After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its abortion ruling last week, activists on both sides stepped to a lectern on the court`s steps to respond. In Chicago`s Daley Plaza, demonstrators held heated rallies.
Overwhelmingly, they had one thing in common: They were white.
It was no aberration. The Washington Post conducted a survey during an abortion rights march in Washington in April that attracted an estimated 500,000 demonstrators. The survey found that 9 out of 10-94 percent-were white.
The highest-profile minority activist on either side, Faye Wattleton, recently resigned the presidency of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America to pursue a TV talk show career. That exit may only accentuate a media-fueled impression that the abortion issue is a debate among white people and that minorities don`t care.
Minority women get abortions at more than twice the rate as white women. But where are they when the issue is being fought so fiercely in the public eye? Where do they stand?
The silence from most non-whites may not be so much a statement of uninterest as a reflection of cultural differences. The issue extends to the influence of the church; taboos against discussing sex and abortion publicly; histories of forced sterilization of minorities; attitudes toward the sexual roles of women; and the role of the family in the community.
The question of where minorities stand is not definitively settled in opinion polls. The Communications Consortium Media Center, a Washington, D.C., media consulting firm, and the National Council of Negro Women commissioned a poll of minority women last year that found that 73 percent believe the decision on whether to have an abortion is one that women must make for themselves.
That conclusion is disputed by anti-abortion activists, who point to a 1989 Boston Globe poll that found that 48 percent of blacks believe abortion should not be legal under any circumstances. Forty-two percent said it should be legal only under limited circumstances.
The National Council of Negro Women/Communications Consortium poll found that 52 percent of minority women believed abortion should be legal only at some times or under some circumstances.
Nineteen percent said it should be illegal all the time. Twenty-five percent said it should be legal all the time for any reason.
Activists on both sides agree on one major reason minorities rarely attend demonstrations on the issue.
”Poor women in general don`t go to marches,” said Irene Esteves, national director of the Professional Women`s Network, a Chicago-based anti-abortion group.
”They are home, working, taking care of their kids, getting from one day to the next.”
”If you look for them at rallies, you`re not going to see them,” said Emily Tynes, deputy director of the Communications Consortium and director of the poll project. ”The subsistence issues are so critical that mobilizing around other issues is a luxury.”
One concern among many
Black women see abortion rights as one of many urgent health care issues affecting them, said Sharon Powell, acting board president of the National Abortion Rights Action League of Illinois.
They are put off by groups that do not address such concerns as the high rates of infant mortality and teen pregnancy in the black community.
”It goes back to the perception of what reproductive rights is,” she said. ”My issue is, if they are only going to talk about abortion, that`s not where I`m at.”
”Disproportionately, yes, they do have abortions,” Tynes said. ”But they don`t think of it in terms of a movement. They think about it in terms of decisions they have to make about their lives.
”The issue of reproductive rights has really no relevance to most Indian women,” said Andy Smith, a member of Women of All Red Nations, an American Indian women`s group, and a member of the National Abortion Rights Action League of Illinois.
”Most Indian women lost the right to abortion with the Hyde Amendment,” she said, referring to legislation that in 1977 ended federal funding of almost all abortions for poor women.
Moreover, minority women say they sometimes encounter cultural insensitivity among white abortion rights activists.
”A reproductive rights group came to the United Council of Tribes in Chicago and started lecturing us on why we should be supporting them,” Smith recalled.
”They started waving their fingers and saying, `You really should be concerned about your reproductive rights.` And this woman got up and said, `We don`t have any rights, period.` Basically, they pretty much got kicked out.” Jamillah Muhammad, director of resource and program development for PUSH for Excellence and a founder of African American Women for Choice, said that more black women are demanding a voice in the abortion rights movement.
”Black women have reached a new level of confidence and motivation because of Carol Moseley Braun`s (Senate) campaign,” Muhammad said.
To promote diversity, the abortion rights league`s national board of directors imposed an affirmative action plan on itself in 1990.
The board also passed a diversity policy at its June meeting in Washington urging that the group reach out to communities not only of different races but also of different physical abilities, sexual orientations and income levels.
”Race and class issues come up together,” Powell said. ”With Medicaid not funding abortion services . . . we really need to reach out to women who are actually affected.”
Some are criticized
Those minorities who do actively work for abortion rights find that their efforts are sometimes criticized in their communities.
Joanne Kyle, a black mother of three from the Southeast Side who volunteers for the National Organization for Women, said that black anti-abortion demonstrators have singled her out when she has participated in a demonstration.
”They yelled, `You got a lot of nerve, genociding your own people,`
” Kyle said.
Anti-abortion activists say there is a widespread belief among minorities that abortion is a form of genocide destroying their children.
”All these nice middle-class white women are telling the poor black women that they need to get abortions so we can end poverty,” Esteves said.
Only 11 percent of black women in the National Council of Negro Women/
Communications Consortium survey said they believed that birth control and abortion are a plot by whites to eliminate the black race.
”If you talk to women of color, they will acknowledge that genocide is a concern,” Tynes said.
”This country has a history of trying to control the reproduction of women of color.
”But they will also say that when they make the decision, they are not making a decision to kill the race; they are making decisions about their families.”
Andy Smith said that even though she supports abortion rights, she remains concerned over how abortion could affect future generations of American Indians and other minorities.
”A lot of pro-choice women are getting into population control,” Smith said. ”Basically, it`s population control for Third World women. We`re not interested in controlling our population for the sake of their population.
”The thing we really want to do is promote life,” she said. ”Our primary issues are having an atmosphere where healthy children can be raised and stopping the things that make abortion necessary, like poverty and sexual violence.”
Smith added that the policy of the federal Indian Health Service-which provides medical care to Indian women on reservations-of providing free sterilization but no abortions is a more serious threat than abortion.
Esteves suggested that the high rate of abortion among Hispanic women means not that those women support abortion rights, but that society has failed to offer them better solutions.
”We have found that one of the largest pro-life communities is Hispanic women,” she said. ”We are primarily very religious people who are very family oriented.”
Felecia Thompson, a counselor at the Loop Crisis Pregnancy Center, said that abortion runs counter to fundamental black religious beliefs and values. ”Growing up in the community, I found that whenever there was a pregnancy, planned or unplanned, and it was incapable of being handled by the woman, someone else would take care of the baby,” she said. ”It was felt that life was precious.”
Democrats by habit
She said the absence of many blacks in the anti-abortion movement can be explained largely by political habit.
”Historically, we tend to be Democrats,” she said. ”And you tend to vote that way without really considering the (abortion) issue.”
Muhammad argued that anti-abortion activists are hostile to the traditional concerns of minorities.
”Most of these people who have an obsessive preoccupation with a fetus will march all the way around the country, but won`t go around the corner to pass legislation for food stamps or the (Women, Infants and Children)
program,” she said.
Minorities on both sides of the issue said that abortion is a subject few in their communities were eager to broach.
Thompson said more blacks would join the anti-abortion movement if black ministers would speak out on the issue from the pulpit.
”I don`t think blacks on the whole are aware at what a great rate we are aborting our children,” she said. ”It`s something not talked about.”
It is not talked about in the Latino community, either, despite the efforts of abortion rights supporter Aida Giachello, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to prod the conversation. Giachello, a founding member of the National Latina Women`s Health Organization and the former chairman of the Chicago Commission on Women, said she has urged several organizations in which she is active to take a stand supporting abortion rights, with no success.
”They don`t want to come out publicly,” she said. ”They are afraid of social sanctions, rejections.”
Through such silence, she said, ”you reinforce the myth that Hispanic women are saints. They are not supposed to have sex or have those thoughts in terms of terminating a pregnancy.”
Powell suggested that it is churches` discomfort with sexual issues that has stifled public debate on the issue within the black community, along with a cultural hesitancy to speak openly about such matters.
”The women`s movement really did something for white women in that way,” she said.
”Women of color have not been as involved in the women`s health movement. We didn`t necessarily participate in all that consciousness-raising.”
Thus far, Powell said, she receives ”quiet support” from other blacks.
”It`s not like I`m going to get 150 women to show up at my house at a rally,” she said. ”But on a one-to-one level, people are going to say, `I`m glad you`re doing this.` ”
