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Overview
Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the Twenty-First Century publishes works that explore the contours and content of reproductive justice. The series will include primers intended for students and those new to reproductive justice as well as books of original research that will further knowledge and impact society. Learn more at www.ucpress.edu/go/reproductivejustice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520963207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2017 |
| Series: | Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Sales rank: | 563,511 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Rickie Solinger is a historian and curator and the author or editor of many books about reproductive politics, including Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade.
Read an Excerpt
Reproductive Justice
An Introduction
By Loretta J. Ross, Rickie Solinger
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96320-7
CHAPTER 1
A Reproductive Justice History
Reproductive justice is a contemporary framework for activism and for thinking about the experience of reproduction. It is also a political movement that splices reproductive rights with social justice to achieve reproductive justice. The definition of reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. In addition, reproductive justice demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom for every human being.
At the heart of reproductive justice is this claim: all fertile persons and persons who reproduce and become parents require a safe and dignified context for these most fundamental human experiences. Achieving this goal depends on access to specific, community-based resources including high-quality health care, housing and education, a living wage, a healthy environment, and a safety net for times when these resources fail. Safe and dignified fertility management, childbirth, and parenting are impossible without these resources.
REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
The case for reproductive justice makes another basic claim: access to these material resources is justified on the grounds that safe and dignified fertility management, childbirth, and parenting together constitute a fundamental human right. Human rights, a global idea, are what governments owe to the people they govern and include both negative rights and positive rights. Negative rights are a government's obligation to refrain from unduly interfering with people's mental, physical, and spiritual autonomy. Positive rights are a government's obligation to ensure that people can exercise their freedoms and enjoy the benefits of society.
Reproductive justice uses a human rights framework to draw attention to — and resist — laws and public and corporate policies based on racial, gender, and class prejudices. These laws and policies deny people the right to control their bodies, interfere with their reproductive decision making, and, ultimately, prevent many people from being able to live with dignity in safe and healthy communities.
The human rights analysis rests on the claim that interference with the safety and dignity of fertile and reproducing persons is a blow against their humanity — that is, against their rights as human beings. Protecting people against this interference is crucial to ensuring the human rights of all because all of us have the human right to be fertile, the human right to engage in sexual relations, and the human right to reproduce or not, and the human right to be able to care for our children with dignity and safety.
This history of reproduction in the United States pays attention to the ways that women have always been determined to make secret decisions, pursue bold options, share information and resources, depend on the support of sisters, friends, and strangers, and take the risks they needed to take to make the reproductive decisions they could make. Sometimes these efforts were successful, sometimes not. Indeed, the reproductive options that fertile people have are always structured by the resources they have — or do not have.
Understanding the historical, legal, and technological contexts in which women have lived their reproductive lives is key to understanding how women have seized particular spaces for managing their fertility. This means understanding how women have avoided conception and how they have had children and been mothers when they wanted to. This kind of information allows us to understand how women have been responsible mothers when they had children in the midst of the life they had, in the midst of the community they lived in. The crucial point here is that no matter what kinds of regulations the government, the church, the family, or other authorities created, girls and women have always done what they could to shape their own reproductive lives. These assertions have particular meaning for the lived experience of women of color, whose reproductive capacity has constituted both a key engine for white power and wealth historically and a touchstone for those who want to distinguish the "value" of women's reproductive bodies by race. These perspectives make clear that women of color have been targeted in distinctive, brutal ways across U.S. history.
The reproductive justice framework derives its vital depth from drawing attention to the persistence of this history — the ways that the history of white supremacy operating in a capitalist system penetrates and misshapes the present. "The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously said. "It's not even past." In this case, past abuses of women's reproductive bodies live on in contemporary harms and coercions, stimulating reproductive justice activists to define the arena of reproductive dignity and safety in terms of human rights. Keeping in mind the impacts of this history, reproductive justice activists and theorists focus on the lived, embodied reproductive and whole-life experiences within their communities of people who can become pregnant and give birth.
We cannot understand these experiences of fertility and reproduction and maternity separate from our understanding of the community — the social context — in which they occur. When we assess the extent to which a group of fertile and pregnant persons are reproductively healthy and the degree of this group's access to affordable reproductive health services, we can understand the relationship between health, health care, poverty, community empowerment, and the experiences of individuals. We can see the connection between reproductive health and well-being and the right to be a mother or a parent. We can see how the economic and cultural health of the community structures the degree of safety and dignity available to fertile and reproducing persons. These perspectives demonstrate the limits of the marketplace concept of free, unimpeded individual "choice" and turn us toward a human rights analysis.
This first chapter recounts the history of the thirteen original colonies and the United States and the resistance by women of color that gave birth to the reproductive justice framework. This chapter makes the case that knowing this history is crucial for understanding what animates and defines the contours and content of reproductive justice and the activist movement associated with its claims. It is a history that shows how colonizers, enslavers, employers, and the state, among other entities, have used reproductive capacity to pursue goals associated with power, wealth, status, and property, creating difficulties and particular degradations for fertile and reproducing persons because of their sex and gender and their capacity to give birth to new life. It highlights the histories of people of color regarding reproduction and parenting because of racial slavery, immigration restrictions, persecution and genocide of Native populations, and other forms of racism in the original thirteen colonies and then the United States. It also highlights the history that women of color have made as they have responded to official policies, cultural assumptions, and casual practices.
This history calls attention over and over to the vulnerabilities of people without institutionalized power. It shows, for example, how some groups have been unable to prevent rape and its consequences; how some were unable to avoid official and unofficial programs of sterilization; how many people were unable to control when they got pregnant or decide whether to stay pregnant and whether or not to be the parents of the children they gave birth to. We see how, as enslaved persons, parents were unable to protect their children from sale or to assert their authority as parents. After white settlers and armies began moving westward across the North American continent, many Native Americans lost their land and also lost their pregnancies and children to genocidal wars and forced marches, and then to the boarding school system that aimed to drain Native culture from the minds of children who were being remade as "Americans." Many people lost their fertility to coercive, race-based sterilization programs. All of these brutalities and indignities and others constitute a catalog of reproductive injustices: they name the reproductive dangers that many persons experienced in the past and that many continue to experience, in updated forms, today. And they define the remedies that mark out the meanings of reproductive justice, in contrast.
By the last third of the twentieth century, a number of factors fueled movement building by feminists of color who focused on matters they would soon associate with reproductive justice. These included the influence of international and U.S. antiracist and feminist-led human rights movements. Movement activists organized against laws and policies that amounted to official reproductive abuse of people of color and their communities. Abuses included coerced sterilization; welfare and fostering policies that punished poor women for "illegitimate" motherhood; and the Hyde Amendment, which denied federal aid to poor women seeking abortions. In other words, reproductive justice was born from the claims of women of color that they had the right to be sexual persons and to be fertile. They claimed the right to decide to become parents and the right to the resources they needed to take care of their children. They also claimed the right to manage their fertility by having access to contraception and abortion services. And they made the case that the reproduction-related abuses of the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s and beyond constituted the direct legacies of a long history of reproductive abuse, reaching back into the slavery regime and earlier. They also drew on their own histories to define the fundamental human rights of all fertile and reproducing persons.
This opening chapter provides a reproductive justice history of reproduction in the United States. It chronicles interactions over time between official efforts to bring reproduction under the control of the state (and other authorities) and the efforts of ordinary people to define, to seek out, to claim, and to hold on to reproductive safety and dignity. These interactions embed some recurrent threads; first, that to achieve its most fundamental goals, every government depends on the reproductive capacity of people who can give birth. Government goals might include encouraging reproduction in order to build adequate labor and military forces. From the perspective of European settlers in North America, official laws and policies were crucial to achieving these kinds of aims. The second thread shows that laws and policies were quickly fundamental to racializing the colonies and then the nation, establishing (and fortifying) the primacy of whites. Laws and policies associated with population defined racial groups and boundaries between them, fixing exactly who was enslaved, who was free, and who was native. Over time, every pregnant woman and every baby born was racialized, marked for inclusion or exclusion, as the founding fathers and their heirs defined and protected the national identity of the United States as a "white country." Over time, white settlers and then white citizens used the law to express their sense of the incompatibility of heterogeneity and democracy.
Racializing the nation depended on the development of a culture and a politics — and a body of law — that declared that white babies had a different, dearer, and nonnegotiable value compared to nonwhite babies and that enforced those different values. Culture and laws were meant to identify which female bodies (and their babies) were marked for which kinds of administration and management by the state. In time, these laws constituted a formidable population-control structure and included antimiscegenation laws, immigration laws, and laws criminalizing contraception and abortion. After slavery ended and the babies of African Americans no longer automatically increased the wealth of slave-owning whites, laws encouraged the sterilization of many women, frequently poor women of color. And welfare laws punished the pregnancy and childbearing of the same women. The government has also created a variety of laws over time that have separated children from their mothers. These have given the state both the power to decide what constitutes a good mother and the capacity to act against the motherhood of women defined as falling short of that standard, even when that standard might embed and depend on racial and class biases. Crucially, although officials wrote these laws and others in language that called for policing the sex, reproductive, and maternal experiences of individuals, in fact, the laws have had the effect of punishing whole communities.
A reproductive justice lens helps us explore this history by revealing the impacts of these kinds of state strategies on the lives of individuals and communities over time. This makes a reproductive justice history distinct from national histories that ignore the short-term or long-term consequences for women and their communities of the slavery regime, the program of Native genocide, anti-Asian immigration restrictions, the Mexican "repatriation," and the colonization of the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean. Many histories have traced the progress of women toward personal reproductive autonomy.
This reproductive justice history does not foreground the concept of individual choice. On the contrary, using the reproductive justice framework, this chapter makes the case that individual choices have only been as capacious and empowering as the resources any woman can turn to in her community. Indeed, this history considers the impacts on women and their communities when state policies use women's bodies as "mechanisms of oppression against [their own] communities": for example, when an enslaver used sexual force to impregnate an enslaved woman or when birthing occurs under conditions that are deeply alienated from community traditions or interests.
Historically, the absence of adequate reproductive health services has rigorously structured the lived experiences of generations of women of color and their communities. This history calls attention to the colonizing and modernizing processes that separated women from family and community traditions and resources. For example, when gynecological and obstetric medicine emerged as male-dominated, professionalized specialties, traditional women-centered knowledge and experience could be sidelined and then officially outlawed, and some enslaved women served the new experts as guinea pigs. In the process, midwives were discredited and their age-old traditions degraded or lost. Public policies consigned particular pregnant and parturient women to underfunded public health programs, and standardization of obstetrics required that some women give birth in deteriorated public institutions under dangerous and alienating conditions. Health-related and other impacts rippled across and damaged communities for generations.
Reproductive justice clarifies the need for protection from coerced sex and reproduction and also from coerced suppression or termination of fertility. The reproductive justice/human rights framework makes claims on the incarceration system, the immigration system, and the health care system, for example, to block institutional degradations associated with fertility, reproduction, and maternity or parenthood, and to recognize and protect the reproductive health and parenting rights of persons under their purview. Indeed, the human rights framework embeds a key corollary or foundational principle whose absence has degraded and damaged millions of women across U.S. history: health care, including reproductive health care, is properly a human right, not a commodity for purchase.
COLONIZING NORTH AMERICA AND RACIALIZING THE NATION
In the colonial period, from the time of the first white European settlements until the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, population growth was crucial to the success of the North American colonial project and to the emergence of the new nation. From the white settlers' point of view, population growth among Europeans was crucial for establishing, developing, enlarging, and defending their land claims, their accumulation of wealth, and their political control of the settled territories. From their point of view as well, removal of the Native population that obstructed European settlement was mandatory, as was rapid population growth among enslaved Africans, who provided the hard labor necessary to realize the full range of Europeans' goals.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reproductive Justice by Loretta J. Ross, Rickie Solinger. Copyright © 2017 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. A Reproductive Justice History
2. Reproductive Justice in the Twenty-First Century
3. Managing Fertility
4. Reproductive Justice and the Right to Parent
Epilogue: Reproductive Justice on the Ground
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index