For whatever reason
Why don’t you just come right out and scream it?
As conservatives across the country wage war on reproductive rights, demanding by law that women be forced to carry any pregnancy to term, regardless of the circumstances, they frequently (slash always) like to forget that they do absolutely nothing to support these people during said pregnancies or after. Mississippi, for example, where abortion will immediately become illegal if Roe v. Wade is overturned, has the highest rate of child poverty in the country and recently rejected a bid to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage. And in Louisiana, which has a similar trigger law that will go into effect upon Roe being reversed, maternal mortality rates are among the worst in the nation. But according to GOP senator Bill Cassidy, the rate at which women die during pregnancy or shortly after is not as bad as it seems—if you subtract the deaths of Black women, which apparently don’t count.
In an interview with Politico, the following words came out of Cassidy’s mouth: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear. Now, I say that not to minimize the issue but to focus the issue as to where it would be. For whatever reason, people of color have a higher incidence of maternal mortality.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with the idea that Cassidy—who wants to defund Planned Parenthood is all, Yes, on its face, our maternal mortality rates are abysmal, but if you only count white women, they’re not that bad! Then there’s the phrase “for whatever reason.” In fact, there is one very big reason in particular— perhaps you can take a guess?
This is racial caste ideology in its purest form: these deaths don’t really count because these people don’t really count.
Related: These votes don’t really count because . . . etc.
This is the American right wing in 2022, and it’s getting worse every day because they’re sealed in a bubble in which they’re told that anybody that points out that they’re literally white supremacists in the most uncomplicated and unambiguous way possible is just peddling Critical Race Theory, which is false because.