.thereidout Blog: Sen. Cassidy accidentally revealed the racism of Republicans' anti-abortion stance
You’d find the history in obscure Twitter threads and textbooks, but if you weren’t steeped in daily news about, it may have been easy to miss the anti-abortion movement’s explicit references to race.
Black women are Louisianans. They’re not statistics to be 'corrected' and parsed from the broader data.last week, in which he seemed to boast about how good his state’s maternal mortality rate might be if not for the existence of Black women. When, who staunchly opposes abortion rights, why the maternal death rate in his state is so high, the senator suggested Black women were merely an outlier responsible for driving up that number.
But … Black women are Louisianans. They’re not statistics to be “corrected” and parsed from the broader data, and it’s obviously racist to suggest separating their pregnancy-related deaths from the total number in order to downplay the severity of maternal mortality. Cassidy’s remarks were cruel, but when we look at them in the context of the GOP’s abortion crusade, they fit perfectly in the party’s pattern of pursuing reproductive rights restrictions despite — or even because of — their racist implications.