Senate Bill 1, DEI, and the impact on reproductive health
Blog | March 19, 2025
This month, Abortion Forward joined hundreds of Ohio college students, faculty, staff, and concerned citizens in testifying against Senate Bill 1. Our testimony was submitted by our Deputy Director Jaime Miracle, but was written by Policy Fellow Milena Wood. Milena also recorded a video for social media discussing the harm that comes from abolishing DEI activities.
Please share Milena’s video on Instagram, read the testimony below, and call Gov. Mike DeWine at 614-466-3555 to demand he veto Senate Bill 1 when it reaches his desk!
Jaime Miracle, Deputy Director
Testimony in Opposition to Senate Bill 1
March 11, 2025
Ohio Senate Bill 1, introduced in the 136th General Assembly, proposes significant restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities at state higher education institutions. The bill contains language that prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion training courses, require closure of existing DEI offices, ban DEI language in job descriptions, prohibit contracting with consultants who promote admissions or hiring based on demographic characteristics, and restrict DEI-related institutional scholarships. Despite effectively banning the presence of DEI, the legislation also conflictingly mandates that institutions affirm intellectual diversity, maintain neutrality on “controversial beliefs,” prohibit political litmus tests in hiring and admissions, and abolish diversity statements in applications. Importantly, the General Assembly would be permitted to withhold or reduce funding to institutions that fail to comply with these provisions.
Senate Bill 1 also requires the development of an American Civic Liberty course for Ohio institutions of higher education with the express goal of providing students an understanding of some of the core documents America was built on. Included in the mandatory reading for such a course is Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is considered by many to be not only one of the core documents of the Civil Rights Movement but also an example of rhetorical appeals used to their best ability. It’s a document already read by most high school students and in some college level courses, and for good reason: it does, indeed, give a good account of the social, political, and cultural climate Dr. King and the rest of America found itself in at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. If we’re going to mandate the reading of this text for all Ohio students, it’s important that we understand the essential value of the text first.
Dr. King makes a legal argument against segregation on the basis of it being the outcome of an unjust law. The law doesn’t need to be perfect in order for it to be just. However, if laws are unjust, then they should be challenged out of respect for the broader legal system. He defines unjust laws as ones that lack impartiality and limit who gets a voice. Just laws equally uplift everyone, while unjust laws exclude and prevent a genuine sense of positive peace from being established. Only when we have positive peace—not just the absence of negative forces but the presence of positive ones, like justice—and the absence of unjust laws can we then foster a genuine sense of relational equality between all groups of people.
In understanding how King defines an unjust law, it’s disconcerting to see how this bill mandates the reading of this text yet simultaneously contains language that will itself produce an unjust law. The rhetoric employed by this bill finds Letter from Birmingham Jail important enough to American democracy to be read by all students, yet apparently not virtuous enough to actually adhere itself to the worldview it prescribes. It leaves one to wonder if the minds behind this bill ever read the text to begin with.
Expulsion of DEI principles in higher education will actively harm individuals. The principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion exist to expand the pool of qualified candidates and make room for conversations that benefit people from all walks of life to create a level playing field. Most importantly, it serves to solidify the importance of recognizing and celebrating the differences between us that contribute to our intellectually diverse social fabric. An education system without DEI does not equally uplift all individuals, it closes the doors to opportunity for some and reduces the substantive quality of education as a whole for everyone else.
Our systems of education shouldn’t need DEI offices. Our universities, under optimal circumstances, would be perfect institutions that have the capacity to provide genuine support and true opportunity for all of its students, faculty, and staff. We operate under the assumption that ‘all men are created equal’ applies in all cases. However, the discrepancies that exist between various groups, all rooted in systemic inequalities, show time and time again that all men, while created equal, are not treated equal under the current system. We shouldn’t need DEI but without its presence, the system cannot equally support and uplift all individuals. Our systems of education are unjust because they exist within unjust contexts. We need the presence of DEI as a force of restorative justice where ideals of equality haven’t been met to correct for the deficiencies in our broader cultural landscape.
Abortion Forward is particularly concerned with the impact this will have on the education of our future medical professionals. The absence of DEI principles will have detrimental consequences in healthcare, especially in light of the long history of medical racism, systemic inequalities, and disregard for the wellbeing of minority groups that much of modern medicine is based upon. When we consider the racist foundations of much of modern medicine—especially gynecology, which finds its roots in the unethical experimentation and the systematic dehumanization of Black women—a medical education that refuses to acknowledge race and gender in an effort to be neutral or ‘colorblind’ is bad for all parties involved. Oversimplified colorblind treatment refuses to acknowledge that historically and presently, people’s bodies and differences do still matter.
There are concerns from sponsors of this bill that DEI practices don’t foster positive racial relations and don’t actually bring about equality or fairness, but there is evidence to support the contrary. The desire for colorblind practices often stems from the idea that by not acknowledging differences, discrimination will not have the opportunity to emerge. In practice, however, colorblind approaches to medicine often yield poor outcomes for both the relationship between medical professionals and their patients as well as general health outcomes. Research has found that non-Black physicians who consider themselves non-prejudiced and color-blind “often harbor strong unconscious racial biases toward minority patients, and are more likely to negatively evaluate Black patients” and these evaluations “can negatively impact treatment decisions, treatment adherence [and] undermine patients’ role in the medical interaction…and lead physicians to have a lower positive emotional tone in visits.” In other words, colorblind approaches to patient-practitioner relationships have the opposite of their desired effect.
Trying to appear more unprejudiced by acting as if we don’t notice race, despite automatically seeing race, makes White practitioners appear more uncomfortable, anxious, and less friendly when working with patients of a different race than them. Not only this, but colorblind interactions with White providers are shown to be cognitively taxing for minorities because “those whites appeared more prejudiced…more offensive, and devaluing the importance of racial issues.” All of this contributes to worse interactions and relationships between medical providers and their patients, and it also undermines trust in medical providers making minority patients less likely to listen to their advice. Colorblind approaches make it impossible for individuals to see where their own biases come into play and even more impossible to see when race is an important component to be considered.
Colorblind approaches to healthcare don’t promote equity, genuine understanding, or cultural competency. When we consider the egregious discrepancies in health outcomes for Black women, ignoring the background conditions that inform these poorer health outcomes is just plain bad medical practice. One study shows that Black women are almost four times more likely to die while giving birth than White women, and Black infants are two to three times more likely to die within their first year of life than White newborns in the U.S. Not only this, but many of these deaths and other health complications that disproportionately affect Black and minority women are preventable. The study also shows that most of these disparities are rooted in modifiable factors like maternal health behaviors, physical and social environments, and inadequate healthcare access or quality.
These disparities persist even when we take ‘risk taking behaviors’ out of the equation. Another study shows that “even when risky behaviors are controlled, the black-white [infant mortality rate] disparity continues to exist.” Even with factors like obesity or alcohol and drug use considered or held constant, Black women still continue to have a higher infant mortality rate than White women. The report offers that “it’s not race so much as racism and the experience of being a black woman or a person of color in this society” that contributes to this disparity in infant mortality rates between White and Black women. The patterns of risk for Black and minority women are rooted in systemic and structural inequalities; it is not the individuals but the frameworks they are made to live and participate in that perpetuate these inequalities.
These facts culminate in one simple truth: the poorer reproductive health outcomes of Black and minority groups can and should be addressed by conscious efforts to understand the background conditions that inform why they have dramatically different health outcomes in the first place, as well as the steps we can take to address them. The singular force we have to accomplish that goal, to push the culture of medical practice in the right direction, is the structure of DEI. Considering how far we’re yet to go in truly addressing health disparities, stopping the programming, messaging, and research that is guiding us to equity is a step backwards. A colorblind approach that would be taught in the absence of DEI structures will literally cost us the lives and health of individuals around the state. Ensuring that our medical schools help students focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks, rather than be blind to them, make our healthcare professionals better healthcare professionals. We need to use the building blocks of DEI for the continued betterment of the system, not destroy the foundations we have fought so hard to lay.
Considering all of the above, colorblind approaches to medicine cannot adequately address the various concerns and disparities that exist amongst minority women. Different groups of people face certain patterns of risk, some being higher than others. A colorblind approach misses the critical differences in outcomes amongst distinct groups by assuming that minorities fundamentally face the same obstacles as their White counterparts in an attempt to appear unprejudiced. The intent to appear unprejudiced means nothing if those actions actively produce inequality.
Promoting genuine equality and making healthcare better and safer for everyone starts with the education our healthcare providers receive. Withholding potentially life-saving strategies, information, and approaches to medicine for the sake of avoiding the imagined horrors of DEI is bad practice and unjust. Ohio’s students deserve to have a well-founded, robust education to provide them with the groundwork to thrive in their respective fields. We need the presence of positive forces like diversity, equity, and inclusion to give us the foundations for true relational equality, and this bill actively keeps us from accomplishing that goal.
We need to be consistent: if what Dr. King said in Letter from Birmingham Jail is so important to understanding American democracy, adhering to the principles of justice he outlines for our democracy is essential. Appealing to his authority as leader of the Civil Rights Movement yet woefully disregarding the key tenets of this work is contradictory. Senate Bill 1 will not promote a well-rounded higher education system for Ohioans: it dismantles the already limited protected environments for underrepresented or vulnerable students and will certainly devalue the education of our future medical professionals.
