Banning abortions can disproportionately impact women of color

In her senior year at the University of Colorado Boulder, Luna Ly’s period was two weeks late. She took a pregnancy test at her partner’s apartment, and after seeing it was positive, Ly went to her first class of the day.

She called Kaiser Permanente to schedule an abortion and was told they would have to send a bill to her parents since she was still covered by their insurance, but that was not an option for her. Sitting outside her work, one of three jobs she had at the time, Ly made an appointment at Planned Parenthood.

After splitting the bill with her partner, she was left with no money in her bank account. Ly remembers it costing around $600.

It felt like a regular doctor’s appointment, she said, until they performed a vaginal ultrasound. Ly remembers the touch of the doctor’s cold hands, before she was told she was eight weeks along. She looked at the ultrasound, to her it looked like a mass of cells, and she says — that’s all it was.

She came in shortly after for her follow-up appointment and was treated by the same doctor. Ly was given the first pill and set a reminder on her phone for the next. The doctor smiled, told her the possible side effects, and she left.

A medication abortion is a procedure in which medication is used to end pregnancy. It is a two-step process; the first pill is mifepristone, it is used to stop the pregnancy from growing, and the second is misoprostol, completing the procedure by emptying the uterus.

“There was no question, no doubt that I was going to get an abortion,” she said. “Despite the stigma, shame, and financial cost, I needed to have one. I was graduating, my life was just getting started.”

Ly said her past informed her decision, too. She watched her mother, a Vietnamese refugee, raise five children on her own. She watched her jump through hoops and hurdles, trying to navigate federal welfare programs to get food on the table, make sure they had health insurance, all while working multiple jobs.

“I knew that I could be in a similar boat even though I had a college education, even though we were financially better off now than we were when I was a child,” she said. “There was no choice, I needed the abortion because I wanted a different future than what I had seen my family go through.”

She never told her mom about her abortion.

Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision, established that a woman’s right to choose an abortion was protected by the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Several states have advanced measures restricting access to abortions. A Texas bill enables private citizens to sue anyone who knowingly “aids and abets” a woman obtaining an abortion. An Oklahoma Senate committee voted to approve a bill banning abortion 30 days after conception.

More recently, Florida lawmakers voted to ban most abortions after 15 weeks. This bill is modeled after a similar Mississippi ban, now awaiting a ruling by the Supreme Court, that can have an impact on abortion access nationwide.

On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving a Mississippi ban on most abortions after 15 weeks; the decision, expected in late June or early July will determine the future of Roe v. Wade. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, women of color will be disproportionately affected. Their access to legal and safe abortions will be greatly limited for a multitude of reasons — one being the wage gap.

The state is claiming the fetus to have made physiological developments by 15 weeks, and that abortions at this stage pose a greater risk to the mother. The Mississippi law’s 15-week ban is several weeks earlier than Roe allows.

However, experts estimate fetal viability at about 24 weeks, a viability standard affirmed by Roe v. Wade in 1973 and adopted by Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 — in their ruling against the ability of individual states to impose an “undue burden” on the right to abortion before fetal viability.

In the heated, two-hour hearing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested adoption services as an alternative to abortion, in that it removes the forced burden of parenting.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stressed a narrow approach. He suggested the Court focus on the issue before them — Mississippi’s 15-week ban, rather than the topic of abortion as a whole. This would uphold Mississippi law but not overrule Roe, upon face value.

Whereas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh challenged the principle of precedent, saying rulings have been overturned in the past, possibly signaling his inclination to disregard the proposal made by Roberts and focus on the state of Roe v. Wade as a whole.

“If the state of Mississippi wins, and Roe falls, we are looking at more than 20 states no longer having access to legal, clinic based abortion,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder and former executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund.

“So, we’re talking about people having to rely on going out of state,” she said “And, we already know who’s going to have the least amount of access to getting out of state, which are marginalized people.”

Relying on travel requires financial means, time off from work, time away from family; it is not always a feasible option. Structural racism and discrimination have created income inequality amongst women of color, creating an additional barrier to abortion access, which is exacerbated by state-level bans.

White women’s annual earnings are only 83% of men’s, and the gap widens with women of color — Black women earn 63% of white men’s earnings and Latina women earn 55%, according to the American Association of University Women.

Thirty-eight percent of Mississippi’s population is Black, and it is one of the poorest states in the country. The Mississippi Delta is majority Black, and Bertram Roberts says, it is a place carved out to be poor.

“We have constructed poverty,” she said. “And so, when you already constructed barriers to people’s lives like that, then of course, abortion access and health care access is just one more barrier.”

Bertram Roberts was a clinic escort at Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi.

“We kept encountering people who were just a little bit short on money,” she said. “Every time that happened we all would jump up and dig in our pockets, trying to get the money together.”

There was a day when a woman exited the clinic crying; she was $50 short for what would’ve been the first appointment necessary to obtain an abortion. Bertram Roberts remembers her and all the escorts just standing there, leaning against the fence, thinking they couldn’t keep doing this.

They wanted to start a fund to help poor people seeking abortions, and she just said, “we’re doing this.” She started by asking people on Facebook for help, and a lot of the group’s fundraising comes from out of state.

“People don’t always feel safe supporting us, and that’s fair,” she said.

Bertram Roberts had a caller who was afraid to tell her mother about her abortion, but when she did, her mother shared her own abortion story.

“The fear and stigma surrounding abortion comes from the anti-abortion terrorism that people have witnessed, that our provider here has endured,” said Michelle Colon, executive director and co-founder of SHERo Mississippi — a Black women’s reproductive justice collective.

Colon has been an advocate and activist in Mississippi for 20 years.

With only one clinic since 2005, some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and some of the most difficult barriers to overcome, she says it seems like they have been functioning in a post Roe climate.

The clinic is the lone abortion provider in Mississippi, but even then, it is limited in its procedures. The clinic is open two to three days a week for abortions because there are no local doctors to perform them.

Additionally, by Mississippi State law, state mandated information must be given in person at least 24 hours prior to having an abortion. Therefore, you must make an in-clinic appointment prior to scheduling an appointment for your actual abortion procedure, under Miss. Code Title 41.

“Mississippi is basically an abortion desert,” Colon said. “I don’t stutter when I say Mississippi is an abortion desert.”

She and her partners chose to create this collective because they believed the contributions made by Black and brown women were being erased and not recognized. SHERo takes on the full spectrum of reproductive justice, using a Black feminist lens.

Colon says they rally for people to talk about their abortion without fear of retaliation. In her own experience at places of work, she has faced public disapproval because of her stance on abortion. She explained that a lot of that has to do with the power religious institutions hold in Mississippi, as mentioned by Bertram Roberts. It creates an intolerable atmosphere.

The anti-abortion and pro-life movements rely heavily on religious rhetoric, which ultimately personifies and individualizes a fetus. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, during the oral arguments, echoed this in her belief that Mississippi’s motive in restricting abortion is religious.

And, “politicians re-enforce this,” Colon says.

“The first thing that comes out of their mouth is that they’re pro-life, and they want Mississippi to be the first abortion-free state,” she said.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Mississippi will be an abortion-free state, she added.

Colon says the 15-week ban is not new, but rather it is a direct attack on Roe. And, it is something Mississippi officials have been waiting for; they know the Supreme Court is on their side with a six to three conservative majority, especially considering the lower courts said to leave it alone.

“The clinic here has been fighting for years,” she said. “And, every threat they have withstood it, but I don’t think they can withstand this one.”

And, it is women of color that will be directly and inordinately affected. Women of color are more likely to be the lone caregiver; they are more likely to work lower-income jobs — two factors that pose a challenge to abortion access.

Mississippi is the only state without a law requiring equal pay for equal work by women and men, and under the Fair Labor Standard Act, the only requirement is to remain above the federal minimum.

“Women are disproportionately paid less than men, and within that Black and brown women are paid considerably lower than their white female counterparts,” Colon said. “They work in jobs that don’t have healthcare, so they have to take money from their other budgets to supplement another part of their family’s survival.”

This is not to say that all people seeking abortions do not have these issues, but to stress how these barriers are compounded for women of color.

“Abortion bans are deeply rooted in racist origins,” Colon said. “They want to exert power over pregnant people’s bodies. Our bodies have been manipulated, used, and abused over history. For them, to continue to challenge our access and right to abortion, is just another abuse against the Black body.”

Bertram Roberts says her greatest fear, in the midst of this national conversation about abortion, is the criminalization of Black and brown women for their pregnancy outcome.

“It hurts to be a woman or pregnant person in Mississippi,” says Colon.

Though state officials claim the interference of the government is for safety and health, Colon said, “we have existing lives who are suffering because they refuse to do what is right for these existing, breathing families here in Mississippi.”

First implemented in 1977 by Congress, the Hyde Amendment bans the use of federal funds and Medicaid for abortion care outside of the limited instances of life endangerment, rape or incest; this dramatically limits coverage of abortion under Medicaid and other federal programs. Because communities of color are more likely to rely on Medicaid, the Hyde Amendment directly affects their ability to obtain an abortion.

In Mississippi, health plans offered in the state’s health exchange under the Affordable Care Act can only cover abortion in cases of life endangerment, or in cases of rape or incest. Additionally, abortion is covered in insurance policies for public employees only in cases of life endangerment, rape, incest or fetal anomaly, according to Miss. Code Title 41.

The more extreme efforts and restrictions against abortion become, the stronger Colon becomes in her resolve. And, after the oral arguments she was disappointed but not surprised.

“I expected more from the Solicitor General, considering he replaced the MS State Attorney General,” she said. “And while I admit to being a bit biased, I am proud of Julie Rikelman the attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, she went toe-to-toe with Chief Justice Roberts and stood her ground with Justices Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett.”

But, she said, Justice Sotomayor’s comment about the Court’s “surviving the stench” of reversing Roe, was a “mic-drop moment” and something to seriously consider because if it is overturned the impact will reverberate beyond Mississippi.

Years ago, Bertram Roberts was turned away from an abortion clinic because she did not have enough money. Now, she fights for reproductive freedom, alongside Colon and many other women, creating funds to help remove barriers to abortion.

And if Roe v. Wade is curtailed or overturned, she intends to stand strong.

“We will still be here,” she said. “We will still be out here doing the work we currently do. We are not going anywhere.