Abortion as Genocide: Race, Agency, and Nation in Prenatal Nondiscrimination Bans

Abstract

In recent years, legislatures in the United States have considered and passed a number of “prenatal nondiscrimination” bills that would ban abortion based on the sex or race of the fetus. Proponents of these laws claim that such abortions are a form of genocide and sex-based feticide. Scholars have not yet offered a critical examination of these laws and their discourse. This article fills that gap and argues that, even as they disavow eugenics, supporters of race- and sex-selective abortion bans paradoxically draw on and reproduce the notions of national purity and civilization that undergirded eugenic policies. Through an examination of a variety of legal texts, I argue that the bans and their accompanying discourse cast women of color as a threat to the nation, while presenting fetuses of color as citizens desperately in need of protection from pregnant women, abortion providers, and the values of some segments of society. The effect is to deny agency to women of color and to cast them primarily as reproductive vessels whose bodies and decisions threaten the polity. The article also shows how these bans cast abortion as a type of slavery that must be eradicated in order to uphold the national culture and values of racial and gender equality. Women of color, therefore, emerge as a threat to the nation in their capacity to perpetuate anti-American values and, as potential reproducers and carriers of innocent fetal life, as essential to nation building.