This year's theme follows Martin Luther King Jr. Day and a raging debate over what actual equality looks like in the U.S. The controversy has become particularly tense in schools and businesses, where questions about inequality regularly surface. Debate has swirled over whether it means simply guaranteeing equal opportunity or eliminating systemic biases against races, ethnicities, and other marginalized identities.
Regardless, rhetoric of systemic inequality – mainly systemic racism – has included arguments about abortion's disproportionate impact on minorities.
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Despite their lower population levels, non-Hispanic Black women accounted for the largest percentage of abortions (38%) in 2019, while non-Hispanic White women accounted for 33%. And compared to White women, "abortion rates and ratios were 3.6 and 3.3 times higher among non-Hispanic Black women and 1.8 and 1.5 times higher among Hispanic women," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported. The agency has attributed this to "disparities in rates of unintended pregnancies, structural factors, including unequal access to quality family planning services … economic disadvantage, and distrust of the medical system."
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And out of 1,000 live Black births, 390 Black children were aborted in 2016, according to the CDC. The Guttmacher Institute, which previously functioned as the research arm of Planned Parenthood, similarly reported that Black, non-Hispanic women saw the highest abortion rate (27.1 per 1,000 women aged 15-44) in 2014, compared to other racial groups. That was nearly three times the rate of White abortions (10 per 1,000 women aged 15-44).
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It's difficult to obtain comprehensive data for abortions in response to genetic anomalies, yet evidence points to even more lopsided proportions. The battle has played out at the state level as abortion providers have fought for abortion access, regardless of prenatal diagnosis. In 2019, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Indiana attempting to reinstate its Down syndrome abortion ban. However, the court's only Black justice, Clarence Thomas, authored an opinion in which he warned that abortion could be used as a tool for eugenics.
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"[A]bortion has proved to be a disturbingly effective tool for implementing the discriminatory preferences that undergird eugenics," he wrote. Those preferences extend to fetal sex as well. A 2019 study also argued that sex-selective abortion had created a gender imbalance in certain parts of the world with "23.1 million missing female births globally."
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