The Most Dangerous Place For a Woman of Color
They’ve done it again.
I have gotten pretty sick and tired of listening to anti-choicers suggest that people of color are being exterminated due to abortion. We’ve seen this kind of propaganda around black women and abortions plenty of times before, most recently with a sign that used Obama’s image, stating that “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted.” This is rather ironic, considering that anti-choicers tend to swing right politically, and most probably did NOT vote for Obama in the first place.
And now they are taking inspiration from this Times Square billboard that says “The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb” to make one that says in Spanish “The most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb.”
How about a sign like this instead:
The most dangerous place for a Latin@ is in Arizona, where it is legal for him/her to be racially profiled.
The most dangerous place for an African-American is around a police man, who is much more likely to arrest him/her than a white counterpart.
The most dangerous place for a Latin@ or an African-American is in school, where they are much less likely than a white person to receive the education that they need.
The most dangerous place for a Latin@ or African-American is within our healthcare system, where they are less likely than a white person to receive the care, or be able to afford the care that they need.
The most dangerous place for a Latina teen is in a sexual relationship, since she is three times more likely than a white woman to become a teenage mother.
The most dangerous for a Latina or an African-American woman is in a sexual relationship at any childbearing age, because she is much less likely to have access to the education, resources and support she needs to prevent unwanted pregnancy.
Stop the double speak. Don’t pretend to support Latinos when conservatives have historically criminalized them with laws like Prop 187 that was meant to prevent undocumented children from receiving education. Or how about Arizona’s SB1070? Or the soon to be nationally-implemented Secure Communities Program?
Yes, it is true that Latinas and African-Americans have higher rates of abortion in the United States. But stop trying to blame that on the pro-choice movement. It’s one thing to be pro-life, it’s another to twist abortion into a fight for the rights of people of color, a struggle that conservatives have rarely participated in before this. Take down these signs, and acknowledge that institutionalized racism shapes a society in which women of color are at a severe disadvantage to access reproductive health care, and contraception, and to make decisions about when and if they want to have children. So many are forced to turn to abortion. If you want to reduce abortions among women of color, then how about increasing access to reproductive health care?
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