Is Helping Black Moms Out Financially Unconstitutional?

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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November 27, 2023

By Alexa Spencer, Word In Black

A lawsuit claims Abundant Birth Project is discriminatory because it grants stipends to Black and Pacific Islander moms in San Francisco.

Though Black women face comparatively high rates of pregnancy complications such as maternal mortality, focused support remains a point of contention. (LordHenriVoton via Getty)

A nonprofit and a law firm filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco and the state of California over Abundant Birth Project, an initiative that provides pregnant Black and Pacific Islander San Franciscans with $1,000 monthly stipends.

[…]

“These government-sponsored and publicly funded programs are designed to select beneficiaries on a racially exclusionary basis. This is unconstitutional… Defendants’ payment schemes also discriminate unlawfully on the bases of gender/gender identity and sexual orientation,” the lawsuit reads.

The Abundant Birth Project was launched in 2021 to study the health impacts of providing supplemental income to mothers during pregnancy and for six months postpartum. Its goal was to reduce racial disparities in San Francisco, a city where Black mothers accounted for 4% of births between 2007 and 2016, but made up half of all maternal deaths.

Read what leaders in the Black community have to say about the suit in the full article.

Precedent has been set for suits of this nature with the Fearless Fund, which offers grants to Black women entrepreneurs.

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