Until fairly recently — I’m talking the last few months — it felt like making the connection between racism and the American anti-abortion movement was mostly an academic endeavor.
You’d find the history in obscure Twitter threads and textbooks, but if you weren’t steeped in daily news about reproductive rights (or aren’t a nonwhite pregnant person), it may have been easy to miss the anti-abortion movement’s explicit references to race.
But Republicans have removed all pretense that their opposition to abortion is based on anything but deeply held, racist beliefs.
Black women are Louisianans. They’re not statistics to be ‘corrected’ and parsed from the broader data.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., helped drive that home with comments he made last week, in which he seemed to boast about how good his state’s maternal mortality rate might be if not for the existence of Black women. When Politico asked Cassidy, who staunchly opposes abortion rights, why the maternal death rate in his state is so high, the senator suggested Black women were merely an outlier responsible for driving up that number.
“About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear,” Cassidy told Politico.
But … Black women are Louisianans. They’re not statistics to be “corrected” and parsed from the broader data, and it’s obviously racist to suggest separating their pregnancy-related deaths from the total number in order to downplay the severity of maternal mortality.
Seemingly detecting the awfulness of his comments, Cassidy claimed his remarks were meant “not to minimize” but “to focus the issue.”
“For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality,” he added.
The reasons — primarily, systemic racism — are well documented. Cassidy, a former physician, was rightly dragged for his comments.
It’s no surprise that a member of the party that scores political points by spewing conspiratorial “great replacement” rhetoric and fomenting moral panics about so-called critical race theory in schools is perfectly comfortable ignoring the plight of Black American mothers. (5/8)
— Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (@RepBonnie) May 21, 2022
Cassidy’s remarks were cruel, but when we look at them in the context of the GOP’s abortion crusade, they fit perfectly in the party’s pattern of pursuing reproductive rights restrictions despite — or even because of — their racist implications.
During the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary last week, the group’s head, Matt Schlapp, appeared to connect the GOP’s anti-abortion stance to the racist “great replacement theory” that alleges nonwhite groups are destroying America through demographic change.
“Roe v. Wade is being adjudicated at the Supreme Court right now, for people that believe that we somehow need to replace populations or bring in new workers, I think it is an appropriate first step to give the … enshrinement in law the right to life for our own unborn children,” Schlapp told reporters outside the conference, according to Vice News.
“If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” he added. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up?”
As it turns out, many people have brought that up. In fact, many Republicans hewing close to the same racist “replacement” theory have made similar remarks about retaining America’s racial makeup.
Perhaps unknowingly, Schlapp and the like are doing the rest of us a favor by flaunting bigoted beliefs like these in the open. It’s more proof that the high-minded religion we’ve been told motivates the anti-abortion movement is actually much more devious.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.