Abortion-Eugenics Discourse in Dobbs: A Social Movement History

Abstract

Black Americans have long debated whether birth control and abortion threaten or uplift the community. In this Essay, we show that antiabortion advocates have intervened these debates by associating abortion with eugenics. For decades, antiabortion advocates have blamed racially disparate abortion rates on intentional discrimination—often highlighting a shadowy figure named Margaret Sanger—rather than explaining the disparity as resulting from structural racism. We follow this abortion-is-eugenic argument from the streets to the pages of the United States Reports, where it appears in the much-studied 2019 decision of Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana & Kentucky and in the Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Antiabortion advocates have developed a constitutional memory of "Sanger" to suggest that criminalizing abortion is necessary to achieving racial justice. We demonstrate how that memory is mobilized in constitutional law and politics to legitimize reproductive coercion and to deflect attention from the structural roots of racial disparities in abortion rates today—conditions for which laws criminalizing abortion provide no relief.

Keywords: eugenics, abortion, birth control, discrimination, Dobbs, Box, Margaret Sanger, constitutional memory