As Election Nears, Voters Agree Abortion Equals "Economic Justice"

A new survey reveals that companies like Facebook are on the cutting edge of the abortion argument when it comes to offering employees the freeze-your-eggs perk. For a new generation of career women, abortion rights (a.k.a. “reproductive justice”) are becoming increasingly tied to “economic justice”. Reporting on the survey, Maya Dusenbery, Executive Director of Feministing writes:

Far from seeing abortion access as something that shouldn’t be included in the broader agendas–let alone a poison pill that would sink their support for the legislation–voters agreed that reproductive rights are pretty key part of ensuring gender equality. As the chart above shows, strong majorities in both states agreed that a woman’s ability to control whether or when she has children is important to her financial stability and equality.

When the question is about the impact of access to abortion specifically, the figure drops slightly to about half. But that simply suggests that we need to more clearly show that abortion is a very common way that people control their reproductive lives–by fighting the stigma that paints folks who have abortions as “the other” when in fact we’re not–and continuing to highlight just how precarious access to the procedure has become, particularly for those with the least financial stability.

Results of the survey illustrate that the highest supporters of government funded abortion are African Americans, Latinos, and those with household incomes less than $50,000/year. The racial statistics shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that the majority of abortions are performed among the Black and Latino communities:

According to 2010 census data, African Americans make up 12.6% of the U.S. population but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that black women accounted for 35.4% of all abortions in 2009. The Guttmacher Institute (AGI) puts the percentage of black abortions at 30% of the U.S. total.Their most recent numbers are from 2008. Similarly, AGI tells us that Hispanic women accounted for 25% of all U.S. abortions in 2008, though Hispanics make up just 16.3% of the U.S. population.The CDC lists the percentage of Hispanic abortions at 20.6%. Compare those numbers to non-Hispanic whites, who make up 63.7% of America’s population, but account for only 36% of all U.S. abortions (37.7%according to the CDC).

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEja-1emRic

The economic need among these populations is also greater than the rest. According to statistics, “between 2000 and 2012, the number of women in need of publicly funded services who were Hispanic increased by 54%, the number of black women in need increased by 22% and the number of white women in need increased by 7%.” Perhaps this is one of the main reasons why Planned Parenthood, the largest federally funded abortion provider in America, plants 79% of its clinics within walking distance of African American and Hispanic neighborhoods. (So much for Ms. Dusenbery’s “precarious access” claim.)

The statistical evidence makes the idea of a white woman advocating for “economic justice” through abortion an eerie reminder of Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate and founder of Planned Parenthood who once wrote,

“We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care…”.

The morally shocking argument that a woman can choose her life over the life of her unborn child pales in comparison to the broad spectrum concept of socially engineering a culture based on Marxist notions of justice and equality. But, we shouldn’t be surprised. Whether it’s freezing your eggs in pursuit of a career, or having an abortion to avoid having another mouth to feed, the pursuit of reproductive justice has always been primarily economic. The scariest thing is that this greed is now being recognized and justified by voters – and lauded by feminists.