-Life and Pro-Choice: The Changing Politics of Abortion in Britain (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020) 24

One of the largest chains of abortion clinics in Great Britain is named after Marie Stopes

Pro-choice author Rosalind Petchesky writes:

“For a Native American woman on welfare, who every time she appears in the clinic for prenatal care is asked whether she would not like an abortion, “the right to choose an abortion” may appear dubious if not offensive.”

Rosalind Petchesky Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality and Reproductive Freedom (London: Verso, 1986) 8

This author is acknowledging that minorities, especially poor minorities, are often pressured to abort their children.

Former Planned Parenthood Federation vice president Naomi Gray on fellow abortion supporters:

“It could then legitimately be said that some white interests are more concerned with causing certain black babies not to get born than they are with the survival of those already born.”

“Black Genocide Seen.” New York Times April 16, 1971

Author Gene Burns, who wrote a book about the legalization of abortion and birth control wrote:

“There was an instance, in Georgia, of a pro [abortion] reform lobbyist attempting to sway right-wing Governor Lester Maddox by raising the specter of white women becoming pregnant as a result of rape by black men.”

Gene Burns The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion, and Cultural Pluralism in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 188

This was cited in:

Sager C Jayne and Lauren F Gooch Georgia Abortion Act of 1968: A Study in Legislative Process (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Department of Health Administration, School of Public Health and Carolina Population Center, 1972) 57

Despite this revelation, Burns does not believe that racism was a main reason behind legalizing abortion.

Before Roe v. Wade, lobbyists for the Medical Association of Georgia urged Governor Lester Maddox to pass an initial rape and incest exception for abortion, asking him how he would feel

“… if a White girl got raped by a Negro and then became pregnant.”

Sagar C. Jain and Laurel F. Gooch. “Georgia Abortion Act of 1968: A Study in the Legislative Process” 1972, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 56, 57

Lawrence Lader, pro-abortion activist who co-founded NARAL, now NARAL Pro-Choice America, in his book promoting legal abortion:

“Above all, society must grasp the grim relationship between unwanted children and the violent rebellion of minority groups.”

Lawrence Lader Abortion (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1966) 156

Social worker Erma Clardy Craven said the following at a National Right to Life convention:

“And listen to the rationale for taking their lives: They are poor! As if poverty should be an excuse for taking a human being’s life! And you can walk through the garbage cans in America and the lunchrooms in America and look at the food that’s wasted….And that to me is the grossest form of racism: to take the life of a black child… And I am two descendants removed from slavery.”

Erma Clardy Craven, Remarks at National Right to Life Convention, Cherry Hill, N.J., 15 July 1982, tape recording