Op-Ed: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised That Abortion Didn’t Persuade White Women
Sophie Choong
Instructor’s Introduction
In WR120:The Sociology of Code-Switching, students explore the ways in which racism forces people to adjust their tone of voice, language, behavior, clothing, mannerisms, hair, and overall appearance. We examined the consequences of White, Eurocentric standards for people of color as they navigate institutions like schools and the workplace. In the weeks surrounding the 2024 Presidential Election, we discussed the ways racism shapes the political sphere.
For their final essay of WR120, I asked students to craft an opinion essay drawing on the work of Sociologist and New York Times opinion columnist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. Students read excerpts from her sociological book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy, her collection of essays, Thick, and several of her op-eds. In reading McMillan Cottom’s essay, “Know Your Whites,” Sophie was inspired to explore White women’s role in the election.
Sophie’s powerful essay “We Shouldn’t Be Surprised that Abortion Didn’t Persuade White Women,” deftly lays out the ways that attachment to Whiteness often overshadows gender oppression when it comes to White women’s support for reproductive rights. Sophie’s expertly woven connections between the current trad wife movement, racism, and abortion rights draw the reader’s attention to the consequences of white supremacy on restricting women’s reproductive rights. Echoing McMillan Cottom’s style but with her own voice, Sophie’s writing showcases her ability to succinctly incorporate sociological evidence on complex topics in a way that captures readers and challenges us all to think critically.
Cara Bowman
From the Writer
I started writing this piece the week after the presidential election in November. I spent most of my teenage years organizing around the issue of universal contraception, and I remember talking to Canadian OB-GYNs after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision about their overcrowded clinics by the border, all the patients coming from America with nowhere else to go. The rupturing not into a world before Roe v. Wade, but an entirely new one, where women’s bodies are surveilled, policed, and punished by the state en masse.
This feels eerily prescient for what is happening in America writ large, five months after the presidential election. There has been little respite from the executive orders that have characterized this presidency, and the brute-force criminalization of poverty, immigrant status, race, gender, disability, and any other form of social marginalization. Whiteness — the identity, the political interest, the institution — has wrought this upon the American population. In this op-ed, I argue that Whiteness animates not just day-to-day relations, but the deployment of state power against the most vulnerable people. For White women who oppose abortion, their Whiteness protects them from these painful boundaries of marginalization – boundaries that the state is reproducing and reinforcing with ever-increasing cruelty each day.
Op-Ed: We Shouldn’t Be Surprised that Abortion Didn’t Persuade White Women
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, pundits and political strategists believed that the right to an abortion would swing White women as a voting bloc leftward. During the 2022 midterms – in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s rollback – access to abortion had been a powerful force, where ballot measures to protect abortion rights succeeded in states like Kentucky and Montana. Three days before the 2024 election, famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer predicted that Harris would win the state by 3 percentage points, with the wedge issue of abortion mobilizing millions of women. I, too, bought into the Selzer hype – into the cautious optimism of a White suburban blue wave that would buoy Harris to victory.
But on Tuesday night, White women declared that faith horribly misplaced; they broke for Trump by 6 percentage points. Despite ballot measures to protect abortion passing in 7 states and failing in 3 – due in part to a measure raising the success threshold in Florida to 60% – the nationwide message was clear: White women will vote for a president who has supported justices and legislators that have restricted abortion rights state-wide, criminalized miscarriages, and caused maternal and infant mortality rates to spike, with no regard for their own reproductive autonomy. Abortion failed to mobilize a major constituency for Harris because White women will never be convinced to protect anything as strongly as their whiteness: it is the privilege they are most afraid to lose and what often insulates them when the rest of their rights are threatened.
The desperation with which some White women cling to their Whiteness isn’t a shock if you’ve seen what else they give up for it. My greatest Internet fixation is the “TradWife” movement, a sphere of online influencers whose content revolves around Manifest Destiny-era norms of motherhood and marriage, pastel-toned videos of their many blond children running underfoot and the hours they spend kneading dough or milking cows. These women have organized their lives around the idealization of a time period where they had no say over their family, partner, or finances, to churn out TikToks with undeniably white supremacist undertones. Many of them are not victims but active participants in extolling the values of Christian nationalism. As long as they can benefit from their Whiteness, spread racist conspiracy theories, and promote the image of their perfect White family to accrue digital capital, their ability to obtain an abortion is secondary.
For TradWives and other antifeminist White women, their racial superiority matters because it takes precedence over and enforces their gender inferiority. As sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne.” The TradWife movement exemplifies the centuries-long political engagement of White women and gender inequality: their race is their greatest interest. By participating in that hierarchy, they enable the oppression of women without the security blanket of Whiteness. Most White women voters in America were willing to vote for a presidential ticket that has spoken openly about banning no-fault divorce, called women without children “sociopathic,” and already criminalized or severely restricted abortion in more than twenty states, because of the promise that their Whiteness would be not just protected but further exalted, to the detriment of every other right they have.
What we overlook about women who vote against abortion is that such laws only seem to apply to everyone else. Whiteness makes it safer and easier to seek abortions, even for those who purport to oppose them on moral grounds. Plenty of anti-choice activists have no such compunctions about getting an abortion themselves; testimonials from abortion clinicians and practitioners demonstrate as much. Women of color in red states are much more likely to struggle accessing an abortion and to face criminal charges for obtaining or inducing one. When you know that you can travel out of state for an abortion and that the chances of being surveilled, arrested, or detained due to a miscarriage are next to none, it’s a lot easier to decide that other people should not receive the same treatment. White women voting for Trump isn’t just about holding onto their Whiteness: it’s about holding onto the assumption that their Whiteness means any other harm he enacts will not touch them.
Let’s be real: the Democratic Party was never going to dismantle the hierarchy that privileges Whiteness so heavily. Even campaign gestures at racial progress were rare, from Democrats advocating for expanded policing budgets to quietly removing the abolishment of the death penalty from their platform. But what the Democrats have actually done for racial equality matters less than how Whiteness is threatened by the possibility of it. And not all White women voted for Trump, just as not all White women are wealthy or privileged enough to obtain an abortion when they need one. Widespread restriction on abortion hurts them too. Yet we’ve seen that plenty of them are happy to concede the rights of all other women and people who can get pregnant for the power that Whiteness affords them, the same power that ensures their other rights will not be compromised regardless. For the 53% of White women in America who chose Trump, their Whiteness was the deciding factor in how they voted – to protect their racial self-interest while putting a target on the backs and bodies of everyone whose health is no longer in their own hands.
Sophie Choong is a freshman pursuing a dual degree in Sociology and Data Science with a minor in Public Health. She was born in England and raised in Vancouver, Canada. She volunteers with AccessBC, the Canada-based grassroots campaign that successfully lobbied for nationwide legislation covering universal contraception. Her hobbies include scrapbooking, long-distance running, and wandering around the Boston Public Library.