The Arizona Supreme Court has exhumed an abortion ban that dates back to 1864, effectively ending access to abortion in the state. Democrats in the state house have been trying to repeal the ban, only to be repeatedly blocked by Republican representatives. The “zombie” law builds upon the state’s existing 15-week ban. Its enactment is divisive even among Republicans, with former President Donald Trump saying the ban “goes too far.” Should the 1864 ban survive any further legal or political challenges, it could be a blow to the Republican Party’s electoral chances in Arizona, a swing state where a Senate seat is being hotly contested.
This may be the first glimpse into an extreme stance on abortion going too far, even for conservative voters. Trump, who was directly responsible for the reversal of Roe v. Wade, told his Arizona party members to bury this ban for a reason: He wants to win. Since the Dobbs ruling in 2022, the politics of abortion have shifted sharply against Republicans. Marilyn Lands, an Alabama Democrat, recently won a special election campaigning on access to abortion and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
Renee Bracey Sherman, a Chicago-born organizer and storyteller, knows it isn’t enough just to point out the racist roots of a ban like Arizona’s, as she did on social media shortly after the state supreme court’s decision. That video — along with her forthcoming book, “Liberating Abortion,” co-authored with Regina Mahone — is why I wanted to have a conversation with her about the recent ruling in Arizona, the way bans on reproductive access exacerbate racial inequity and who has the “right” to an abortion.
Jamil Smith: Aren’t all abortion bans racist? I don’t think people fully grasp this, and I’m tired of having to repeat myself — I’m sure you are as well.
Renee Bracey Sherman: A lot of people think, “How are abortion bans racist?” If you look at the history of how and why abortion bans came to be, they were a backlash to increased immigration, Black liberation and White women wanting to participate in society.
Some of the first abortion bans were in the mid-1800s. You’ve got Native Americans being thrown off their lands, experiencing genocide and White leaders wanting to control them. You’ve got Black people newly freed from slavery and Victorian-era women starting to use birth control and wanting to have fewer children.
Horatio Storer was a 19th-century physician who was very anti-immigrant, very anti-Black. He was concerned about the White population being outpopulated by people who were not considered White. He worked in partnership with the American Medical Association to push for state laws to restrict abortions, writing: “Shall these regions be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
After World War II, Black people were coming back from the war wanting to use the GI Bill for economic uplift. White women who worked during the war would’ve liked to keep their jobs. There was a new push for people to have control over their lives and their fertility, leading to Roe v. Wade in 1973.
We saw a backlash to Roe almost immediately. It was after the Civil Rights Movement, after Black liberation. Conservatives had lost school segregation at the Supreme Court. They lost school prayer and busing; they lost the Board of Education. So they picked an issue where they could still carve out votes without violating policies that say you cannot openly discriminate. They picked abortion.
At that same time, White women had the White women’s liberation movement. This threatened White men because if White women didn’t have enough babies, then they would not be able to keep the number of White babies higher than the number of Black and Brown people in this country. The anti-abortion movement isn’t just about anti-Blackness; it’s also about the natalist concerns of the White population.
Anti-abortion activism came into play again in 2010 with the conservative Tea Party movement, which was a reaction to Barack Obama’s election. The Tea Party took over the state houses and started putting in place voter ID laws and abortion bans. They needed to be able to maintain political power, and they wanted to make sure that White people had the sheer volume of numbers to control Black and Brown people in this country. They were afraid that Black and Brown people would be able to control their fertility and have economic mobility.
At the same time conservatives were pushing abortion bans, there was discussion in the media that White people were going to become the minority in America. That’s when we started to see the anti-immigrant backlash of the Obama-era policies. It was always about White people’s fears about losing control and power. The way they enacted it was by controlling White women’s fertility because they were afraid of being outpopulated by Black and Brown people.
White people have also controlled Black and Brown people’s fertility through sterilizations, genocide and slavery — not just abortion. They actually wanted Black people who could procreate during slavery.
They want labor, cheap labor, that they can have power over. You can’t have power over somebody who’s aborted.
At the end of the day, who can you shit on? If you always have a Black underclass of people, then you can say: We need to make sure that we are better than them. We need to make sure that we are on top of them.
The other confusing thing is the statistic that Black people have abortions at higher rates than everyone else. There’s a lack of access to consistent birth control. That doesn’t mean that the number is higher. [Editor’s note: Black women are overrepresented in the data on abortion relative to their population.] White women still have the highest number of abortions.
This allows conservatives to complain about Black parenting rather than looking at our nation’s responsibility to take care of all children. It plays into the individualism of the U.S. and the anti-Blackness of how we talk about creating families.
If you don’t have Black people, then you can’t blame them for society’s ills.
Capitalism always needs an underclass. I think anti-Blackness always needs it, too. You always need someone to treat poorly. That’s why class solidarity between poor White folks and poor folks across race is really important.
Trump is calling upon the Arizona legislature to adjust the state’s abortion policy after the ban went into effect. What is your perspective on that?
Trump is an opportunist and White supremacist. He will say whatever the party is telling him to say to be able to move forward.
What I’m frustrated by is how many times we have White women who are going to believe his lies because their belief about abortion is predicated on abortion stigma and anti-Blackness.
They think the people having abortions are people of color, people who do not like children, teenagers, people who want to delay pregnancy. But that’s not actually who has abortions. It’s people who are already parenting and love and care about children. But their anti-abortion stigma is so deeply ingrained with anti-Blackness that they cannot recognize that people who have abortions also look like them.
There’s been a focus on the 1864 part of the ruling, partially because of the Civil War. Arizona was not even a state at that time. What’s your take on how the media has covered this and how that has accounted for the racist impact of this ban?
Slavery was not legal in Arizona Territory in 1864, and it was a crime to take someone out of Arizona for the purpose of putting them into slavery. But we know this happened all the time, where people were kidnapped into slavery. Black people in this country were being forced to breed at that time. That’s the larger issue — it was about coercion.
In terms of media coverage, if you don’t talk about how this ban came to be — that White men and some White women were afraid of the reproduction and procreation of Black women, non-White immigrants and Indigenous folks — you’re never going to understand the racist roots of abortion bans that are happening right now.
One of the successes of the Civil Rights Movement was that it made racism unpopular enough to stigmatize it. Beyond protecting abortion rights, what do you think the next steps need to be to disincentivize the racism of abortion bans?
Stigma works, right? It’s how we get people to do things.
We need to stigmatize the behavior of coercing people into doing things with their pregnancies that they do not want to do. We need to stigmatize making abortion inaccessible. We need to stigmatize treating someone poorly who’s experiencing a pregnancy. This is why Regina Mahone and I wrote the book “Liberating Abortion.” We think that when you can liberate abortion, it helps all of us because you’re asking people to treat people who had abortions with love, respect and support.
How would you explain the connection between Black maternal health and the risk of death in pregnancy regarding abortion?
To save some people’s lives when it comes to a pregnancy, you might need an abortion. Doctors, medical midwives, and nurses need to be able to perform every medical intervention to save a pregnant person’s life. Abortion is a part of that.
What you don’t want is a medical provider being unclear about what the law is in the very minutes that they’re trying to save your life. Those are the minutes that you are going to need. You should not have to be on the brink of death to be able to get access to an abortion if you need it.
If we do not have a conversation about this country’s founding history and the racism that created it all, we will never understand the motivations for abortion bans.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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