African American Women and Abortion RightsEarly 20th Century
Well before the Hyde Amendment in 1977 took away Medicaid funding for abortions for poor women, in the early part of the 20th century, within the more general American social context of the reproductive rights revolution (including the work of Margaret Sanger), "the black women's club movement supported the establishment of family-planning clinics in Black communities. In 1918 the Women's Political Association of Harlem became the first Black organization to schedule lectures on birth control... The National Urban League requested that the Birth Control Federation of America (the forerunner to Planned Parenthood) open a clinic in the Columbus Hill section of the Bronx in 1925. ...In 1931, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of the Abyssinian Baptist Church spoke at public meetings in support of family planning."
Various newspapers serving the African American community, the National Urban League and the NAACP pressed the need for family planning. "The Black press espoused this strategy as a means for uplifting the race, perhaps partially in response to the economic ravages of the Depression. The African-American newspapers of the period also reported the mortality rate of women who had septic abortions and championed the causes (of) African American doctors who were arrested for performing illegal abortions," according to Loretta Ross: The Baltimore Afro-American wrote that pencils, nails, and hat pins were instruments commonly used for self-induced abortions, and that abortions among Black women were deliberate, not the spontaneous result of poor health or sexually transmitted diseases. Statistics on abortions among African-American women are scarce, but 28 percent of Black women surveyed by an African-American doctor in Nashville in 1940 said they had had at least one abortion. This was the social situation within a context, that, as well, included the influence of the eugenics movement.
1950s
"The majority of abortions available to African-American women in the 1950s and early 1960s were provided by doctors, midwives, and quacks operating illegally. Little information is available regarding the Black midwives who provided abortions, except for arrest records and court transcripts. Information on physicians is slightly more accessible. For example, Dr. Edward Keemer, a Black physician in Detroit, practiced outside the law for more than thirty years until his arrest in I956. He was sent to prison for fourteen months and afterward sold vacuum cleaners in New Jersey until he was able to win reinstatement of his medical license in the early 1960s. His assistant, LaBrentha Hurley, was jailed for sixty days and had to fight to get her children back after she was released. When Keemer resumed his practice, he continued openly to defy the law. By this time, he had become militant in the fight for reproductive rights. At a 1971 press conference held by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, Keemer described an illegal abortion he had performed the previous day and pledged he would continue to save women's lives, whatever the consequences. He and his assistant were rearrested several days later and again faced prosecution." (Ross)
Even as standardized hospital practices did emerge, according to Ross, African American lay midwives, whose ancestry linked back to slavery, continued to practice in the South, providing "most of the abortion and contraceptive services" for African American women. These women, technically functioning illegally, "developed informal networks of communication" to share contraceptive and abortion information.
1960s
By the late 1960s family planning became once again "synonymous with the civil rights of poor women to medical care." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected this re-emergent belief that family planning rights were a important aspect of the civil rights movement: In 1966 he wrote in a Planned Parenthood publication that family planning is "a special and urgent concern" for African Americans and "a profoundly important ingredient in quest for security and a decent life." Studies found that "when contraceptives were unavailable and abortion was illegal, septic abortions were a primary killer of African-American women. One study estimated that 80 percent of deaths caused by illegal abortions in New York in the 1960s involved Black and Puerto Rican women. In Georgia between 1965 and 1967 the Black maternal death rate due to illegal abortion was fourteen times that of white women."
"If complications developed from illegal abortions, women visited physicians who operated in the poorer sections of the city... Dr. Joe Beasley, who helped establish one of the country's first statewide family-planning programs in Louisiana in the 1960s, observed that the leading causes of maternal mortality were the medical complications of criminal or medically unsupervised abortions:
The other thing we saw was tremendous problems of induced abortion, with the highest predominance in the lower socioeconomic group, and the middle and the upper getting more expensive abortions. So we see women very carved up--very crude abortions-knitting needles, cloth packing. And we see them coming in highly febrile, puerperal discharge in the vagina, germs in their blood, blood poisoning, septicemia, and those who survive have a very high probability of being reproductive cripples... then when we looked at it, there was a very low pattern of contraception in the lower socioeconomic group, in spite of what seemed to be a very strong desire not to have unwanted children ... I mean, if a woman will risk her very life with a criminal abortion, that's pretty damn strong motivations.
Dangerous, self-administered procedures probably killed many women. Nurses reported that 'sticks, rocks, chopsticks, rubber or plastic tubes, gauze or cotton packing, ball-point pens, coat hangers, or knitting needles" were frequently used by desperate women. Or they chose to use douches believed effective in inducing abortions made from detergents, orange juice, vinegar, bleach, disinfectant, lye, potassium permanganate, or colas. The gaseous explosions of soft drinks said to cause a miscarriage; some teenagers considered them spermicidal.' Clearly Black women needed and wanted abortion and contraception services. But few had access to safe and affordable treatment."
More Recently
A 1989 brochure from African American Women for Reproductive Freedom: "Somebody owned our flesh, and decided if and when and with whom and how our bodies were to be used. Somebody said that Black women could be raped, held in concubinage, forced to bear children year in and year out, but often not raise them."
In 1991 a poll found that 83 percent of African Americans support some level of abortion rights.
Actor Whoopi Goldberg holding up wire coat hangers during the March for Women's Lives, April 25, 2004 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.; photo source National Organization for Women. (Note: Possibly the largest protest ever held on the Mall.)
SOURCE:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/Organizations/healthnet/WoC/reproductive/ross.html
Melanie Tervalon, "Black Women's Reproductive Rights," in Women's Health: Readings on Social, Economic and Political Issues, ed. Nancy Worcester and Marianne H. Whatley (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1988).
www.now.org
Yesterday's Black History Month Thread #7: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=496690&mesg_id=496690