In an article on The Washington Post, SaraEllen Strongman explains why Black feminists support abortion rights, despite attempts from antiabortion campaigns to build alliances with African Americans.
"In their political campaign to outlaw abortion, antiabortion groups have attempted to build alliances with African Americans by trying to evoke rhetoric of racial violence and injustice. These groups have circulated materials that have co-opted the language of African American political movements with slogans such as “Abortion suppresses the Black vote” and “Black lives matter in and out of the womb.” This antiabortion rhetoric attempts to link abortion with anti-Black racism and sometimes even goes so far as to suggest that Planned Parenthood, a major provider of abortions in the United States, is complicit in Black genocide.
Abortion is a contentious issue in the African American community, especially since many religious Black Americans hold the same beliefs about fetal personhood as White evangelicals. But one group has consistently advocated for the importance of abortion rights for Black people: Black feminists. Why? Because they have long seen the right to abortion as part of broader racial and reproductive justice goals.
As abortion rights become an increasingly significant focus for feminists in the 1960s, Black feminists did not place the same emphasis on them as White feminists did. They were more concerned about the ways in which Black women, along with other women of color, poor women and disabled women, were subject to reproductive coercion."
