By Fajer Saeed Ebrahim

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women are too often missing from national abortion conversations, especially at a moment when policies are rapidly reshaping access to care and people’s ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

When we are included, it’s often as part of a single, oversimplified narrative that flattens the lived realities of our communities. That lack of nuance shows up in policy, where our voices are too often overlooked.

Disaggregated data helps change that. When we invest in it, we start to see a clearer, more honest picture of how AAPI women are navigating abortion, and what it will take to ensure our communities are seen, heard, and reflected in the policies that impact our lives.

That’s exactly what we set out to do in NAPAWF’s new report, Beyond the Labels: AAPI Women on Abortion Care, Dignity, and Criminalization.

This is the largest national, multilingual, disaggregated study of AAPI women’s views on abortion to date, capturing perspectives across more than 25 ethnic communities, and what we found challenges many of the assumptions often made about our communities.

Eighty-six percent of AAPI women believe it is important to protect the rights of people who are pregnant or could become pregnant. That alone should shift how people think about where our communities stand. But before dissecting their beliefs, it’s important to get a clearer picture of how AAPI women understand abortion in the first place.

AAPI women view abortion as healthcare, not politics

Across more than 1,400 survey respondents and multilingual focus groups, there is strong alignment around core values. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of AAPI women believe abortion should be legal, and 84% agree that people should be able to make their own abortion decisions without government interference.

To read the entire article: https://aapidata.com/blog/aapi-women-are-often-missing-from-the-abortion-conversation-heres-what-the-data-actually-shows