Supreme Court case on abortion pill is also a matter of racial justice

In 2021 alone, more than 1,200 women in the United States died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, with Black women dying at nearly three times the rate of white women. The Black maternal death rate in the U.S. is a staggering 28 times the rate of other wealthy countries.

In the 24 years since the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone, approximately one death per year has been associated with the drug, about the same as ibuprofen or acetaminophen and a tenth the risk of Viagra.

An organization dedicated to “seeking the ultimate good for the patient with compassion and moral integrity” might well be expected to be far more concerned about maternal deaths than an overwhelmingly safe and effective medication.

Instead, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is on a mission to make America a more dangerous place to be pregnant.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed likely to overturn a lower court ruling that dramatically restricted access to mifepristone, which was used in the majority of abortions last year. But the question before them is restricted to whether the Alliance has standing to challenge the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Since the Court obliterated abortion rights in 2022, at least 14 states have effectively banned abortion, including the use of mifepristone. Another 12 states have blocked access through telehealth, mandating at least one in-person clinic visit to receive it.

The Alliance — which incorporated in Amarillo, Texas, specifically so its case would be heard in the Fifth Circuit by a right-wing extremist federal judge — successfully challenged both the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone and its 2016 policy change that expanded access and extended the allowable use from seven to 10 weeks of pregnancy. An appeals court reversed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on FDA approval, but let stand the ruling on expanded access and allowable use.

Further restrictions on abortion access would only exacerbate existing racial disparities in health and economics. More than 60% of those who seek abortions are women of color. But the majority of Black Americans live in states where abortion is effectively banned or severely restricted. Black women are less likely to have the means or ability to travel to other states.

The landmark Turnaway Study found that women who were denied wanted abortions and went on to give birth were more likely than other women to suffer life-threatening complications such as eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage. Those denied abortions, and the children born as a result, were more likely to live in poverty, to face eviction, and to struggle to meet basic living expenses.

Two of the women in the study who were denied an abortion died following delivery.

Contrary to its mission statement, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine does not base its standards on medical science. Of the six “experts” who submitted declarations supporting the Alliance, five have been discredited by courts in other abortion cases. As the ACLU noted in an amicus brief, the advocacy group that published one doctor’s research on medication abortion claimed that President Barack Obama hypnotized listeners with his speeches. One is not a doctor or a scientist, but holds degrees in theology.

If the extremist campaign to criminalize abortion isn’t about saving lives, what is it about? It is part of a larger agenda to reverse the progress of the 20th century and re-establish white male dominance over our nation’s political and social institutions. After all, it wasn’t Roe v. Wade that first galvanized the so-called religious right; it was Green v. Connally, which held that a private school that practiced racial discrimination could not be eligible for a tax exemption.

“The religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision,” Dartmouth Professor of Religion Randall Balmer recalled Moral Majority architect Paul Weyrich saying in a 1990 speech: “[W]hat got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.”

As Balmer told New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall, “Opposition to abortion became a convenient diversion — a godsend, really — to distract from what actually motivated their political activism: the defense of racial segregation.”

When groups like Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine speak, we hear the echo of Bob Jones saying segregation is “God’s established order.”

Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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