Racial Discrimination of Blacks in Abortion Clinics in the United States

Racial Discrimination of Blacks in Abortion Clinics in the United States
Your Name
November 5, 2016
Your Institution of Affiliation
The racial disparity has been an age-old issue in the US. The outward distinction between color and origins have persisted and transposed into symbolic boundaries, which are then characterized by unequal access to resources. Throughout the years, this inequality could be seen in mundane activities such as searching for a job, looking for a place to live in, queuing in a drugstore, etc. Today, these “apparent” issues are relatively lessened, all thanks to the efforts of private groups, non-government organizations (NGOs), and even the government itself towards gradually reducing racist acts towards people of color. However, despite the sharp decline of inequality in access to everyday resources – access to food, shelter, clothing, education, etc. – this issue still exist in “not-so-obvious” contexts and situations such as having an access to safe and legal abortion. In the United Stated alone, it is said that the abortion rate for African-American women is five times as high as that of the Whites. Most activists groups believed that the reason behind this is the “result of aggressive marketing by abortion providers to minority communities” (Cohen, 2008). And due to this issue, these groups such as the Issues4life Foundation works in order to prevent any African-American lives being lost due to these unfortunate acts of discrimination. However, the author of this paper believes that presenting data per year isolates the general trend and changes that are happening. Being aware of this flaw in the study of racial discrimination in abortion clinics, the author of this paper dedicated this paper to the comparative and temporal analysis of how much have ‘racial disparity in abortion clinics changed throughout the years. The first part of this paper is dedicated to introducing essential concepts regarding abortion and racial discrimination such as; what is abortion and what factors affect abortion rates in between people of color? The paper would then shift towards an analysis of the disparity on abortion between races in between the years of 2005 to 2016. And, due to the limitations of time, the scope of this comparative analysis would be limited to those studies done in between the years of 2005 to 2016.
Chapter One
Racial Discrimination, Stereotypes, and Abortion
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (n.d.), “Racial discrimination is defined as the unequal treatment of someone because of his race or certain characteristics which are associated with race, such as hair texture or skin color”. Based on this definition, which is still being used today, it is apparent that the issue of discrimination could persists even if someone is not exactly a Latino, African American, Chinese, etc. as long as they have certain features which are associated with other races. In other words, this implies that racial discrimination is based on how people sees you, rather than who you really are. In co...