Utah governor signs legislation banning clinics from providing abortions

[Lonestarblue]

4. White fears and white supremacy have always been intertwined with abortion.

The Nation published an interesting history of their linkage in 2020. I also remember reading some years ago that the head of the Southern Baptists praised Roe because it would save women’s lives. Not long after Roe became law, conservatives decided to use it as a political issue because their true issue was preserving white supremacy, but they could not openly campaign on that issue. Once elected based on the abortion issue, they could then pass laws privileging white people.

Today, the organizers and funders of the anti-abortion crowd know quite well that black women suffer maternal death at nearly three times the rate of white women. Hispanic women die about twice as often as white women. Perhaps I’m being too cynical, but I believe these groups think that they will maintain and even grow the number of white people in the US because denying abortion and reproductive care means that more black and brown women and babies will die.

“As sociologists Nicola Beisel and Tamara Kay wrote with regards to the criminalization of abortion in the late 19th century, “While laws regulating abortion would ultimately affect all women, physicians argued that middle-class, Anglo-Saxon married women were those obtaining abortions, and that their use of abortion to curtail childbearing threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/anti-abortion-white-supremacy/