THAT AGAINST WHICH ALL IS MEASURED.

I didn’t call the police — not after he left my dorm room and not after I discovered I was pregnant. I never once imagined that calling the police could help my situation. It could only make things worse. I envisioned prosecutors, courtrooms and interrogations. I was trying to survive my first year of law school, worried I might fail out, wondering how I would make it through my first round of exams. The last thing I wanted was to become a court case myself. Nor did I want a baby. I had no extended family to fall back on; no one who could loan me money to help raise a child; no place to go except to my parents’ rented home — a place that felt temporary, at best, given their financial insecurity and recent eviction. I did not want to give a baby away and I did not want to raise my rapist’s child.

At the time, I felt terribly alone but my circumstances were far from unusual. Black women have the highest rates of abortion in the country, undoubtedly due to the severe wealth gap between black and white families — a gap that holds even among the poor. The white household living near the poverty line typically has about $18,000 in wealth — primarily due to intergenerational wealth transfers — while black households in similar economic straits typically have a median wealth near zero. Although women of all colors who are poor are far more likely than those who have greater resources to choose to end their pregnancies, the situation for black women is especially dire. Although our families often want to help, as mine certainly did, that frequently proves to be a practical impossibility. A 2014 report found that for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white family, the median black family owns just 5 cents. Even if I wanted to give birth to my rapist’s baby — which I did not — I, like so many others, could not turn to my family for help.

 Of course being rich doesn’t “make a woman not a woman anymore” and I’m sure a few rich women with ultra-patriarchal men in their lives will have men attempt or even succeed to exert control over their bodies but the point is this: Even if you assume husbands/fathers who are controlling-- who can subtly convey to a medical professional that they trust that they may need an illegal abortion?: It is only a woman with a doctor that they have a long-standing and trusting relationship with by virtue of good insurance, a woman with the kind of social conditioning that makes her feel entitled (not grateful, but entitled) to good care (as we all should feel), and the woman who has the kind of societal standing that inspires people toward empathy and discourages criminal prosecution even for illegal things. Isn’t it a rich white woman? 

Read Dorothy Roberts and what she has to say about the fates of wealthy white women who do cocaine or other illegal substances while pregnant versus poor Black women who are addicted while pregnant. Both women navigate the strictures of patriarchy but former often comes out unscathed, recommended for therapy, while the latter is jailed and has her children taken away.