Backlash to affirmative action hits pioneering maternal health program for Black women

As Briana Jones prepared for the birth of her second child, Adonis, monthly stipends from San Francisco’s Abundant Birth Project helped her pay for gas to drive to prenatal appointments and buy fresh fruits and vegetables for her toddler son and herself. For Briana Jones, a young Black mother in San Francisco, a city program called the Abundant Birth Project has been a godsend. Another nonprofit, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, together with a Dallas-based law firm called the American Civil Rights Project, filed the lawsuit against the city of San Francisco and the state of California over the Abundant Birth Project, alleging the program violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment by granting money exclusively to Black and Pacific Islander women. The lawsuit calls public money used for the project and the three other guaranteed-income programs “discriminatory giveaways” that are “illegal, wasteful and injurious.” “The city and county of San Francisco crafted the Abundant Birth Project with the express intention of picking beneficiaries based on race,” Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, said in a phone interview. Bonta, a law school graduate, said the litigation against the Abundant Birth Project is the result of “conservative groups who want to exist in a world that doesn’t exist, where communities of color have not had to suffer the generational harm that comes from structural racism.” In the U.S., Black women are far more likely than white women to report that healthcare providers scolded, threatened or shouted at them during childbirth, research shows.