Blog #9 - Smith, Crew

Andrea Smith’s article, Beyond Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life of Color and Reproductive Justice, discusses the underlying prejudices behind pro-choice and pro-life views. Smith does not explicitly support either view. Instead she uncovers the injustices surrounding both pro-life and pro-choice standpoints. In her first argument, Smith equates anti-abortion laws to the prison industrial complex. Time and time again, the United States prison system has proven to be a failure in not only rehabilitating inmates but deterring crime and addressing the social issues that promote criminal behavior. The failure of the prison system to deter crime is well known. Smith argues that the purpose of incarceration must therefore be to control the population of individuals of color, because a large percentage of jail inmates are either black or Hispanic. Smith states that prisons drain funds from beneficial programs such as education and social services which would be implemented in communities of color. These overlooked communities are left economically disadvantaged and more prone to high incidences of crime. Smith views the prison system as an extension of slavery that maintains white supremacy. The biggest failure of the prison system is that is serves as a temporary solution that does not address the underlying social conditions that foster crime. Smith states that the problem with the pro-life argument is that it serves to criminalize abortion rather than address the societal, economic and political conditions that promote it. The criminalization of abortion would most directly affect women of color who live in poor communities. Smith argues that women who live in poverty are generally more in contact with government run programs, such as public physicians and health facilities. So women who live in these neighborhoods and want to have an abortion must either avoid their physicians or risk encountering a government employed doctor who could have them arrested. Prisons do not deter crime; and anti-abortion will not stop women from having abortions because these laws will not address the underlying issues that force a woman to terminate a pregnancy. Instead of safely and legally going to a physician to have an abortion, women would be forced to undergo illegal and often times dangerous procedures to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

On the other hand Smith contends that the pro-choice standpoint only benefits women in the middle an upper class. Legislation such as the Hyde Amendment restricts federal funding for abortions. Smith states, “Choice also became a symbol of middle class women’s arrival as independent consumers. Middle class women could afford to choose… According to many Americans, however, when choice was associated with poor women, it became a symbol of illegitimacy. Poor women had not earned the right to choose.” (395) Once again poor women of color are disadvantages and unable to experience the same benefits afforded to women of the middle and upper class. Another argument that Smith makes is that abortion is promoted in order to control the black communities. The pro-choice position supports the idea of eugenics in which reproduction is discouraged among individuals with genetic defects or with presumably undesirable traits. Privilege is a main theme in this article. Smith demonstrates how both pro-life and pro-choice views ultimately benefit white middle and upper class women and negatively affect women of color. I completely agree with her idea that the only way to truly benefit all women would be to address the social and economic issues that promote abortion.

In the article And So I Chose, the author Allison Crews discusses the failures of society to education and support women who have abortions. Crew’s emphasizes the right of all women to chose to have of not have an abortion. A woman has control over her own body, and the right of women outweighs the right of a fetus. Woman should not be granted the right to chose to terminate a pregnancy. Instead it should be considered a right that she is born with. Crews states, “Whatever our reproductive choices, nobody can ever deny us our right to them.” (149)