By Allen R. Gray
NDG Contributing Writer
The issue of abortions is the most heated debate topic for the 2022 midterms for American voters. Its gnawing presence has possessed the moral conscience of Americans for nearly 50 years since the decision of Roe v. Wade. The subject itself is polarizing and forces voters to take a hard stand on one side of the debate or the other.
But is preventing the loss of unborn lives really the driving force that has piqued Republican interest and has them on a born-again crusade?
The fear of the vanishing white race, some feel, (and the potential loss of voting power that would come with it) is the impetus for a major national push to end all abortions—for whatever reason. It is easy to assume through American neglective and sometimes violent actions that it’s not life in general that we care so much about.
In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in the matter of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Court had to consider the constitutionality of the 2018 Mississippi state law that banned most abortion operations after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Court’s ruling overturned the decision of the seminal Roe v. Wade (1973) ruling on abortion that permitted a woman the right to choose.
With the Dobbs decision an avalanche of laws strictly prohibiting abortion—and in most cases making abortion a felony for the woman, the person that helped her, and the participating physician.
States that were the most vehement in the rhetoric surrounding abortion and subsequently went all-in with passing the prohibitive laws are solidly Republican, and their data reveals that white women are just as willing to have an abortion as are other races.
These laws that abolished abortions—regardless of health issues, rape, or incest—came regardless of the wishes of a vast majority of Americans. A Pew Research Center survey revealed that 61% of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal, compared to 37% of American adults who believe it should be illegal, yet states passed anti-abortion bills into law, nonetheless.
The response to these draconian laws that block the path toward safe abortions has always been that a desperate or violated woman has no choice but to resort to some draconian solution.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between the years 2010 and 2014 nearly 56 million abortions occurred worldwide for each of those years. WHO also estimates that over 25 million of those abortions were performed in unsafe conditions, sometimes by individuals who lacked the proper training for such a sensitive procedure.
In the “good old days” of the 1950s and 1960s, an estimated 1.2 million illegal abortions occurred each year.
The 1973 Roe decision caused the number of illegal U.S. abortions between the years 1972 and 1974 to plunge from 130,000 to 17,000, which meant safer environments became accessible for many more women—but not for women of all races.
During that same period, pregnancy-related deaths in 1972 and 1973 were attributed to Black women at a rate of two Black deaths to one white death.
Traditionally, legal and safe abortions have been reserved for white individuals who possessed Herschel Walker-type money and could afford adequate healthcare.
In New York between, 1951 and 1962, 88% of legal abortions were performed by private physicians. Because some states allowed for abortions, affluent women were able to access safer, medically sound terminations, and avoid the possibility of septic infections that are a byproduct of unsafe medical conditions.
On the other hand, poverty has a way of penalizing the impoverished.
Black and Hispanic women—who have the highest rates of rape-related pregnancies—are three times more likely to attempt a self-induced abortion out of desperation.
A query entitled Number of U.S. “Legal Abortion” Survey by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute showed that there are still a great number of American women who are opting to end their pregnancy. In 2018 for instance there were a total of 619,591 legal abortions documented in the U.S. In 2019 the documented number of abortions rose to 629,898. Then in 2020, the number of documented abortions grew exponentially to a total of 930,160.
Lovers of Life should push toward the goal of promoting safe abortions for all women regardless of race or socioeconomic status because abortions have been and will always be a part of us. The alternative for a distressed woman is a self-managed abortion or self-induced miscarriage abortion performed without medical assistance. These self-reparative methods often involve herbal medicines, sharp tools, forceful massage, or achieved through other creative (more dangerous) methods.
Abortion is not merely an issue for an individual state or a collective nation to consider. Abortion and abortion safety is an issue the entire world must consider as the number of unsafe abortions worldwide is continuously astronomical.
