One of the egregious ironies of anti-choice advocates using this tactic is that while they claim to be opposed to race and gender discrimination, they are relying on racist and sexist stereotypes to carry their message. In this case, Black women are either too ignorant to know when they are being duped into having abortions they don’t want, or are so lacking in humanity that they would knowingly participate in the genocide of their own people. With Asian women, this legislation appeals to the stereotype of the browbeaten, submissive Asian woman who is powerless in the face of family coercion or who is willing to cold-heartedly commit female infanticide. According to the proponents of this legislation, both Black and Asian women need somebody else, in this case either white legislators or the white anti-choice movement, to save them, both from themselves and from their communities. Black and Asian women become the convenient scapegoat for taking a stance on gender and race equality without doing anything to truly address racism or sexism.
The relationship between FDLs and race, abortion, and sex selection makes a strong case for using a reproductive justice approach to women’s reproductive lives. Reproductive justice starts with an intersectional perspective and with acknowledgment of the inequalities and externalities created by racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, xenophobia, ablebody-ism, and classism. There is no “universal” or “neutral” woman for whom one is fighting for, but rather women embedded in social, political, and economic structures of inequality and discrimination. The work of reproductive justice is to create the carrots, create the enabling conditions for each woman to make the best decision for herself, her family and her community. The focus is not on what any one woman might do and punishing her if she does the wrong thing, as in the case of FDLs and abortion bans, but on creating the best context within which any woman might make her own choice.
Susan Cohen notes that while the abortion rate for Black women is almost five times that of white women this is primarily due to higher rates of unintended pregnancy. Black women as a group want the same number of children as white women1, and contend with more unplanned pregnancies that lead to abortion. Some of the causes of these unintended pregnancies include lack of access to effective and affordable contraception; lack of comprehensive sex education; lack of satisfaction with the quality of services and contraceptive methods; in addition to cultural and linguistic barriers and poor access to comprehensive health services. And, while seeking parity in either abortion rates or in services is not necessarily the answer (it doesn’t make sense to treat Black women just like white women), there is much that can be done to ensure better access, affordability, cultural competence, and education so that Black women can make the best reproductive decisions for themselves. As SisterSong, a women of color reproductive justice collective, stated during the Georgia fight, “trust Black women” and create the best enabling conditions for them to make the right decision for themselves and their families. The real question in these discussions should be, have we done enough to create those enabling conditions?
Sex selection is a complicated issue for many movements, including the reproductive rights and justice movement, and women’s rights and human rights movements. All these movements seek to defend, protect, and fulfill women’s reproductive autonomy and yet recognize that gender discrimination and stereotyping is what leads to sex selective practices. Sex selection is a symptom and not the cause of gender discrimination. In the United States, sex selective practices, like sex selective abortions, are additionally complicated by abortion politics. If women didn’t have to fight so hard to ensure the basic right to abortion they wouldn’t be in a position where they have to take a position on sex selective abortions. In countries like India and China, and in most of Europe, where abortion is not a contested right, policymakers and advocates take a position opposing sex selection (mostly pre-pregnancy techniques) without endangering women’s access to abortion.
Anti-choice advocates are using this tactic to drive a wedge between reproductive rights and justice groups, women’s groups, feminists, and domestic violence prevention groups. It sets up a false choice: defend abortion and support gender discrimination, or oppose gender discrimination and limit abortion rights.
It also seeks to create tension between communities of color and reproductive rights groups whose first inclination is to declare it isn’t happening. Denying that sex selection is a serious concern in the United States marginalizes the practice to Asians and immigrants, and then trivializes their concerns. In 2008, when the legislation first appeared, the first response of many reproductive rights groups was to deny that sex selection was happening in the US, and if it was happening, it was being done by a small, insignificant number of people, or more precisely, by a small, insignificant number of Asians. South Asian women’s and domestic violence prevention groups in the U.S. pushed back against this framing of sex selection as a “trivial” issue. For them it is a real concern and a preference for sons is a challenge they want to address in their communities. Given that sex selection is happening in the United States,2 denying or trivializing it is neither a real nor helpful option.
- S.A. Cohen, “Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture,” Guttmacher Policy Review (2008). [↩]
- Jason Abrevaya, “Are There Missing Girls in the United States? Evidence from Birth Data,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1.2 (2008): 1-34; and Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund, “Son-Biased Sex Ratios in the 2000 United States Census,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 105.15 (2008). [↩]
