Study Finds Most Abortion Clinics Are Not In Black Neighborhoods (1692 hits)
By Susan A. Cohen
Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute have found that these arguments do not hold true when looking at the data. In actuality, about 60 percent of facilities (six in 10) that perform abortions are located in predominantly white neighbor hoods.
By comparison,13 percent are located in Latino neighborhoods. Only six percent are in predominantly black areas, and that’s still less than the 18 percent of clinics in areas where the racial makeup is pretty even.
To put it in simpler terms, there are nearly 10 times as many abortion providers in white neighborhoods as there are in black ones.
Furthermore, of the clinics that perform more than 400 of these procedures per year, 58 percent of those are in mostly white areas. Meanwhile only nine percent are in predominantly black neighborhoods. Even when combined with the 16 percent of these providers in more Hispanic areas, that’s still not enough to add up to the number in white ones.
This much is true: In the United States, the abortion rate for black women is almost five times that for white women. Antiabortion activists, including some African-American pastors, have been waging a campaign around this fact, falsely asserting that the disparity is the result of aggressive marketing by abortion providers to minority communities. The Issues4Life Foundation, for example, is a faith-based organization that targets and works with African-American leaders toward achieving the goal of "zero African-American lives lost to abortion or biotechnology." In April, Issues4Life wrote to the Congressional Black Caucus to denounce Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its "racist and eugenic goals." The group blamed PPFA and abortion providers in general for the high abortion rate in the African-American community—deeming the situation the "Da[r]fur of America"—and called on Congress to withdraw federal family planning funds from all PPFA affiliates.
These activists are exploiting and distorting the facts to serve their antiabortion agenda. They ignore the fundamental reason women have abortions and the underlying problem of racial and ethnic disparities across an array of health indicators. The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy. This applies to all women—black, white, Hispanic, Asian and Native American alike. Not surprisingly, the variation in abortion rates across racial and ethnic groups relates directly to the variation in the unintended pregnancy rates across those same groups.
Black women are not alone in having disproportionately high unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. The abortion rate among Hispanic women, for example, although not as high as the rate among black women, is double the rate among whites. Hispanics also have a higher level of unintended pregnancy than white women. Black women's unintended pregnancy rates are the highest of all. These higher unintended pregnancy rates reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time. Moreover, these realities must be seen in a larger context in which significant racial and ethnic disparities persist for a wide range of health outcomes, from diabetes to heart disease to breast and cervical cancer to s*xually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV.
Behind the Numbers Abortion rates have been declining in the United States for a quarter of a century, from a high of 29.3 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 in 1981 to an historic low (post-Roe v. Wade) of 19.4 in 2005. The overall number of abortions has been falling too, dropping to 1.2 million in 2005. Currently, about one-third of all abortions are obtained by white women, and 37% are obtained by black women. Latinas comprise a smaller proportion of the women who have abortions, and the rest are obtained by Asians, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and women of mixed race (see chart).
The abortion rates among women in minority communities have followed the overall downward trend over the three decades of legal abortion. At the same time, however, black women consistently have had the highest abortion rates, followed by Hispanic women (see chart). This holds true even when controlling for income: At every income level, black women have higher abortion rates than whites or Hispanics, except for women below the poverty line, where Hispanic women have slightly higher rates than black women. ...
