If you are black or Hispanic in a conservative state that has restricted access to abortion, you are more likely than white women to have an abortion.

Minority women will bear the brunt if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortion, according to statistics analyzed by the Associated Press.

The numbers are clear. In Mississippi, people of color make up 44 percent of the population, but 80 percent of women have abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.

In Texas, they make up 59 percent of the population and 74 percent of those who receive abortions. Alabama’s numbers are 35% and 70%. In Louisiana, minorities make up 42 percent of the population and about 72 percent of those who receive abortions, according to the state Department of Health.

“Abortion restrictions are racist,” said Cathy Torres, a 25-year-old organization manager at Frontera Fund, a Texas-based organization that helps women pay for abortions. “They directly affect people of color, black people, brown people, Indigenous peoples … those who are struggling to make ends meet.”

Why is the difference so big? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial support to women seeking abortions, said that in states with restrictive abortion laws, women of color Access to health care is often difficult, and options for effective birth control are lacking. Sex education in schools is often ineffective or inadequate.

If abortion were banned, these women — often poor — might have the hardest time traveling to remote parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raise children they might not be able to afford, said Roberts, who is black and once volunteered in Mississippi. The only abortion. Clinic.

“We’re talking about people who have been marginalized,” Roberts said.

Amanda Fudge, who is black, is one of them. She was a single unemployed college student in 2014 when she found out she was pregnant with another child. She said she didn’t know how she could afford another child.

She had two abortions in Chicago. Fudge said there was no problem getting in touch with an abortion provider. But now she’s in Mississippi, moving to escape an abusive relationship. Misled by the ad, she first went to a crisis pregnancy center, which tried to convince her not to have an abortion. By the time she found an abortion clinic, she had come too far for surgery.

“Why can’t you have an abortion here safely and easily?” asked Furdge, 34, who happily raises her son, now 7, but continues to advocate for women’s choice.

Historically, anti-abortion laws have been written in a way that hurts low-income women, Torres said. She pointed to the Hyde Amendment, a 1980 law that prohibits the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in rare circumstances.

She also cited a 2021 Texas law that prohibits abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. Where she lives, near the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, women are forced to travel for abortions and must pass through state Border Patrol checkpoints, where they must disclose their citizenship, she said.

Regardless of what the lawmakers say, Torres insists the aim is to target women of color and control their bodies: “They know who these restrictions affect. They know, but they don’t care.”

But Andy Gibson, a former member of the Mississippi legislature who is now the state’s agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race has nothing to do with Mississippi’s post-week 15 abortion ban. The law now goes to the Supreme Court to directly challenge Roe v. Wade, the court’s 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

White Baptist pastor Gibson said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have “innate worth” from conception. He said lawmakers in Mississippi sought to protect women and babies by restricting abortion.

“I absolutely disagree with the notion that this is racism, or anything other than saving the baby’s life,” said Republican Gibson. “It’s about saving the life of the unborn baby and the life and health of the mother, No matter what color they are.”

For those who say that forcing women to have children will make them suffer, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a white Republican, said that compared to when Roy was 49 years ago, “working mothers are more likely to balance career success. and family life” decided.

Fitch, who is divorced, often refers to her own experiences working outside the home while raising three children. But Fitch grew up in a wealthy family and had a career in law — both factors that give working women the means and flexibility to help raise children.

That’s not the case for many minority women in Mississippi or elsewhere. Advocates say there is little support for women with babies in many places where abortion services have been cut.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and people in low-wage jobs often don’t have health insurance. Women can enroll in Medicaid during pregnancy, but that coverage disappears soon after they give birth.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the United States. In Mississippi, black babies are about twice as likely to die in the first year of life as white babies, according to the Dime March.

Nationwide, fewer black and Hispanic women have health insurance, especially in states with strict abortion restrictions, according to U.S. Census Bureau information analyzed by The Associated Press. For example, in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia, at least 16 percent of black women and 36 percent of Latinos were uninsured in 2019, some of the highest rates of this kind in the country.

The problem is compounded in states without effective reproductive education programs. Mississippi law requires sex education in public schools to emphasize abstinence to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Discussion of abortion is prohibited, and instructors are not allowed to demonstrate the use of condoms or other methods of contraception.

Taylor Harden, director of Planned Parenthood in southeastern Mississippi, is a 26-year-old black woman who had an abortion five years ago, an experience that led her to a career supporting pregnant women and defending abortion rights.

She said she did not learn birth control when she attended public schools in rural Mississippi. Instead, a teacher put scotch tape on students’ arms. The girls were told to wear it on another classmate’s arm and then another to see how it lost its ability to bond.

“They’ll tell you, ‘If you’ve had sex, this is what you’re like: You’re like this tape — it’s all used up, it’s washed out, and nobody’s going to want it,'” Harden said.

When she got pregnant at 21, she knew she wanted an abortion. Her mother was battling cancer, and Harden had no job or a place to live after his final semester of college.

She said she felt terrified and ashamed, just like she did in a sex education class. When she went to the clinic, she said protesters told her she was “killing the most precious gift from God” and that she was “killing a black baby and playing with what white supremacists want.”

Harden’s experience is not uncommon. The anti-abortion movement often uses racial terms to describe the abortion struggle.

Outside Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, protesters handed out pamphlets calling abortion a “genocide” of blacks and said late Planned Parenthood founder and eugenics supporter Margaret Sanger “wanted to eradicate Minorities”. The pamphlet compares Sanger to Adolf Hitler and declares: “Black Lives Matter to Margaret Sanger!”

The Mississippi clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, which itself denounces Sanger’s belief in eugenics.

White people are not alone in making this argument. Alvida King, the niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is among black anti-abortion advocates, who have for years described it as a way of annihilating race.

Former President of Pro-Life Mississippi Tanya Britton often drives three hours from her home in the north of the state to pray outside the abortion clinic in Jackson. Britton, who is black, said it was a tragedy that since Roy’s abortion the number of black babies would equal the population of several large cities. She also said people are too casual about terminating pregnancies.

“You can’t take someone’s life because it’s inconvenient — ‘I want to finish my studies,'” Britton said. “You wouldn’t kill your two-year-old just because you were in grad school.”

But Jackson’s state Rep. Zakiya Summers, who is black and a mother, said poor women don’t act arbitrarily. With little support in Mississippi — for example, the legislature rejected a proposal to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage in 2021 — they are sometimes forced to make tough decisions.

“Women are here just to survive, you know?” she said. “And Mississippi isn’t making things any easier.”