Oklahoma Reminds Us that Women’s Rights Are Alienable — Especially Women of Color

Recent events in Oklahoma serve as a harsh reminder that women’s rights continue to be disposable. From allowing Daniel Holtzclaw to terrorize the community for so long, to passing SB 1552, state officials in Oklahoma seem determined to send the message that women’s lives — particularly those of Black women — don’t matter.

Oklahoma’s SB 1552, a bill that effectively outlawed abortion, was ultimately vetoed. Still, this  attempt to police women’s bodies is distressing, particularly in Oklahoma, a state with one of the country’s worst records for supporting women’s rights.

On May 19, Oklahoma’s legislature passed SB 1552, a bill that would make it a felony to performs abortions, providing no exceptions for rape or incest (the only exception being if the woman’s life is in danger). If signed into law, performing an abortion would have become punishable by up to three years in prison, and would strip doctors who provide the constitutional right of their medical licenses.

On May 20, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin vetoed the bill. This is good news, but her reason for vetoing the bill – that the language was too “vague” – is alarming. Oklahoma’s latest attack on women further marginalizes those already most vulnerable in the state – including Black women, poor women, those with mental health issues, and those with previous system involvement (too many women being caught at the intersections of multiple bases for oppression).

Nationally, Black women are around five times as likely to have an abortion as white women, and Latina women are over twice as likely. Why is it that conservative lawmakers are so concerned about the protection of life “from the beginning of conception” (as State Senator and sponsor of SB 1552 Nathan Dahm told the Associated Press), but once children are born these same people assign no value to many of the lives they insist be brought into the world?

The message that women’s rights are mutable carries over across reproductive justice, mass incarceration, economic security and education; and it is no coincidence that these systems negatively impact some women more than others.

While this bill was unique in that it effectively made abortions illegal, Oklahoma already has a track record of severely restricting reproductive rights. During her tenure Fallin has signed into law 18 bills restricting access to abortion, leaving just two operating abortion clinics in the state. Not surprisingly, these decisions about women’s rights are being made mostly by men — as of 2015 just 12.8 percent of elected representatives in the state legislature were women, and none of them were women of color.

Oklahoma has the highest rate of female incarceration in the country, along with the one of the highest rates of sexual assault. Black women are overrepresented in the state’s prison system: Black people compose 7.7 percent of the general population but 20 percent of the state’s female prison population.

Oklahoma was graded with a D+ by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in their 2015 Status of Women in the States, ranking among the worst states for women’s mental health and disease mortality rates, particularly for Black and Latina women. And the list goes on. The state has one of the lowest rates of health insurance, one of the highest gender wage gaps, and 30 percent of Black women and 26.2 percent of Latina women live below the poverty line.

Oklahoma’s state sanctioned disregard for the lives of certain women was exposed to the country through Daniel Holtzclaw’s trial. Holtzclaw is a former Oklahoma City Police Officer tried for the sexual assault of 13 Black women during the course of duty, ranging from a grandmother to a 17-year-old girl. In January, 2016, he was convicted of 18 counts and sentenced to 263 years in prison in a landmark trial by an all-white jury.

But as this draconian bill reminds us, what happened to the Black, mostly poor, system-involved, women Holtzclaw preyed upon is not about one bad apple. Holtzclaw made a conscious choice the take advantage of those he knew were worthless to the system whose badge he carried. The root causes of both Holtzclaw’s raced and gendered sexual abuse and a bill that criminalizes abortion are the same: systemic dehumanization.

If SB 1552 had passed, it clearly would have been found in violation of federal law (we still have something called Roe v. Wade for now). So what was the point of even supporting this bill? It seems to me like it has to be to send a message: that women have no right to control their own bodies or futures, and those who support them in doing so should be considered criminals.

In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay reminded us that “even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away.” SB 1552 calls on us to reckon with the reality that our society is structured upon the premise that certain lives are worth more than others. Although this attempt to add further hardships into the lives of some of the most vulnerable members of our society has been stymied for now, that it could pass through a state’s legislature speaks volumes about where we are as a country and how far we still have to go.