Last week, the ACLU sought a court order to force the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to release documents outlining U.S. policy limiting refugee and undocumented teenagers’ access to important reproductive health services. According to the complaint, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover the details of these policies in August, but has received no response. The FOIA request was triggered by news that in June 2008 the Commonwealth Catholic Charities of Virginia—an ACF grantee—fired four social workers who helped an unaccompanied, undocumented 16-year-old in its custody obtain an abortion and contraception. The complaint also references a Catholic Charities nurse who was fired after she refused to deny her patients information about condoms.

According to the complaint, the ACF’s policies apply to both unaccompanied, undocumented minors and unaccompanied refugee children—many of whom speak little to no English and are detained in jail-like facilities until they are deported, reunited with family in the U.S., or obtain asylum in the U.S., as circumstances warrant.

Reproductive justice demands that minors are given medically accurate information about sex and sexuality and have access to reproductive services. These policies are especially unconscionable considering the vulnerability of the populations affected. As the ACLU put it, “[these minors] are in need of our compassion and care,” not the imposition of religious beliefs that may not match their own. It is maddening that grantees of federal funds who are supposed to provide at-risk minors with necessary services and care are allowed to operate under “the basic teachings of the Catholic Church” rather than to provide medically necessary and legally required reproductive care.

The ACLU’s complaint reminded me of the news in September that women immigrants are now required to receive the HPV vaccine, Gardasil in order to become citizens—a requirement not imposed on male immigrants or current U.S. citizens.

Critics have commented that this is another example of the government using vulnerable populations as human lab rats to test new reproductive technologies. And, I can’t help but notice the double-standard imposed on immigrant women when it comes to the supposed “encouragement” of sexual promiscuity that mandating this vaccine would entail. (You’ll recall, many social conservatives were concerned that vaccinating girls against HPV would conflict with their abstinence-only-until-marriage-or-else message.) I think that this double standard sends a message that only certain groups are worth government “protection”—as a post at Feministing put it, “I guess they don’t care about these things when it comes to immigrant women.”

Personally, I don’t feel that Gardasil has been on the market long enough to be mandated to any group. In fact, the lead researcher in the development of the HPV virus vaccine, Dr. Diane Harper, said that Gardasil “has not been out long enough for us to have post-marketing surveillance to really understand what all of the potential side effects are going to be.” (And while we’re at it, let’s keep studying the effects of the vaccine on boys and men. If we’re going to make the vaccine mandatory, it should be for both sexes.) The Gardasil mandate for immigrant women, coupled with the recent news of alarming domestic policies regarding undocumented and refugee minors’ access to reproductive services, signals the importance of continuing to build and sustain a movement that addresses the intersections between immigration status, class, and access to health care.

-Amanda Allen

Today, November 20, is Transgender Day of Remembrance. This day was set aside to honor and memorialize victims of transphobic violence in 1998.

Just last week saw the murders of two black transwomen, Duana Johnson and Lateisha Green. There has been little media coverage of these killings, and what coverage there is frequently fails to respect the victims’ identity.

Read a memorial poem dedicated to Duanna here.

Read the names of this year’s dead here.

Queen Emily says:

Few will respect our lives as they were, and few will mourn them, and they must be mourned. Their lives were meaningful, their names and genders were real and important, and they lost their lives from hate…

And yes, today we remember those of us still living–our fear, the fear that lives at the heart of every trans person, that someone will know that we are trans, and will kill us for it. Today we remember all the other times we murmured “oh fuck” as we read the news. Today we discover the deaths we missed, because we couldn’t bear hearing about them anymore for awhile, even though we must. We must.

I’ve been thinking a lot about coalitions lately. Coalitions and communities, about how those two concepts overlap and how they are very different creatures with very different functions, and different needs.

Some of these musings were sparked by a conversation with a friend of mine, who mentioned how he had spoken up in an LGBTQIQ support group about his experience as a transgender person and gotten nothing but an an awkward silence back from the other members. This led to a discussion of the limitations of the LGBTQIQ (etc) umbrella, and how the word “community,” so commonly applied to the LGBTQIQ movement, is often a misnomer. The issues faced by lesbian and gay people are not the same as issues faced by bisexual people are very much not the same as issues faced by transpeople are not identical to issues faced by intersex people. The issues faced by queer people of color are not the same as those faced by queer White people. The issues preoccupying affluent and middle class queer folks may be completely irrelevant to queer people living in poverty. And all too often the umbrella doesn’t cover everyone the way it’s supposed to or assumed to.

It seems to me that this problem arises when people within the so-called community assume that because it is a “community,” everyone encompassed by it does have the same needs, the same interests, and the same or similar experiences. It’s that mindset–an expectation of automatic clarity and easy understanding, an inability to engage with difference–that my friend met in what was supposed to be a safe space. In fact, the LGBTQIQ movement is much more like a coalition than a community, an alliance of groups with vastly different–and sometimes conflicting–interests, concerns, and unifying experiences. And coalitions are not–cannot be, should not be–safe spaces. Effective coalitions require us to step outside our comfort zones, to work through and with differences of opinion, to expect that understanding won’t always or often be intuitive or simple.

The other thing which has me thinking about coalitions is the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which–as Amanda pointed out in her last post–is most certainly a reproductive justice issue. I believed, and still believe, that it was time for marriage discrimination to be ended in my state. The initiative passed by only a few percentage points–and is a hallmark of coalition failure, a failure of coalition-building.

(more…)

Although many ballot initiatives that would threaten reproductive rights were defeated Tuesday night across the nation, we cannot consider last night a victory for the reproductive justice community.

But let’s start with the good news. In California, voters for the third time voted against a constitutional amendment that would require parental notification and a mandatory waiting period for a minor seeking an abortion. This time around, the proponents of the constitutional amendment purported to provide pregnant minors with another option: that of telling an adult relative (other than the parent) about the pregnancy, but having to simultaneously report her parents as abusive to authorities. Proposition 4 was defeated 52 to 47.

Voters in Colorado overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have defined a fertilized egg as a legal human being. By providing legal protections for fertilized eggs, this measure would have had particularly devastating consequences, had it passed, as it would have called into question the legality of hormonal contraception, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research in Colorado. Voters in South Dakota also rejected a second attempt to ban abortion in the state (this time with “exceptions” for rape, incest, and the health of the pregnant woman). And, in Michigan a measure was passed that would expand embryonic stem cell research in the state.

However, reproductive justice cannot be achieved until all people are treated equally and all people’s decisions about their reproductive and sexual self-determination are treated with dignity. In Florida, voters narrowly approved an amendment banning gay marriage. The Florida constitution will now define marriage as between one man and one woman. Voters in California similarly approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that eliminates the rights of same-sex couples to marry announced by the California Supreme Court in May of this year. Voters in Arizona supported a similar constitutional amendment.

And, in a stunning display of contempt for same-sex couples and committed unmarried heterosexual couples, 57% of voters in Arkansas voted to pass a proposal that disqualify all potential adoptive parents except for married couples. The measure also prohibits unmarried couples living together from fostering children.

Why anyone would want to make it even harder for a loving couple to adopt a child in the context of an already-broken adoption system is beyond me. Apparently, the goal is to “publicly affirm the gold standard of rearing children whenever we can”–not to match disadvantaged children with stable and caring parents. (In case you were wondering, the “gold standard” is “married mom and dad homes.”  The priority, then, is deciding whose lifestyle qualifies under a discriminatory and outdated definition of what a family is, not placing needy children in loving homes–to advance a “moral” agenda at the expense of kids without homes.

It’s curious that after reporting that this measure passed in Arkansas, the next sentence in this article is the following: “Tuesday was a relief for supporters of reproductive rights.” Adoption rights are reproductive rights. The rights of same-sex couples to marry and the rights of adults to become parents are reproductive rights. I don’t know about you, but after hearing about the measures that passed in California, Arizona, and Arkansas, the last emotion I feel is relief.

-Amanda Allen