Lawmakers cut the mic of the only black woman scheduled to speak about Tennessee's abortion ban
in passing a bill calling for a near-total abortion ban. Prior to the hearings, every speaker was promised ten minutes to make their case, but Cherisse Scott, CEO of a reproductive justice organization and the only black woman to speak at the hearing, had her mic cut and was ordered from the room when she attempted to speak about the legacy of white supremacy and America’s long history of denying black women bodily autonomy.
“The legislators made each of the speakers submit an outline of our statement a week or two in advance. I timed my statement when I wrote it to make sure it came in around 10 minutes—I knew better. And I knew there was a possibility they wouldn’t let me finish. By the time I got to the part of my statement about white supremacist ideology in Tennessee, they stopped me. Senator Mike Bell hit his gavel, he said “that was enough,” and he asked me to stop.
Speaking to the committee as both a reproductive rights advocate and a black woman who was personally the victim of a crisis pregnancy center posing as an abortion clinic, Scott was hoping to address the ways black women, in particular, are now and have historically been affected by a system that denies them the right to control their own bodies:
When we’re talking about abortion bans, especially in the South, it’s important to remember the history of how America was founded. Black women have never had full autonomy over our bodies or self-determination over whether to be a parent or not. We’re still living in a culture of supremacy and colonialism.
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