That the abortion horror stories happen disproportionately to Black women is interesting, since Black women are the population cohort (by race and sex) most opposed to abortion.
Lakisha Wilson |
This bears repeating: A young Black woman is more than twice as likely to be sold an abortion as a young white woman, and once she gets on the abortion table, she is about twice as likely to suffer fatal complications as a white woman.
More to the point, a Black woman coming of age in the US is at least four times more likely to die from abortion complications than a white woman coming of age.
Tonya Reaves |
I'm not the only person who has noticed this profound indifference to the lives of Black women entering America's abortion clinics. Matty Byrd, whose daughter Belinda died of abortion malpractice, wrote to the Los Angeles District Attorney:
The other young Black women were Lynette Wallace and Cora Lewis.I am the mother of Belinda Byrd, victim of abortionists at [Inglewood]. I am also the grandmother of her three young children who are left behind and motherless. I cry every day when I think how horrible her death was. She was slashed by them and then she bled to death ... and nobody cares. I know that other young black women are now dead after abortion at that address. ... Where is [the abortionist] now? Has he been stopped? Has anything happened to him because of what he did to my Belinda? Has he served jail time for any of these cruel deaths? People tell me nothing has happened, that nothing ever happens to white abortionists who leave young black women dead. I'm hurting real bad and want some justice for Belinda and all other women who go like sheep to slaughter.
Belinda Byrd
Antonesha Ross |
For some reason, as I leafed through the death certificates, my eye was drawn to the box marked "Race."
Edrica Goode |
"Look at these, Mona," I told her. "They're all Black women. We're never going to be able to get anybody to care."
That was nearly twenty years ago, and it seems that I was right. As long as abortion quackery continues to be predominately a problem of Black women, it will continue to be an invisible problem that doesn't get acknowledged, much less addressed.
A young Black man gets shot by a police officer under unclear circumstances, and entire neighborhoods burn. A young Black woman is left unattended to bleed out at an abortion clinic, and the silence is deafening.
It's about time for that to change.
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