On April 10, Chelsea H. Jones, a voting rights researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, discussed with SUNY Oswego students the significance of abortion rights to Black women and the subsequent criminalization of this marginalized demographic in her talk, “Criminalizing Black Womanhood: The Pervasive Impact of Abortion Rights on Everyday Life.” Jones’s presentation laid out the stark healthcare statistics that plague Black women, how restrictive reproductive and gynecological health policies harm them and the conditions that enable the vicious cycle of systematic racism and oppression to fester.

“You’re probably wondering why a voting rights researcher is here to talk to you about abortion rights, right?” Jones said. “And that’s because I think these two issues are inextricably linked, and I’m going to talk to you a bit about that today. But for Black women especially, the right to vote is tied to abortion rights and vice versa.”

Jones continued with a personal anecdote to describe her relationship with reproductive health. On a university study abroad trip in China, Jones’s health took a nosedive, leading to an emergency hospitalization and the consequential diagnosis of uterine fibroids, or “benign tumors that affect a person’s uterus’s ability to function properly,” Jones said.

“In my case, [the fibroids] led to me bleeding for multiple weeks at a time. And since then, I’ve undergone about five different surgeries to have the fibroids removed and ultimately have them regrow.”

“After my first surgery, I was told, ‘You’ll probably be able to have children, but we’re not quite sure how strong your uterus is and how many it’ll be able to hold,’” Jones said. “So, what happens if, when I get pregnant, the doctor’s doubts come true and something happens to threaten my life or the life of my unborn child? Will I be granted an abortion to save my life? Will I be given the medication that I need so I don’t have excessive bleeding? If I were to miscarry at home, would I be charged with a felony?”

“Is my life as a scholar, as an advocate, as a sister, a mentor, a friend, will it matter more than the moral disposition of a few people that think that abortion is inherently wrong?” Jones said.

With this segway, Jones dove into the differences between racial demographics, where Black women perpetually saw a harrowing reality in comparison to their White, Hispanic, and Asian counterparts. 

On one slide of her presentation, 2021 and 2023 data showed that Black women were 41% more likely to develop cervical cancer, 75% more likely to die from cervical cancer and 13% less likely to be screened for cervical cancer. Yet, Black women have an 86% increased chance of survival with screening, a potentially life-saving procedure that is not consistently done.

Another slide showcased the discrepancies in maternal emergencies between Black women and those of other races. “According to the [Centers for Disease Control] (CDC), Black women had twice the fetal mortality rate as White and Latino women, and this is from 2015 to 2017,” Jones said. “And this trend persists when we look at maternal mortality; that’s the death of a mother. The CDC reports that in 2021, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 2.6 times higher than that of White women.”

Disaggregating the data, as Jones would describe it, shows the depth of marginalization Black women face in terms of reproductive health standards. White women are statistically more likely to receive adequate treatment for any aspect of reproductive health. In contrast, Black women are at a higher risk of both losing their child during pregnancy and dying of a detectable disease due to the carelessness or biases of a medical professional.

“There are many, many reasons that a person’s body would not be able to fully carry out a pregnancy,” Jones said. “So when abortion is illegal, when miscarriage is illegal, we are criminalizing the functions of our body that many times are not up to us to control. Our bodies are being policed by factors that we don’t have any control over.”

“So my question to you is, how is that pro-life?” Jones said. “Pro-life means being supportive of a healthy, stable existence, right? But it should not remove access to the things that help you get to a healthy, stable existence. Pro-life should be pro-health. That’s pro-financial health of someone who cannot support a child, pro-physical health of someone who cannot safely birth a child, pro-mental health of someone who is not well enough to raise a child and pro-holistic health of maybe someone who did not consent to have a child.” 

After laying out the problems that Black women continuously face, Jones shifted her tone from the systematic discrepancies in healthcare for Black women to the link between voting and abortion rights in the United States.

“The current landscape of voting rights is a function of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling that took away federal protections of voting across the country,” Jones said. “It left it up to the states to… decide who gets to vote, and we’re seeing that inequities exist because of that [ruling]. Well, the same thing happened with the [Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] ruling, federal protections for abortion rights were taken away, and states are being left to decide who gets to have an abortion, if anyone at all.”

“The same people that are restricting abortion rights are also restricting access to democracy,” Jones said.

Jones mentioned that certain states have simultaneously enacted restrictive legislation on voting and abortion rights following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, including both Dakotas Arkansas, Mississippi and Indiana. However, Jones also spoke about states where voters went to the ballots to prevent new suffocating policies, such as in Ohio.

“About 2.2 million voters, about 57 percent of the people who came out to vote, voted in support of putting the right to abortion on the [state] constitution,” Jones said. “So ballot measures show us that we still have the power to reverse these restrictions and affect change in our communities. When the federal government takes our rights away, we still have the opportunity, the right and the duty to fight back, and that’s what they did in Ohio.”

Jones’s discussion concluded with her appeal to students to use their communicative flexibility and newfound voting freedom to make reproductive, voting and women’s rights more accessible in today’s society.

“Your call to action from me is to stay engaged, to do your research, to tell and retell and retell the stories of people impacted by what you heard today and to never forget the power you have,” Jones said.

Photo by: Nicolas Diaz Contreras