Worried about women of color? Thanks but no thanks anti-choicers. We’ve got it covered.

February 24, 2010

I have another piece up at RH Reality Check today. Apparently it’s my week for publication! This one has a lot more opinion and snark than yesterday’s. I was responding to the recent efforts on behalf of the anti-choice community to argue that abortion is being used by groups like Planned Parenthood as a form of eugenics against women of color.

Latinas and other women of color don’t need to be protected by paternalistic ideologues motivated by a political agenda that disregards the needs of women of color and their families. So thanks for your concern, anti-choicers, but I think the women of color advocates working within the reproductive justice movement have got it covered. We’re working in those clinics you attack, we’re helping to shape policies and provide services in our communities, services that allow us to decide what our needs are.

We know whom we can trust to make decisions about family creation: women themselves. We don’t need limits on what services we can access.  And we don’t need your ideological bullying.

The next time one of your crisis pregnancy centers, one of your dramatic billboards, or one of your bogus pieces of “sex and race selection” legislation actually works to support women through whatever choice they make for their families—we’ll talk.

Read the rest here.

Leave a Comment » | abortion, parenting, racism, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

How about we call it blog for justice day?

January 22, 2010

Today is blog for choice day, a chance for the blog world to commemorate the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade–on it’s 37th year!

Each year, I find myself unable to write about choice without talking about why I want it to be justice instead.

As I’ve talked about before, choice isn’t enough.

Choice doesn’t recognize that we don’t all have a choice. That often times our choices are impacted by what others want, by what we can afford, by what we will allow ourselves to do.

Our choices are mediated by politicians, religious figures, our paycheck this month. Our choices are limited by our family members, our lovers, what we see on TV and who is close to us when we have to make a decision.

Our choices are determined by the color of our skin, the language that rolls off our tongues, the restrictions of our bodies, the gender we identify with and the people we love.

Our choices aren’t just about abortion, they’re also about how we live, how we create family, how we interact with our bodies, with society, and with the world.

So I’m going to spend today, instead of thinking about choice, thinking about justice.

6 Comments | Blogosphere, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

Washington State: Only 30% of incarcerated women are shackled during labor

January 20, 2010

The Superintendent of the Corrections Center for Women (the only one in WA state that houses pregnant women) said 30% of women are shackled during labor in a recent MSNBC article.

Only 30%?! Wow, how nice of them.

Bills have been introduced in the Washington State House and Senate that would outlaw the inhumane practice of shackling incarcerated pregnant women during labor and delivery. The laws would prevent the use of any types of restraints on pregnant women who are incarcerated.

Let’s hope this law passes, so 30% can become zero.

Thanks to Peggy at Open Arms for the heads up!

2 Comments | pregnancy, reproductive justice, Shackling | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

“The idea that a woman maintains her human rights, even when she’s pregnant, is a radical new idea.”

January 15, 2010

The title comes from Lynn Paltrow, of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, on this segment of GRITtv. Also on the segment is Silvia Henriquez, Executive Director of National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

Video after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | abortion, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

Is a “choice” a bad frame for childbirth?

January 11, 2010

There is an article in the UK newspaper the Telegraph, about Sheila Kitzinger, and her thoughts about a new UK plan to ensure all women have choice when it comes to where they give birth. From a US perspective, the plan is pretty radical. The choice includes home birth, a birth center attended by midwives and a traditional hospital setting.

Kitzinger supports the plan, but criticizes the language of choice:

“Choice comes from the language of advertising – it is what happens in supermarkets,” she said. “The idea is one of free choice but in fact the products at eye level are displayed to have the greatest impact on the consumer; it is the same with maternity.”

“Childbirth experts are often blamed for raising women’s expectations but I think you have to look further. I think the problem is a consumerist agenda. We are geared up to competition, to test everything; nowadays, we see birth as a performance,” she said.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Reproductive justice activists have long critiqued the reproductive rights movement for using the consumer based “choice” framework. They argue that not everyone has the same “choice” largely due to social and economic factors.

Moving from choice to justice has been a way to move the reproductive rights framework to a broader philosophy that incorporates the reality that many women do not have a choice–and their socio-economic situation, their race, their religion, etc don’t allow them to make these decisions.

One of the reasons “choice” is so popular, though, is that it removes judgment. If I say I am pro-choice, I’m not saying I like abortion or promote it, but that I value the right of every individual to decide. Same thing with birth. If the UK government supports every woman having a choice, they are not saying that homebirth is good, or hospital birth bad, but that every person should be able to decide.

But “choice” still ignores that there are factors that influence us, often that we don’t have control over. Those factors could be doctor’s opinions, family pressures, economic circumstances, access issues, cultural barriers. This is another place where the reproductive justice and birth activist movements find commonality–”choice” isn’t working too well for either movement.

Reproductive rights folks have latched onto “justice” as a frame instead. Reproductive justice works toward a world where all people have the resources and support they need to make decisions about family creation. I think birth activism fits neatly into that framework, which is part of the reason I write about how these issues overlap.

4 Comments | birth, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

Bellevue shuts down birth center for low-income women

December 1, 2009

Word got out a few weeks ago that Bellevue, a hospital in Manhattan (New York City) was shutting down their in-hospital birth center which was opened in 1998. It was the only birth center in Manhattan to accept Medicaid, and probably one of the few around the country serving low-income women.

From the NY Times:

The center gave healthy women the opportunity to give birth in a comfortable environment absent the frenetic bustle of a normal hospital delivery ward. Roughly 85 percent of the patients were Chinese- or Spanish-speaking immigrants, most of them referred though Gouverneur Healthcare Services on the Lower East Side. (All midwives were required to be fluent in either Mandarin or Spanish.)

The center allowed healthy expecting mothers to walk around, bathe in a Jacuzzi as a way to reduce pain naturally, and choose to forgo common but invasive medical techniques like induced labor and epidural blocks. Unlike women who chose natural birth at home, patients had immediate access to hospital facilities if there were complications.

Fans of the birth center said that it had a Caesarean rate of less than 4 percent over its lifetime; the hospital said that such a statistic was not available.

According to the NY Times, the closing was done secretively and without much notice to the public or even the hospital advisory board. While economics was cited as the reason for the closure, this flies in the face of the information about how the birth center reduced interventions (and cost) for women who delivered there.

I think this is just further proof that most hospitals don’t care that much about outcomes or patient satisfaction–they care about money. Rumor is that the birth center will be leased out for some other purpose (generating revenue via rent or the income of whatever facility they install).

Here’s the financial math that I think is insidious and behind this kind of decision:

While you would think it’s a good thing that these patients were having births that were much less expensive (because of lower interventions and c-sections), it actually means the hospital loses revenue. Why? Because they don’t have as much to bill Medicaid for, meaning less money for the hospital.

What does that mean? Our current system of health care (which is primarily profit driven) doesn’t result in the best care for women, or their children. It’s the same logic that has created our health care system which spends way more per capita than any other country in the world, but has relatively bad outcomes.

In 2002, the United States spent $5,267 per capita on health care—53 percent more than Switzerland, the next-highest-spending country, and 140 percent more than the median OECD country.

Want to try and get the Bellevue Birth Center back? Sign this petition by Choices in Childbirth.

1 Comment | birth, health disparities, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

From NAPW: Advocating on behalf of Precious Women

November 25, 2009

I just received this message in my inbox from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Their ED, Lynn Paltrow had a lot to do with me starting this blog (read the origin story here).

Her message gave me chills.

It seemed that an appropriate way to recognize this holiday weekend would be to post it here. Read it, support NAPW if you can, and learn more about the work of their organization.

Dear Friends and Allies,

Over the weekend I saw the movie Precious. This movie, about “an overweight, illiterate teen who is pregnant with her second child” is a soaring tribute to human dignity and, for me, captures the reasons why NAPW takes the cases we do.

Recently, NAPW chose to work on behalf of R.G. — an African American teenager from Mississippi who became pregnant when she was fifteen. She suffered a stillbirth one month after turning sixteen. What was the state’s response? They arrested her and charged her with murder.

NAPW learned about the case shortly before R.G. was scheduled to go on trial as an adult. We learned that her mother’s efforts to obtain help from other organizations had been rebuffed. NAPW reached out to her local counsel and offered our assistance.

The state claims the stillbirth was caused by R.G.’s cocaine use. Never mind that researchers have not been able to link cocaine use to pregnancy loss. Never mind that no country in the world has passed a law making it a crime for a teenager to suffer a stillbirth. And never mind that a Mississippi Supreme Court judge has expressed serious concerns about the qualifications of the doctor hired by the state to prepare the autopsy report.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | activism, racism, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

More victories for pregnant incarcerated women

October 6, 2009

Yesterday, a victory from the folks at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

This case is pretty horrific. You can see more about Nelson’s story in the RH Reality Check video above. More info:

On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit (the federal level appellate court that reviews decisions from federal district courts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas) issued the long-awaited decision in Nelson v. Norris. In this case, Shawanna Nelson argued that being forced to go through the final stages of labor with both legs shackled to her hospital bed was cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. She argued that she should be allowed to sue the director of the prison and the guard who repeatedly re-shackled her legs to the bed. Ms. Nelson, an African-American woman, was incarcerated for non-violent offenses of credit card fraud and “hot checks.”

The idea of shackling any person during labor is abominable, but in this case the one argument for the practice is bunk. The only argument I can think of (which I definitely don’t agree with) is that an incarcerated person could be “dangerous” and therefore need to be restrained, even while giving birth. It’s ludicrous for even the most “violent” of criminals, let alone a woman like Nelson, who was incarcerated for CREDIT CARD FRAUD. Absurd.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | activism, birth, reproductive justice, Shackling | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

Great article on the practice of shackling incarcerated women

July 6, 2009

Anna Clark has a great piece up at RH Reality Check about the practice of shackling incarcerated women. She delves into both the realities of the practice (horrific) and the amazing activist response that has arisen to organize against this practice (and has been successful!). Here is an excerpt:

The 2008 federal policy against shackling cued renewed hope among advocates for the humane treatment of incarcerated women. Beyond lawsuits and advocacy with individual departments, legislative campaigns to restrict shackling are finding unprecedented success-after years of falling on deaf ears.

New Mexico is the most recent state to bar shackling through a bill signed by Governor Bill Richardson this spring. New York and Texas currently have bills backed by legislative support that await the word of their governors before they become law. “For us, it’s not enough to change regulations (on shackling in particular prisons),” Saada Saar said. “To do this campaign through the legislature gives us a way to respond to violations of the policy. Through state statutes, mothers’ rights are better protected.”

“A lot of states do have corrections policies that restrict shackling, but (the policies) aren’t commonly known or understood,” Sussman said. “A law allows us to go to court; it makes it hard for others to say they didn’t know (that shackling is restricted).

“We have a strong case in Illinois because of the law there, for example. We need to bring cases to ensure enforcement,” Sussman added. “It’s a dual strategy.”

It’s a strategy that inspires diverse support. Broad coalitions are signing on to legislative and legal campaigns to transform the experience of giving birth in prisons, jails, and detention centers.

Among those backing the New York Anti-Shackling Bill are women’s health advocates, prison rights organizations, medical and public health groups, and “even fellowships and ministries that aren’t our frequent allies,” Sussman said.

Read the rest here and more from Anna Clark here.

2 Comments | activism, birth, reproductive justice | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

Sterilization revisited

April 21, 2009

akhbaar-0071

Comic from ellejohara.com

This comic, which was created in 2007, I just found in a trackback.

It was inspired by this post I wrote: Sterilization: Abuse vs Access, in response to something Ann wrote at Feministing: Careful, or you’ll regret not reproducing.

That post remains the most highly trafficked post at Radical Doula ever. As the comic points out, it’s these inconsistencies that really highlight the racism in our medical profession. It’s indicative of racism that exists much more broadly, but these moments really bring it to light. Especially now that the green/global warming/environmental movement is kicking into high gear, racist population control thoughts and policies are even more likely.

1 Comment | racism, reproductive justice, sterilization | Permalink
Posted by radicaldoula

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