Going beyond choice: Abortion experiences of people of colour in the UK

According to a recent report, Black women in the UK are four times as likely to die in childbirth as their white counterparts, while Asian women face a twofold risk. Women living in the UK’s most deprived areas are three times more likely to die than those in more affluent areas. 

Medicine as a field and its developments are built from racist ideology: from eugenicist theories codifying the social construct we know as race, to forced sterilisation, contraception coercion to the non-consensual experimentation on the bodies of people of colour. Particularly the field of gynaecology is rooted in slavery. Medical students of colour, too, face harassment and abuse in their education. What’s more, women from ethnic minorities face endemic structural racism when seeking and accessing healthcare, and feel that their signs and symptoms are more often dismissed. Even the pain experienced by people of colour is not taken seriously compared to their counterparts, with black patients less than half as likely to receive pain medication as white patients.

Being human means that we will all, at some point in our lives, require medical care and intervention. And yet huge numbers of people are denied that healthcare, or given care inferior in quality, on the basis of their race. This is, quite literally, a life-or-death issue, with people of colour left fighting for their lives.

And since abortion is a part of healthcare, with this knowledge in mind, the decision-making process of people of colour, about whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy, goes far beyond the question of, “am I ready to have a baby?” –– to “will I survive?”

It is time for reckoning in the pro-choice movement. If we purport to fight for the reproductive rights of all, we cannot disavow all of this. Our narrative, and our struggle, must embrace these truths and work towards change. It is time for campaigners to move away from an ‘individualist’ model focused on bodily autonomy, toward an expansive rights-based framework already set by women of colour – Reproductive Justice.

Edem Barbara Ntumy – Co-Director, Decolonising Contraception

Edem Barbara Ntumy is speaking at Our next event Going beyond choice | Abortion experiences of people of colour in the UK is on 23/06/2021 at 7 pm