More Black women will die without Roe v. Wade

Yet nearly 50 years later, here we are.

With the Supreme Court’s stunning yet predictable repeal of the constitutional right to an abortion, women now have fewer rights than their mothers did. The same goes for women of color, who never had equal rights to begin with and face the increased risk of dying while pregnant because of historical health care inequities that are about to get worse.

Or, as Blount told me, the five Supreme Court justices who ripped away five decades of body autonomy told “a whole generation of Black girls … they aren’t worth saving.”

In 2020, the most recent year for which there is data, 292 Black women died in the U.S. of what are known as maternal causes, a 42% increase from the year before.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show Black women are three times as likely as white women to die because of a pregnancy-related issue. The rate is more than four times that for Black women between ages 30 and 34. The rate jumps to five times that for Black women with at least a college education when compared with their college-educated white peers, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

These statistics are borne out of a potent mix of structural racism and implicit health care bias. Knowing this, Blount and her colleagues at the Black Women’s Health Imperative are sounding the alarm about the Supreme Court ruling.

“We’re looking at what could be a 33% increase in Black women who are going to die every year simply because they don’t have access to abortion care,” Blount told me, referencing a 2021 study by the academic journal Demography, which covers issues related to population. “When you do the social network mapping of who these women support, you’re talking about touching thousands of lives. It’s a potential tragedy that has ripple effects.”

Black women like Blount know reproductive health freedom is a racial justice issue in America. It’s a crucial connection for the public to understand, which is why antiabortion advocates have spent years co-opting racial justice language for their cause. And they’ve done this while strategically perpetuating fallacies about abortion and the Black community, including linking it to a systemic eradication of Black people.

Here’s some truth: As the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on reproductive health rights, stated in a report nearly 14 years ago: “Behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy.” And these unintended pregnancies “reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services.” This fact has to be viewed in context with larger disparities in health outcomes for people of color, like Black maternal mortality rates, the report explains.

There is also other potential fallout to consider.

According to UCSF’s Turnaway Study, which spent 10 years tracking what happened to about 1,000 women of various races who were denied abortions, women who were forced to give birth experienced increased poverty. And “years after an abortion denial, women were more likely to not have enough money to cover basic living expenses like food, housing and transportation.”

Black women already account for 22% of women living in poverty, even though they make up around 13% of all women in the U.S., according to the Center for American Progress, a public policy research organization.

Since this country’s founding, Black and brown women have been caught in a maze of health care obstacles and mistreatment. The Supreme Court’s recent decision is just the latest chapter in a centuries-long story of exclusion.

Still, Byllye Avery, who in 1974 co-founded the Gainesville Women’s Health Center, a first-of-its-kind Florida clinic that spent years serving low-income and marginalized women facing unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, has hope. It rests on a new generation of Black and brown activists.

“I have a strong belief that the young people are going to pull together and figure out how to fix this,” she said. “Once people have been free to do something, it’s hard to lock them back up.”