Why is it that when colonizers need help, they turn to the very people they’ve been oppressing for centuries? The latest comes from social media, where Rachael Lorenzo, an Indigenous abortion rights advocate, tells KHN that she started fielding questions on Twitter from non-Native people about whether abortion services could be made available on Native land—implying that since they’re sovereign nations, they could skirt the abortion ban resulting from Friday’s official announcement overturning Roe v. Wade.
The simple answer is no. There are extensive legal and financial issues with opening abortion clinics on tribal land. And, Lorenzo and other activists say, they’re outraged that all of sudden when an issue that impacts non-Native people arises, using land reserved for tribal nations always becomes a lightbulb idea.
RELATED STORY: North Dakota Native Vote is hoping to ensure Indigenous voters get to the polls this year
Campaign Action
“All of a sudden, this issue that’s going to impact white women, too—or impact white women more broadly—now we’re being seen as the potential savior. … It should not be on tribal nations to go above and beyond when so many tribal nations already have very limited resources,” Lorenzo says.
Native American communities face overwhelming inequity in health care.
The American Bar Association reports that “American Indians and Alaska Natives born today have a life expectancy that is 4.4 years less than the United States’ all races population, and they continue to die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories of preventable illness, including chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, diabetes, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.”
KHN reports that Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt recently said on Fox News he thinks tribes may attempt to give “abortion on demand” services, adding, “They think that you can be 1/1,000th tribal member and not have to follow the state law. And so that’s something that we’re watching.”
Indian Country Today reported that Chuck Hoskin Jr., Cherokee nation principal chief, responded to Stitt by saying:
“Speculating on what tribes should do … is irresponsible. Just as irresponsible is the Governor of Oklahoma and his disguised media campaign, which is really meant to attack tribes and our sovereignty.”
According to reporting from High Country News, enrolled American Indians get little help from Indian Health Service facilities, despite being “twice as likely to experience sexual assault as other women in the U.S.”
“They don’t care. … They don’t want to have federal agencies with any kind of abortion services,” Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC), told High Country.
The bottom line is that anyone who suggests that tribal lands are really sovereign and that reservations have the resources to simply open health care clinics at will, or can make legal decisions without the support of lawmakers who govern them—particularly after the reversal of Roe, and particularly since many of these states are controlled by Republicans—are living in an alternate reality.