A recent article in Mother Jones magazine about the bad old days of back-alley abortions made me shudder.

Author Eleanor Cooney described how she desperately sought an abortion when she became pregnant as a teenager in the 1960s. Her quest led to her being molested by the first quack she saw, to scrounging up $800 from wealthy friends who were going to send her to some outfit in Florida, who would then send her on to the islands, to get one.

After fears of what could happen to her alone on the islands, if that doctor turned out to be unscrupulous as well, Cooney broke down and told her mother, who arranged for her to get a safe abortion in Manhattan.

If George W. Bush and his ideologues have their way, those days could return.

Last year Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Bill into law. The law bans late-term abortions – which are extremely rare anyway – except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. This law, which is mercifully being struck down as unconstitutional by a number of state and appeals court judges, makes no exceptions in cases where the pregnancy could lead to a disabling injury for the mother, or in cases of rape or incest.

But besides reducing the few women who seek such late-term abortions to nothing more than vessels for fertilized eggs, this law has a more sinister intent: to begin to chip away at the right to abortion established under the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 30 states are poised to make abortion illegal if Roe is overturned.

Right now, five of the nine Supreme Court justices are believed to support abortion rights. But that could change if Bush, in a second term, gets to nominate a new justice who supports his views.
 
Black women in particular ought to be worried about this. Because as bad as the bad old days were for white women like Cooney, they were even worse for us.

When abortion was illegal, botched abortions were a primary killer of black women. According to research by Loretta J. Ross, former program director for the National Black Women’s Health Project, between 1965 and 1967 the death rate of black women in Georgia from illegal abortion was 14 times higher than that of white women. Another study estimated that in the 1960s, black and Puerto Rican women made up 80 percent of the deaths from illegal abortions in New York.

There were other perils as well. Unlike white women, who might have been turned in to authorities for seeking an abortion by racists who saw abortion as an obstacle to preserving the white race, desperate black women seeking abortions were also subjected to racist bargaining. In other words, they’d have to agree to be sterilized in return.

The specter of a return to those days is chilling.

To be sure, some things have changed since then. The stigma that was once associated with out-of-wedlock births, for example, is gone, so having a child and being unmarried is no longer a source of ostracism. But what hasn’t changed, though, is the fact that unplanned pregnancies are still making it extremely tough for black women to escape poverty, or to plan lives without poverty.

Even Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1966 received the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award, recognized this. He wrote: “For the Negro, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life…The Negro constitutes half the poor. Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. This is a cruel evil that they urgently need to control.”

Many of the black women who exercise their right to choose probably realize this – which is probably why now, even though white women make up 63 percent of women who seek abortions, black women are three times as likely to seek one.

What that tells me is that, if abortion is ever outlawed, a number of black women will still try to get one – even if they have to die trying.

Now I know all the criticisms. These women should have taken birth control. They shouldn’t have had sex. Unfortunately, though, we live in an imperfect universe where condoms break and birth control and judgments sometimes fail. Abortion ought to be available as a family planning option when those things fail.

Of course, the ideologues have distorted this issue even among black people who ought to know better. Unfortunately, they now have some black preachers railing about abortion being genocide and so on.

That’s dumb – and black women shouldn’t be listening to that.

Especially since the same white ideologues fighting to overturn Roe are the same folks who endure all kinds of international wrangling to adopt babies from China rather than adopt one of the many unwanted black children here in the United States.

Another reason why black women ought to ignore that is because historically, control over our reproductive destinies was denied us through slavery, when we were brought here by white slavers to be breeders and to have no say in when we reproduced or with whom. Now a piece of that control is being whittled away by ideologues who still don’t give a damn about us.
 
Not much has changed there.

The other thing is that history shows that, whether legal or no, women who want to end a pregnancy will risk their lives to do it.

The dead would include black women as well. Which is why, when it comes to abortion rights, we’d be wise to pay attention to our own history.

And not the ideologies of people who have never had our well-being in mind.