This article uses driving time to examine the geographic relationship of abortion facilities to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in terms of race/ethnicity and population density. We analyze both the current reproductive justice landscape and predict how this landscape will change following the projected reversal of Roe v. Wade. Our results demonstrate that disparities in the presence of abortion facilities and CPCs manifest in terms of rural/urban classification and race/ethnicity. These disparities will become more pronounced in the post- Roe landscape. Four major findings include: 1.) Following the projected reversal of Roe, the ratio of abortion facilities to CPCs will change from 1:3 to 1:5; 2.) the number of people who live closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will nearly double post- Roe; 3.) people in rural areas live in disproportionate proximity to CPCs, although the number of people in large metropolitan areas living closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will increase nearly four-fold post- Roe; 4.) compared to other racial and ethnic groups, a greater percentage of Native Americans live closer to a CPC than an abortion facility and the share of Black and Hispanic/Latino people who live closer to a CPC than an abortion facility will more than double post- Roe. Ultimately, our results push scholars, advocates, and policy makers to discuss access to reproductive healthcare and reproductive justice in terms of presence of CPCs as much as absence of abortion facilities.
In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Inspiring the most public outcry is Texas's S.B. 8, which bans abortion after six weeks and allows private citizens to sue those performing abortions or aiding in this process. Abortion justice supporters should be enraged—but only in small part due to Texas’ ban, any of the other 105 enacted restrictions, or the likelihood that the Supreme Court soon will hand down a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. We should be enraged because the anti-abortion movement has chipped away at the accessibility of abortion to the degree that the legal right to abortion means far less than it should. Key to this chipping away has been crisis pregnancy centers—religiously motivated, anti-abortion non-profit organizations that critics describe as “fake women's health clinics.” Today, there are 2500 crisis pregnancy centers and just 738 abortion clinics in the U.S., numbers that were reversed 30 years ago. And yet, countering crisis pregnancy centers has been less central to the work of abortion justice advocates than advancing crisis pregnancy centers has been to the anti-abortion movement. In this article, I argue that focusing on crisis pregnancy centers can provide new opportunities for both understanding the contemporary abortion landscape and also for advancing abortion justice activism. To put a finer point on it, I argue that centering crisis pregnancy centers in our development of what Sydney Calkin terms “the political geography of abortion” is one way to animate outrage among those who have not been involved in abortion justice work previously and to sustain outrage among feminist activists who have been worn down by decades of anti-abortion advancement.
In this article, I consider the ideologies that emerge when disability and LGBTQ rights advocates' ubiquitous calls for visibility collide. I argue that contemporary visibility politics encourage the production of post-racial and post-spatial ideologies. In demanding visibility, disability and LGBTQ rights advocates ignore, ironically, visible markers of (racial) difference and assume that being "out, loud, and proud" is desirable trans-geographically. I bring together disability studies and queer rural studies-fields that have engaged in remarkably little dialogue-to analyze activist calls for LGBTQ and disability visibility. The discourses evident in such calls transcend movements and virtual spaces and emerge as some of the LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest whom I interviewed discuss their relations to (their own and others') LGBTQ sexuality and disability. I analyze several cases to illustrate how visibility discourses compel the erasure of material bodies, and in the process, render certain (spatialized and racialized) experiences obsolete. I close by considering how my critique of visibility discourses might influence critical discussions of identity politics more broadly.
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