The overturning of Roe v Wade is part of a wider movement entangled with nativism and white supremacy
hen the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade on 24 June, permitting the state criminalisation of abortion in America, the only thing everyone could agree on was that it was a historic decision. Unfortunately for America, the history it was based on was largely fake.
But there is yet another, less well-known cause for all this in civil-war era America. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story.
The war had devastated a generation of white men, with estimates of around 750,000 dead, or 2.5% of the population, as the ratio of white men to women plummeted after the war. White women were gaining self-determination, forcing their way into higher education and professions. Contraception and medical standards were improving while urban industrialisation mitigated against the need for large families to work farms.
Soon spokesmen for the patriarchal class were making explicit claims about the racial obligations of Protestant adults to sustain their political dominance. In a forgotten 1928 bestseller called Bad Girl, a married young white woman considers an abortion to maintain her freedom; having decided to keep the baby, she casually employs a racist slur in thinking about the Black mothers with whom she will have to share a ward: “But I guess you don’t care who your neighbours are once the pain starts,” she reflects.
By 1939, the year Gone With the Wind premiered as a film, the subtext of “race suicide” had become manifest. Reporting the latest population statistics, a California paper declared “the race suicide prophecies we have heard for many years don’t seem to have been justified”, as “there’s evidently life in the white race yet”.
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