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The AP Is Wrong: Abortion Bans Do Not Harm Minority Women, Abortions Do

Pregnant mother with son
Image CreditPhilippe Put / Flickr

The AP’s argument is: ‘If the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it.’ The opposite is true.

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On February 1, the Associated Press (AP) published a widely disseminated article claiming that minority women “bear the brunt” of pro-life laws restricting abortion. Here’s a fact-check of this article’s many false and misleading claims.

The thesis of the AP’s argument is: “if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it.” The article notes that the black abortion rate is extremely disproportionate compared to the white abortion rate in the South, but absurdly correlates the high black abortion rate with pro-life laws

The truth? Minority women have the highest abortion rate nationwide, and the abortion industry’s targeting of low-income and minority communities is plain to see. To borrow a line from the AP, “The numbers are unambiguous” — but the AP was looking at the wrong numbers. According to the most recent analyses available, nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion businesses are located in minority neighborhoods and nearly 90 percent of its “mega facilities” are within walking distance of non-white neighborhoods. 

In another failed attempt to paint abortion access as the solution to a problem, the AP reporters highlight the high infant mortality rate in Mississippi. There, black infants are nearly four times as likely as white infants to be killed in abortion violence. Also, according to the AP, “Black infants were about twice as likely as white infants to die during the first year of life.” 

With no explanation as to how abortion access improves this dire situation, one is left to deduce that the AP authors think infant mortality is best cured by prophylactically killing the child in utero before he or she has a chance to die outside the womb. 

The truth? An analysis of more than 100 peer-reviewed studies shows that each abortion a woman undergoes increases the risk of preterm birth for her subsequent children (and preterm birth is a leading cause of infant mortality). The AP also forgot to mention that Mississippi, with its astronomical black abortion rate, also has the highest rate of preterm birth in the nation.

According to that finding, “In Mississippi, the preterm birth rate among Black women is 44% higher than the rate among all other women.” If the AP had taken off the abortion blinders, it could have seen that, by referencing the black infant mortality rate, it was highlighting one of the many reasons abortion needs to be abolished — not expanded.

At every turn, the AP fails to explain how increased abortion access can meaningfully improve any of the struggles non-white women face. In fact, reliance on “abortion access” may be exacerbating the very situations in question.

The reality is that 76 percent of abortion-seeking women admit they would not be seeking an abortion if their circumstances were different. That statistic comes from Human Coalition, where 77 percent of abortion-seeking clients are minority women. Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reports that “qualitative data from in-depth interviews portrayed women who had had an abortion as typically feeling that they had no other choice, given their limited resources and existing responsibilities to others.” 

The AP fear-mongers about the impending fate of abortion-on-demand via the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling, saying: “If abortions are outlawed, those same [minority] women — often poor — will likely have the hardest time traveling to distant parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raising children they might struggle to afford.”  

Considering the fact that most women don’t want abortion access but want their circumstances to be different, why do the AP’s (both white) reporters and all those who claim to support abortion on behalf of women ignore the facts and instead choose to cry “abortion access!” more loudly?

Corporate abortion doesn’t just refuse to invest time, money, and strategy into improving the circumstances of the low-income minority women it claims to care about. It rallies against efforts to support these women with tangible resources and financial investments.

Minority women ask for support, and abortion peddlers — bolstered by their mainstream media allies — respond, No, you need abortion. One is hard-pressed to find a better example of modern racism than that. The “soft bigotry of low expectations” doesn’t feel very soft to the black child as he’s violently evacuated from his impoverished mother’s womb.

The abortion industry and its allies may view minority families as undeserving of support, but the pro-life movement is already standing alongside these communities and ramping up its support in preparation for Roe v. Wade to return to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.

Through Students For Life of America’s Campaign for Abortion-Free Cities, advocates deploy each month to knock on doors and have conversations in the very neighborhoods Planned Parenthood has infested for generations. These activists provide information about free, local, nonviolent resources — often within walking distance to the communities that need abortion alternatives the most.

Online, SFLA’s Standing With You initiative is doing the same thing — connecting those most targeted by the abortion industry with the resources that change their circumstances so they can reject abortion and embrace life, both for themselves and for their children.