Amid discussions of reproductive rights, Asian-American organizers and academics stress that restrictions based on misleading racial stereotypes have long been plaguing the community, and they fear there may be more cases to come.
Experts say sex-selective abortion bans, or restrictions perceived to be sought based on the intended sex of a fetus, have been repeatedly passed and proposed in several states in recent years. Critics say lawmakers have justified it by invoking tropes about Asian families’ preference for sons.
In 2019, the Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomasresponding to a petition to review an Indiana ban, he wrote: “In Asia, widespread sex-selective abortions have led to 160 million ‘missing’ women,” adding that “selective abortions of girls are common among certain populations in the United States,” referring to Chinese and American Indian families.
These stereotypes have been debunked before, but advocates say it hasn’t stopped bills from being proposed, putting Asian American women’s reproductive rights at risk of being “policed.” And now, in the wake of a leaked draft opinion last week showing the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, critics fear that more states, even progressive ones like Minnesota and New York, will be encouraged to propose, or reintroduce, these restrictions.
“We call him a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing,’” Becca Asaki, New York organizing manager for the National Forum of Asian-Pacific American Women, a rights group, told NBC Asian America. “It’s just a really horrible attempt to undermine our rights and try to play on stereotypes about our communities that aren’t really true and are deeply rooted in racism.”
Since 2009, about half of US states and the federal government have considered banning sex-selective abortion. And several states, including Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arkansas, have signed them into law. Asaki said the move became popular after a high-profile 2012 national bill that sought to punish providers who perform sex-selective abortions with fines or even prison terms. Although the bill was ultimately defeated by the House, Asaki said several states followed suit, attempting to pass a carbon copy of the legislation.
Activists say lawmakers in “safe haven” areas have also tried to implement these measures. A ban on sex-selective abortion has been proposed several times in New York State. It wasn’t until 2021 that the New York City Council passed a resolution, urging Congress and the state Legislature to oppose a ban on sex-selective abortions, “which perpetuate racial stereotypes and undermine access to care.”
Lisa Ikemoto, a professor who specializes in reproductive rights and health care law and policy at the University of California Davis School of Law, said that while race is not explicitly invoked in the legislation, support for the ban is based on the rhetoric that perpetuates archaic and harmful stereotypes about immigrant families while co-opting the rhetoric of gender equality.
“He is uniting the kind of anti-immigrant racism in the fight against abortion to take advantage of another restriction on access to abortion in the form of health care,” Ikemoto said.
Advocates say that in the past, some lawmakers have repeatedly selected stories of infanticide from China and India to defend a ban on sex-selective abortion. Charlie Collins, a Republican no longer serving in the Arkansas house, has said he sponsored a 2017 sex-selective abortion ban in the state after talk that China’s one-child policy had resulted in a proportion unequal from boys to girls.
But a 2014 University of Chicago Law School Study showed that foreign-born Chinese, Indian, and Korean Americans, on average, have more daughters than white Americans. And when the researchers looked at states that had implemented a sex-selective abortion ban, such as Pennsylvania, no change in sex ratios was observed. According to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights group, nearly 90 percent of all abortions take place in the first trimester, before most women are aware of the sex of the fetus.
Seri Lee is the national campaign and membership director for the National Forum of Asian-Pacific American Women, and is based in Illinois, where lawmakers continued their failed attempts to pass the ban in 2019 despite it having been blocked by a court order. She said such policies put Asian-American women at the discretion of health care providers and allow professionals to act on racist biases and stereotypes. The very introduction of the ban, Lee said, is a sign that lawmakers “do not trust the AAPI community and condone racial and systemic discrimination.”
“Some providers might use those stereotypes to make the question a little more difficult for Asian patients and not for others,” Ikemoto said. “And so Asian American women are more likely to face questions about the reasons for their abortion.”
Lee said Asian American women already face a number of existing barriers to health care, including language and mistrust of their providers. Sex-selective bans seek to further alienate the community from proper care, and communication barriers could obscure those issues.
“By taking that into account, it’s even more likely that any kind of bias or discrimination a patient might experience goes unreported,” Lee said.
With a possible repeal of Roe V. Wade on the horizon, in addition to existing restrictions on reproductive rights, Lee said some states, like California, have groups that aim to counter these restrictions and ensure abortion access is expanded. .
“With the California Abortion Future Council, they actually have this long list of what reproductive freedom would really look like to make sure that California remains a safe haven for abortion access for Californians, but also for people in the whole country”. Lee said.
“So even in states where abortion will remain legal, productive work is still being done.”
For now, Ikemoto said she and many others must process the possibility of a new, perhaps more restrictive, reality.
“It’s a lot to take in. I was born in 1961. So I am the first generation to receive the full protection of Roe v. Wade,” Ikemoto said. “I grew up with the understanding that women have the ability to make decisions in control of their own bodies. And now it looks like we’re about to be thrust into a different world.”
Reference-www.nbcnews.com