Sydney Etheredge, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania (center), speaks at an Oct. 24 panel on reproductive rights. She was joined by Nikkole Terney, the abortion care director at Allegheny Reproductive Health Center (right), and Pitt junior Alexa Pierce, president of Pitt’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action club. (Photo by Sophia Levin/PublicSource)
Roe’s end is having varied impacts on different demographic groups, shining a light on an “androcentric” healthcare system, per abortion rights advocates.
by Sophia Levin, PublicSource
A “pressure cooker” for the healthcare system. That’s how Sydney Etheredge, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, characterized the confluence of the Dobbs abortion ruling and the COVID-19 pandemic.
This story is a part of Selves, a newsletter about gender and identity by PublicSource.
Sign up today.
And it’s worse for people of color, low-income patients, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups, she and three other abortion advocates discussed with a 50-person audience at an Oct. 24 panel hosted by the Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice at the University of Pittsburgh.
Abortion bans have further exposed the medical industry’s emphasis on othering, Etheredge said. She explained that treatments and benefits are ascribed to specific groups of people, which makes them easy to ignore. The industry teaches people to say: “‘Medicaid, that’s for poor people. … Title 10? Oh, that’s just for poor women. … The Ryan White [HIV/AIDS] Program? Oh, no, that’s just for people with HIV,’” Etheredge said. “It’s all of this othering, othering, othering.”
When abortion rights were revoked, Etheredge said, the disparities began to spread. “It was no longer these marginalized, smaller populations,” she said. The Dobbs decision “is impacting women and anyone who could reproduce.”
Etheredge and Nikkole Terney, the abortion care director at Allegheny Reproductive Health Center [ARHC], represented the region’s only two freestanding abortion clinics at the panel. They were joined by University of Pittsburgh law student Abby Deter, vice president of Pitt’s If/When/How chapter, and undergraduate junior Alexa Pierce, president of Pitt’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action [PPGen] club.
Disproportionate impacts
Deter described the medical field as “androcentric, which means that white men are the standard. They are who we tailor our medicine to. And this contributes to the higher maternal mortality rate that women of color experience, which is only going to continue to increase when we’re being forced to carry pregnancies to term.”
In 2021, the abortion rate among Black and Latina women was 3.7 and 1.3 times higher, respectively, than their share among Pennsylvanian women. Black women accounted for 44% of abortions in the state while making up 12% of the female population. Hispanic women made up 11% of the state’s abortions and 8.4% of the female population.
Read entire article here
About Post Author
