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Undivided Rights | Excerpt
WOMEN OF COLOR AND THEIR STRUGGLE FOR REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
"We're sick and tired of being sick and tired!" With Fannie Lou Hamer's words as their rallying cry, more than 1,500 African American women gathered at Spelman College in Atlanta for the first National Conference on Black Women's Health Issues in 1983: "They came with PhDs, MDs, welfare cards, in Mercedes and on crutches, from seven days to eighty years old—urban, rural, gay, straight—in desperate search for themselves." The conference gave birth to the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP), the first ever women of color reproductive justice organization and the foremother of the other organizations profiled in this book.
The histories of NBWHP and the other reproductive rights organizations formed by women of color in the 1980s and 90s are stories of activism, courage, and determination that challenge the common belief that communities who have suffered the most from restrictions on reproductive rights do not organize on their own behalf. This book retrieves part of that history by documenting the reproductive rights activism of eight women of color groups in the United States.
Accounts of the reproductive rights struggle in the US have typically focused on efforts to attain and defend the legal right to abortion, efforts led predominantly by white women. What little information is provided about women of color tends to center on the abuses they have suffered and represents only a partial history. Most of the reproductive health organizing done by women of color in the United States has been undocumented, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged. Turning the tide of this limited scholarship, Dorothy Roberts, Linda Gordon, Rickie Solinger, Jennifer Nelson, and others have brought to light both the struggles of women of color to resist reproductive oppression and the roles they have played in the fight for reproductive justice. Theirs and similar works have highlighted the external challenges confronting communities of color and constraining their reproduction-population control, sterilization abuse, unsafe contraceptives, welfare reform, the criminalization of women who use drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, and coercive and intrusive family planning programs and policies.
However, Dorothy Roberts cautions us against seeing women of color as passive puppets. Therefore, this book focuses on what women of color have done for themselves, rather than what has been done to them. We put the activism of women of color in the foreground. By adopting this approach we neither discount the devastating consequences of reproductive abuses, nor deny the impact of structural forces such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. But these issues are the backdrop for the organizing and do not take center stage.
This book utilizes a series of organizational case studies to document how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies and have organized to define and implement a reproductive justice agenda to address the needs of their communities. We selected groups that reflect a wide range of organizing strategies, issues, and challenges from four ethnic communities: African American, Native American/Indigenous, Latina, and Asian and Pacific Islander. To illustrate the range of organizing occurring within communities of color, we included two organizations from each—a national group, more well-known and often with a longer history of organizing, and an organization newer to the work and/or one that is grassroots-oriented. All of the groups varied in size, focus of programmatic activity, and budgets.
These contemporary struggles for reproductive justice arise from a long history of oppression and resistance, beginning before 20th-century battles to legalize contraception and abortion. Thus, each pair of case studies is preceded by an introductory chapter that grounds the organizational histories in the larger history of the community.
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Our research has yielded a tremendous amount of information, as well as experiences, insights, and perspectives that are critical to understanding the past and to crafting future organizing strategies. The remainder of this chapter presents the predominant themes of the aggregated histories and case studies. Despite significant differences among the groups, there are important similarities among them as well. All are engaged in (1) redefining reproductive rights to include the needs of their communities; (2) leading the fight against population control and asserting an inextricable link between the right to have children and the right not to; (3) organizing along lines of racial and ethnic identity in order to create the spaces to confront internalized and external oppression, forge agendas, and engage with other movements; (4) promoting new understandings of political inclusion and movement building that bridge historic divisions and create new alliances.
Redefining Reproductive Rights
Women of color in the US negotiate their reproductive lives in a system that combines various interlocking forms of oppression. As activist, scholar, and co-author Loretta Ross puts it: "Our ability to control what happens to our bodies is constantly challenged by poverty, racism, environmental degradation, sexism, homophobia, and injustice in the United States." The groups in this book created their own definitions of reproductive rights—definitions that are grounded in the experiences of their different communities and that link oppressions. It is because of these intersections that women of color advance a definition of reproductive rights beyond abortion. Their critique of "choice" does not deny women of color agency; rather, it shows the constraints within which women of color navigate their reproductive lives and organizing.
Early in the abortion rights struggle, before these organizations were created, women of color resisted the coercion that masqueraded as "choice." In a 1973 editorial that was supportive of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, the National Council of Negro Women sounded this important cautionary note:
The key words are "if she chooses." Bitter experience has taught the black woman that the administration of justice in this country is not colorblind. Black women on welfare have been forced to accept sterilization in exchange for a continuation of relief benefits and others have been sterilized without their knowledge or consent. A young pregnant woman recently arrested for civil rights activities in North Carolina was convicted and told that her punishment would be to have a forced abortion. We must be ever vigilant that what appears on the surface to be a step forward, does not in fact become yet another fetter or method of enslavement.
Twenty-five years later, in her introduction to Policing the National Body, co-author Jael Silliman expands their critique:
The mainstream movement, largely dominated by white women, is framed around choice: the choice to determine whether or not to have children, the choice to terminate a pregnancy, and the ability to make informed choices about contraceptive and reproductive technologies. This conception of choice is rooted in the neoliberal tradition that locates individual rights at its core, and treats the individual's control over her body as central to liberty and freedom. This emphasis on individual choice, however, obscures the social context in which individuals make choices, and discounts the ways in which the state regulates populations, disciplines individual bodies, and exercises control over sexuality, gender, and reproduction.
"Choice" implies a marketplace of options in which women's right to determine what happens to their bodies is legally protected, ignoring the fact that for women of color, economic and institutional constraints often restrict their "choices." For example, a woman who decides to have an abortion out of economic necessity does not experience her decision as a "choice." Native American activist Justine Smith writes, "In the Native context, where women often find the only contraceptives available to them are dangerous, where they live in communities in which unemployment rates can run as high as 80 percent, and where their life expectancy can be as low as 47 years, reproductive 'choice' defined so narrowly is a meaningless concept."
All of the organizations in this book include abortion and contraception as part of a much wider set of concerns. Access to resources and services, economic rights, freedom from violence, and safe and healthy communities are all integral to their expanded vision. While each group draws on its unique history, their similar definitions of reproductive rights reflect significant commonalities of experience and overall socioeconomic status. These include disproportionate rates of poverty, lack of access to health care information and services, lack of insurance coverage, and limited access to contraceptive services.
A broader cultural understanding of reproductive rights encompasses the race, class, gender, and immigration experiences of each group, linking reproductive rights and access to health care. For example, all the groups argue that culturally competent providers are crucial to achieving access to reproductive health services. In addition to health care providers knowing the language of the people they serve, cultural competency requires an understanding of and respect for the cultures, traditions, and practices of a community. Stereotypes and a lack of accurate knowledge about communities are barriers to interpreting women's needs. They are also obstacles which prevent women who need information and care from getting it.
The expanded definitions also incorporate the less obvious ways in which the fertility of women of color is undermined. For example, several of the groups include environmental issues in their definition of reproductive rights and in their advocacy. Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health responded to the threats from environmental toxins in their neighborhood and constructed a very broad definition that explicitly encompasses the right to safe food and a clean environment. The Native American Women's Health Education Resource Center definition, coming out of Native Americans' historical struggle for survival, includes sovereignty, the right to live and parent as Native Americans. By incorporating more issues into the concept of reproductive rights, these definitions provide a nuanced and critical analysis of reproductive choices, birth control, and family planning.
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