Abortion Was Already Inaccessible on Reservation Land. Dobbs Made Things Worse.

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Federal and state abortion restrictions have been interfering with tribal sovereignty for years.

Since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June, millions of people have faced new barriers to abortion access: increased wait times, longer distances to travel, and in many cases, an inability to access the procedure altogether. But for many Native people, especially those living on reservation land, these kinds of obstacles feel especially familiar. 

“It is sad to say that we’re kind of used to these types of policies being passed and implemented,” says Krystal Curley, who is Diné and the executive director of Indigenous Lifeways, an Indigenous health and social justice group. “Now it’s the whole US that’s going to have to experience what we’ve been experiencing…and it’s traumatic.”

Native American tribes are sovereign nations that have a government-to-government relationship with the United States. Tribes have the right to make many laws on their land and for their citizens—and in theory, that right applies to making decisions about health care, including abortion. But in practice, decades of state and federal laws have limited tribal nations’ ability to provide reproductive health services, leaving Native people with disproportionate barriers to abortion access. In a post-Roe world, the obstacles to abortion access on tribal land have only gotten greater. For advocates like Curley, the ruling feels like just the latest escalation in a centuries-long attack on bodily and tribal autonomy. 

“We’ve been under these genocidal policies for 500 years,” Curley says, pointing to a legacy of violence that began with the use of rape as a weapon against Native women during colonization. Since then, federal and state governments have spent decades trying to control Native people’s decisions about their families and reproductive health—from forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families to the Indian Health Service’s forced sterilization of Native women in the 1970s. 

“America has always been after our natural resources, and one of the ways that you go about doing that is to target Native women, because we bring forth the next generation,” says Charon Asetoyer, executive director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center, who is Comanche. “If you can sterilize or control our fertility, you can control our population. The agenda is the same: harvest our natural resources.”

Today, federal government restrictions continue to limit Native people’s ability to access reproductive health services. That’s in large part because more than half of American Indian and Alaska Native people access health care through the severely underfunded Indian Health Service, which was established by a combination of treaties and legislation as partial payment for millions of acres of Native lands. Because IHS is a federal agency, the 1976 Hyde Amendment prohibits it from funding abortion. “They decide what is best for us,” says Asetoyer, who has been advocating for a repeal of the Hyde Amendment since the Obama administration. “It’s really very paternalistic.”

Although IHS is technically allowed to perform abortions in cases of rape or incest, research has found that most of its clinics don’t. The only comprehensive report on the issue is a 2002 study from Asetoyer’s group that found the IHS system performed only 25 abortions between 1976 and 2002. 

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