Hi folks–
I hope your last few weeks were as restful as mine. I’m happy to be back and blogging away. To start things off again, you can check out my post on Bush vs. Choice, the NARAL Pro-Choice America blog. I wrote as part of a series commemorating the one-year anniversary of the approval of emergency contraception over the counter.
This recent post on the very popular feminist blog Feministing.com generated a lot of discussion among their readers, and got me pretty angry at the same time. It dealt with the story of one 20-something woman and her search for a doctor who would sterilize her, because she knew she never wanted to have children. Pretty much everyone refused to perform the procedure, for varying reasons, most of which revolved around not trusting her to make the irreversable decision at such a young age.
This is not a new dilemma. Mostly white, middle class women have dealt with these challenges since the procedure was developed–doctors not wanting to sterilize them based on age, number of children, even permission from husbands. Women have even had problems getting doctors to give them long-term birth control, like IUDs, for similar reasons.
But there is a flip side to this debate, which I attempted to add to the discussion that arose from the Feministing post, but had little impact overall. The flip side is sterilization abuse: women who are forcibly or unknowingly sterilized against their will. Here is what I commented on the feministing post:
I think that you will find that for women of color, low income women, or immigrant women, this issue is completely different. Rather than having trouble getting sterilization surgeries, they are being FORCIBLY sterilized.
There is a long history of this in the United States. In the 1970s, it was discovered that hundreds of Mexican-origin women were being unknowingly sterilized at an LA hospital. They were being told the operation was reversible and given forms they couldn’t read (because they were in english) to sign.
These abuses promoted a campaign by a group called CESA (Committee to End Sterilization Abuse), spearheaded by Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias that was able to pass federal guidelines regarding sterilization–requiring forms in the person’s native language, and a waiting period to give consent. Many times these women were being asked if they wanted the procedure while in labor.
This created an outrage among white feminists, for exactly the reasons Ann mentions above–they felt it was an infringement on a woman’s right to choose sterilization and was a barrier to her access.
It’s a great example of when the feminist movement gets divided along racial lines–white women and women of color are experiencing this issue in opposite ways.
There are a number of more “legal” ways that women of color and low-income women continue to be subjected to coercive reproductive control policies. Undocumented women in PA were allowed access to tubal ligations (without cost) but no help for other shorter term birth control methods.
Generally I love the debates and discussions on Feministing, I think they provide a wide range of perspectives and foster great dialogue. I was really disappointed by this post however, and even more disappointed to see that in the more than 100 comments posted (mine was 20-something) only one other person even acknowledged the flip-side of this issue for women of color, low income women, and immigrants.
There are seriously racist and eugenist philosophies at work here, for both cases. Doctors don’t want to sterilize young smart white women, partially because these are the people everyone wants reproducing. Just take a look at egg donation advertising for further proof of this. And the government wants to sterilize young undocumented and poor women of color because they are all of the things I just mentioned: of color, undocumented and poor. Plus they are reproducing at a higher rate than white people, who are barely replacing themselves. So let’s call this what it is–racism at work on our access to reproductive health technologies.
Check out this fabulous article by Susan Sharon Lerner from Salon about women’s access to abortions in Mississippi. Unfortunately for women in that state, every barrier that you can imagine has been placed on their ability to access services, we’re talking lack of providers (there is only one in the entire state), waiting periods, high costs, strigent (even bordering on harrasment-like) requirements on the clinic and provider, hostile political climate, coupled with extreme poverty and a twelve week cut-off for abortions in the state, and you have a scary set of circumstances that means a lot of women in that state will continue with unwanted pregnancies.
Lerner sums it all up better than I can:
It’s hard to imagine someone who can’t afford a bus trip taking responsibility for a new life — especially when she doesn’t want to.
PS If you’re interested in reading more reproductive rights related news–check out my organization’s new blog, Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz where I’ll be writing more about reproductive justice and the Latina community.
In a NYTimes article today, Nancy Goldstein, a reproductive justice rockstar from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and her wife are featured for being one of the same sex couples to be recognized by NY State for a marriage ceremony they had in Massachussets in 2004.
Unfortunately they are part of a small number of couples who are being recognized, and only because of a legal technicality. Goldstein and her partner were married before the July 2006 NY Supreme Court decision which came out against same-sex marriage. Only couples married between May 2004 and July 2006 will be recognized by NY State.
Check out this blog, hosted by openDemocracy, which is giving a forum to women’s opinions and reactions around the G8.
So, this year openDemocracy will be covering the G8 process from a women’s perspective. We have invited some of our authors to lead the debate in an openSummit on key issues such as aid, globalisation, climate change and health. A summary of these voices will be published at the end of the month. With openDemocracy we have the technology to address G8 and challenge their views. We should take full advantage of this. As part of the struggle to reform the world, we can also help to reshape the news.
I have a post about reproductive justice and what I do during my day job.
An article in the newest issue of Mother Jones makes a great point:
And if the Supreme Court and abortion opponents really want to protect the lives of fetuses, they might consider this: Murder is the number one cause of death of pregnant women in the United States.
But of course we don’t really care about the women carrying the fetus, just the fetus itself. It’s frightening to think about the incidence of intimate partner violence and women as victims, the article also points out that one million women are stalked in the US every year. ONE MILLION women.
Another related crisis is the mass murder of women and girls in Guatemala. This is a human rights disaster, and its not being talked about. Women are being murdered simply because they are women.
Since 2001, more that 2,600 Guatemalan women and girls have been killed and the numbers seem to be accelerating – 110 were murdered in January and February this year alone. Only a negligible number of their killers has ever been convicted.
The scary thing about these murders? They are usually unprovoked. Similar issues have been documented on the US-Mexico border, as well as war-torn countries where rape is used as a weapon.
This weekend I finally saw the new Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and what struck me about their Global Feminisms exhibit is how violence is such a pervasive theme. Many of the pieces used shocking imagery to represent the effect of war and national struggles on women’s bodies, including a video which showed a woman hula hooping with barbed wire. It was painful, disturbing and moving all at the same time.
It’s horrible that we have to waste our energy on five anti-choice men on the Supreme Court, when we have such big issues at hand. BTW, it’s National Call-In Day. Call your Congress people and tell them to support the Freedom of Choice Act.
I participated in a really interesting conference last week, entitled Facing Race. Sponsored by the Applied Research Center, it brought together academics, politicians, organizers and activists to discuss racial justice.
I was psyched to participate, particularly because I love talking about reproductive justice work outside of the reproductive rights spaces. The whole point of what we’re trying to do is emphasize the connections between movements, and moving beyond the world of single issue activism. The other side has gotten it right–they’ve figured out how to all be on the same team: the anti-immigrant people, the anti-choice people, the anti-peace people, the anti-sex people and the anti-gay rights people. And the big problem is: we’re not. Instead, we progressives fight for airtime for OUR issue (which has to be THE issue), and the other side wins.
So this conference brought together people from different worlds, with a focus on race and racial disparities. I participated in an awesome panel about sexual health and communities of color, and we were able to have a really dynamic conversation about some key issues. What does the pro-choice movement look like in communities of color? How can we organize around sexual health in these communities? How can we broaden the conversation beyond just abortion rights, to talk about things like the rights of welfare mothers, HIV/AIDs, research, new technologies and birth rights? How can we include people who don’t identify as feminist, or pro-choice?
The other great thing about the conference was the discussion of the war in Iraq. While obviously a progressive issue, it’s not one that gets any airtime in reproductive rights spaces. The speakers at this conference were really intent on talking about the war as a racialized one, and emphasizing that social justice movements will go nowhere without an end to the war in Iraq. That’s a pretty strong statement but a powerful one. We really do have to keep in mind how the foreign policy decisions our government makes influence progressive movements in this country. Like the Global Gag Rule and domestic abortion advocacy.
One important thing I learned: it’s not enough to simply TALK about people of color, or women of color, and how their experiences differ. We have to continually highlight the moments where racism is a motivating factor–and call it out as such. Theories about the biological differences between races and individualism are used by the other side to de-emphasize the role that institutional racism plays in shaping our communities, in holding our communities back, and we have to combat this by continually calling it like it is–particularly when it comes to the racist policies that are being implemented by our current administration.
I’m re-posting my feministing guest blog here, because it does a good job of explaining why I use the term radical doula, and why NAPW‘s recent Summit to Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women was so amazing–and fit very well with the essence of what it means to be a radical doula. Thanks to Jessica Valenti for giving me the opportunity to guest blog, and as a result deciding to create my own.
During the pre-conference training organized by Be Present, Inc, I stood up and introduced myself as a radical doula. This was a designation that I came to assume for myself through an understanding that my beliefs (which seemed to me completely logical and altogether natural) placed me apart from a large part of what I have come to call the “birth activist” community (midwives, doulas and advocates who work toward changing the standards of care for birthing women in the US). This conference highlighted many of the ways my politics are a seeming contradiction: I’m a doula and I’m a pro-choice abortion advocate. I’m a doula and I’m a lesbian. I’m a doula and I may never have children. I’m a doula and I’m Latina. I’m doula and I’m not entirely comfortable with the gender/sex binary.
What was so groundbreaking about this conference was that it brought together two of my worlds, the birth activists (midwives, doulas, academics) and the pro-choice activists (policy people, advocates, organizers). I can see now how these two groups, the former of which dedicates its time to supporting women as they bring children into the world, and the latter that fights for women’s rights to not bring children into the world, don’t necessarily go together. The irony is that I never understood the contradictions that exist between them until Lynn Paltrow pointed it out to me—precisely because the two are really good about not mentioning the others issues. The midwifery conferences I have been to in the past never mentioned the issue of abortion—allowing me to erroneously assume that they were all pro-choice just like me. Likewise, the pro-choice conferences rarely mentioned the issues that face birthing women—so focused as they are on the rights of women fighting not to birth. So congratulations NAPW, you succeeded in beginning a dialogue between the two movements (as stilted and precarious as it may have been at times)—even just by creating a space where that dialogue was possible.
What this conference made entirely clear to me is that the activists from these two camps need to be in the same room, if not simply because the people whom we are fighting are one and the same. The people who want to take away women’s rights to abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sex education are the same ones who aren’t afraid to forcibly subject women to c-sections, limit the scope of women’s choices about how they birth or place the rights of an unborn fetus above the rights of a woman.
Check out the original and complete post here.
Radical Doula 