From the halls of congress to the Oval Office to the Supreme Court, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion is the talk of the town. Will a new conservative majority on the Court declare Roe unconstitutional? Will the twelve states that have already passed laws restricting abortions or the fourteen others preparing to succeed in making legal abortions extinct? Lots of questions, few answers. But there’s a huge part of the abortion debate that flies under the radar. Did you know that for a certain class of women (poor) of a certain ethnicity (women of color) abortion has not been on the table since 1977? These are the women who depend on Medicaid, the federal insurance program, to cover their healthcare. Every year enough senators and representatives vote to extend a rider prohibiting federal insurance from paying for abortions and every president since Reagan agrees and Supreme Court Justices sit on their hands. In the U.S. where freedom is supposed to be a constitutional right, millions of women of childbearing age are not free to end an unwanted pregnancy. To find out how we got here and why the 2020 presidential election will probably not change the outlook for women, especially poor women read “It Took Forty-Two Years for the Democrats to Figure Out that Millions of Poor Women Can’t Get An Abortion”
