Racial Discrimination of Blacks in Abortion Clinics in the United States

Racial Discrimination of Blacks in Abortion Clinics in the United States
Your Name
November 5, 2016
Your Institution of Affiliation
The racial disparity has been an age-old issue in the US. The outward distinction between color and origins have persisted and transposed into symbolic boundaries, which are then characterized by unequal access to resources. Throughout the years, this inequality could be seen in mundane activities such as searching for a job, looking for a place to live in, queuing in a drugstore, etc. Today, these “apparent” issues are relatively lessened, all thanks to the efforts of private groups, non-government organizations (NGOs), and even the government itself towards gradually reducing racist acts towards people of color. However, despite the sharp decline of inequality in access to everyday resources – access to food, shelter, clothing, education, etc. – this issue still exist in “not-so-obvious” contexts and situations such as having an access to safe and legal abortion. In the United Stated alone, it is said that the abortion rate for African-American women is five times as high as that of the Whites. Most activists groups believed that the reason behind this is the “result of aggressive marketing by abortion providers to minority communities” (Cohen, 2008). And due to this issue, these groups such as the Issues4life Foundation works in order to prevent any African-American lives being lost due to these unfortunate acts of discrimination. However, the author of this paper believes that presenting data per year isolates the general trend and changes that are happening. Being aware of this flaw in the study of racial discrimination in abortion clinics, the author of this paper dedicated this paper to the comparative and temporal analysis of how much have ‘racial disparity in abortion clinics changed throughout the years. The first part of this paper is dedicated to introducing essential concepts regarding abortion and racial discrimination such as; what is abortion and what factors affect abortion rates in between people of color? The paper would then shift towards an analysis of the disparity on abortion between races in between the years of 2005 to 2016. And, due to the limitations of time, the scope of this comparative analysis would be limited to those studies done in between the years of 2005 to 2016.
Chapter One
Racial Discrimination, Stereotypes, and Abortion
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (n.d.), “Racial discrimination is defined as the unequal treatment of someone because of his race or certain characteristics which are associated with race, such as hair texture or skin color”. Based on this definition, which is still being used today, it is apparent that the issue of discrimination could persists even if someone is not exactly a Latino, African American, Chinese, etc. as long as they have certain features which are associated with other races. In other words, this implies that racial discrimination is based on how people sees you, rather than who you really are. In contrast to this, a more specific definition of “blackness” is based on the “One Drop rule” which states that anyone who even had a single black ancestor from five generations ago, is already considered “Black”. However, what makes this problematic is the fact that this definition does not entirely coincide with how the Black community sees one another. Since being black is generally interpreted by how a person looks, even members of the black community differentiates themselves between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks. This would then lead to the issue of colorism (discrimination based on the tone of one’s skin), a problem that is worth mentioning but is already beyond the scope of this study. However, since the racial discrimination usually works based on how others see a person and not his/her original cultural and racial identity, the working definition of “Blacks” is based on how others perceive a person rather than the concept of the One Drop rule.
As compared to the definition of racial disparity, the definition of abortion is less problematic, in this study the author used Merriam-Webster dictionary's definition which is “a medical procedure used to end a pregnancy and cause the death of the fetus” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).
Lastly, this study defines stereotypes in particular with abortion and racial discrimination, based on how it affects the way a non-black person would perceive and/or act towards a black person, and how a colored person make choices about abortion based on the expectations that these stereotypes entail. Perhaps a good example to this is based on an interview done in 2005 to Renee Bracey Sherman. Sherman is an African-American teenager who underwent abortion during that same year in order to “escape” being an example of the stereotypical image of a black woman. She said that…
“You don’t want to take the chance of everyone judging you at a moment when you’re so vulnerable. There’s a very unfortunate stereotype of women of color, and black women in particular, that we are promiscuous and just have babies. You don’t want that to be you”. (Dutton, 2014)
Based on her response, it was apparent that the power of expectation plays a major role in one’s decision in choosing whether to undergo abortion or not.
Chapter 2
Racial Discrimination in Abortion clinics throughout the years
According to Reverend Clenard H. Childress, the general trend towards abortion is also a phenomenon called the Black genocide (Abort73.com, n.d.). This is due to the fact, that as compared to the number of abortions of White women, blacks are five times more likely to undergo the process. In a 2005 census done by the CDC in the US, about 50 per 1000 women of ages 15-44 that underwent abortion are Blacks (more specifically African Americans). However, the 2004 data also showed that the number of unintended pregnancies is also higher for colored people such as blacks and Latinos as compared to whites (Cohen, 2008). Cohen (2008) who wrote this paper, interpreted the data and the similarity of the trend between unintended pregnancies and instances of abortion between blacks. She said that the main reason why the number of black women who undergoes the abortion and the number of unintended pregnancies within the same population is the s...