Law Students for Reproductive Justice at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, CA held “Violence Awareness Week” (or V-Week) between February 15 and February 17 to raise awareness about domestic and sexual violence faced by women around the globe. 

We used the three days as both an awareness campaign and as a method to collect toiletries to donate to a local women’s shelter. A large colorful poster bearing violence-related statistics was on display behind our table, and handouts were available for those wishing to learn more.  Each day we posted a different question passersby could answer in an attempt to win a prize. The prizes were shirts that read “Don’t Turn Your Back on Violence Against Women.” One question was “what percentage of women are physically or sexually assaulted each year by either a husband or intimate partner or someone they know?” While a handful of people attempted fair guesses each day, the question on the last day (a nod to this being “National Condom Week”) yielded the most responses: a jar containing condoms was on display and students were urged to guess “how many condoms are in the jar?”  

Finally, our members asked students to take a picture for UNIFEM’s Get Crossed campaign, which urges people to take a stand and “Say No to Sexual Violence in Conflict.” A large red canvas sheet that read “Stop Rape Now” was the backdrop for the pictures where people stood with their arms crossed in the shape of an “X” to demonstrate their solidarity with the campaign. The week of activities was a huge success for our chapter as it garnered a substantial amount of attention from students and faculty.  

Jenn Kish

In her feature on the supposed generational divide in the pro-choice movement, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg correctly observes that abortion has hit the headlines recently in the context of health care reform and the horrendously restrictive Stupak amendment—and it’s not something reproductive rights advocates are happy about.  But there isn’t much else I can relate to in her assessment of the current landscape in reproductive rights advocacy and activism.  In fact, I think the story—which argues that there is a chasm between the “menopausal militia,” meaning the generation of feminists who came of age before Roe v. Wade and view abortion in “stark political terms,” and the “millennials,” the younger set for whom Stolberg suggests abortion is a personal issue—misses the mark in a sad but revealing way.

Relying on quotes from Naral Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan, Stolberg promotes this political/personal dichotomy without actually explaining how this supposed shift to the personal manifests itself—other than the fact that the post-Roe generations seem less responsive to single-issue pro-choice calls to action.  Provocative accompanying artwork, which consists of a black rectangle with brightly colored letters spelling “WE” floating above “ME,” implies that younger women are selfish in neglecting abortion politics.  Yet Stolberg acknowledges that “a clear majority of Americans support the right to abortion, and there’s little evidence of a difference between those over 30 and under 30.”  In fact, she herself points to several examples of young people organizing right now to stop the Stupak amendment (including LSRJ’s recent webinar on abortion and health care reform legislation).  So what’s the issue?

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg concludes that young people don’t respond to email alerts about contacting their legislators because they know abortion is legal and believe “if you really need one you can probably figure out how to get one.”  Which means not only are we selfish, but we’re also foolishly complacent.  But what about the millions of poor women, immigrant women, and young women who can’t ever “figure out how to get one” because the barriers we’ve erected to accessing legal abortion are simply too high?  Such women may be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or to induce an abortion through other means, with serious consequences for the health and security of themselves and their families.  And what about those of us who aren’t poor, immigrant, or under 18 but believe deeply that how our society treats those women reflects on all of us, individually and collectively? (more…)

The reproductive rights movement was founded by women and originally fought for issues men ignored, like a woman’s right to determine the timing and spacing of her children.  Reproductive justice, however, has a greatly expanded focus and fights not just for the right not to have children, but also the right to have children, and to parent the children we have.  RJ strives for healthy and empowered communities and, thus, inherently involves both sexes.  In spite of this expansion, because the movement has traditionally been understood as a woman’s issue, the fight has still largely been left to women. The RJ community has thoroughly discussed this dilemma and has hypothesized how best to frame the issues so that men better understand the implications of ignoring reproductive justice.

We are armed with information that seems like it should be inflammatory to the stereotypical male.  For example, recent scientific studies have shown that exposure to specific chemicals causes the feminization of male fetuses and infant boys.  This means that exposure to phthalates, bisphenol-A, or any other chemical that mimics estrogen can decrease penis size, androgenital length, and sperm count, in addition to other possible physical deformities, like the urethra developing at the base of the penis rather than the tip.  All of these facts hit men where they are, stereotypically, the most sensitive: their “masculinity.”  Those in the reproductive justice community who have been working to reduce environmental reproductive toxins viewed this information primarily as more evidence of harm, but secondarily as a method for getting men interested and involved.  What can convince men more than threats to their virility?

(more…)

I’m short on time this week, so here’s a round-up of links, including follow-ups on some of the stories I talked about in my last post.

Outlaw Midwives, a Manifesta.

Mostly pregnant middle and upper class educated white women have the economic and racial privilege and choices to have a ‘natural/normal’ birth. These women, a small segment of the global birthing world, create their natural experiences by exoticising, fetishizing, imitating and co-opting the practices and images of 3rd world brown women childbearing cultures. Natural/normal concept is really code for ‘preferred’, it is the elite white women who have the preferred childbirth and normal body. Their body, lifestyle, childbearing, mothering, and inevitably, their children set the standard through their privilege and access for what is normal and natural.

It’s not about ‘natural’ birth, vs. medical interventions vs. Cesarean. It is about empowerment.

At Salon: Bristol Palin stammers the truth.

Bristol told Van Susteren that telling her parents she was pregnant “was, like, harder than labor,” and described sitting on the couch with Johnston and a best friend there for support, so petrified about making her announcement that she was “just sick to my stomach,” so much so that finally, her best friend had to blurt it out for her. Bristol continued, “I don’t even remember it, because it was just like something I don’t want to remember.”

Amanda Palmer talks more about her controversial song, “Oasis”, and her personal experience of abortion.

I would have to say the worst part about getting an abortion wasn’t the surgery itself, it was having to deal with people screaming at me outside of the clinic, and literally shoving up against me, and shoving pictures of mutilated fetuses in my face. I think, if anything else, when it comes down to it, writing that song was my way of processing that kind of assault, and just making it into a joke, which is how I process it, and that’s got to be fair.

More on Nadya Suleman and the “octuplet debate”:

From RH Reality Check: Missing the Point on Large Families– “Instead of focusing on those who make questionable choices, why not focus on those who have no choice?”

From Lisa at My Ecdysis: Mother of Fourteen, Nadya Suleman– “What I find interesting, though, is that throughout history and the world, there are women exactly like Suleman who raise their multitude of children with much less media and attention than Nadya Suleman. There are women who are neither scorned or criticized for the number of children they have. They are ignored. The reaction our country has had to Nadya Suleman confounds me.”

From Alas, a Blog: Nadya Suleman Receives Death Threats and Return of the Revenge of the Daughter of the Welfare Queen.

Julie writes: this is about “the worship of motherhood and the hatred of mothers.” And I don’t think you can have one without the other.

Nojojo writes: I can’t help wondering how much of the rage I’m seeing — not merely outrage, but murderous incandescent fury — is because the Welfare Queen specter has been raised in Americans’ minds, perhaps conflated in some weird-ass way with The Arab Threat and maybe even The Brown Conspiracy To Outbreed White People? (Suleman’s fertility doctor appears to be Indian, see. We’re all in on it!)

This issue, by the way, is something I didn’t talk about in my last post, and should have–the fact that Nadya Suleman is a woman of color. I think it has everything to do with the way people have responded to this story.

One of my favorite female musicians, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, wrote in her blog this week about the BBC’s censorship of her song Oasis, “a tongue-in-cheek, ironic up-tempo pop song…about a girl who got drunk, was date raped, and had an abortion.” The BBC thinks that her lyrics “make light of abortion, rape, and religion.” Amanda, who is herself a survivor of date rape, writes,

our COLLECTIVE freedom to approach situations with humor, with irony, with anger, with sadness, with darkness, with an edge, from a different perspective, from within the situation…it’s ESSENTIAL.
we have to agree about this or we ALL get in trouble….

should we just cry about it demurely and hope that the proper reaction, the one that society deems appropriate, will make it go away?

Her answer is profanely emphatic. As it should be. No one has the right to tell us what is an appropriate, acceptable reaction to what happens to us, to our bodies–to tell us what to feel, what to say, what to hide.

(more…)

• From Daily Kos and Netroots Nation: activists from the Pretty Bird Woman House shelter speak about sexual violence against Native women and their struggle for justice. Because of jurisdictional uncertainty, the non-Native perpetrators responsible for 86% of assaults against Native women are rarely arrested or prosecuted. Video here (sorry, couldn’t get it to embed properly.)

• Politico “discovers” the pro-choice spiritual left. It’s actually a pretty savvy article. I think that it’s long past time the religious/spiritual left got some recognition as a political force–from everyone, including the spiritual left itself. Learning to approach reproductive justice from a faith-positive perspective can only help our movement. Some of us may have a hard time getting our head around this, in the context of so many decades/centuries of religiously-motivated attacks on women, sexual freedom, and reproductive rights. (I myself split from Christianity years ago, citing irreconcilable differences.) But as this article points out, the religious Right has done a very good job of hijacking God and spirituality for their own oppressive purposes, and as in many other areas of politics, the left has long allowed them to frame the discourse. Hopefully we’re now seeing the beginning of a push to reclaim it. Combined with the momentum towards framing reproductive rights as human rights, there’s a lot of space in that direction to movement-build.

• Most of the readers here have probably already seen this, but President Bush has proposed new regulations for the Department of Health and Human Services that, among other things, redefine abortion to include some forms of contraception. Under the regulations, health providers, researchers, and medical schools would only receive federal funding if they sign “written certifications” promising that they won’t discriminate against employees who would rather not perform essential reproductive health services. (Rep. Nita Lowey and family planning activists respond.) Looks like Bush is hard at work on his legacy, intent on leaving the country in as much of a mess as possible come January.

• Queen Emily, guest blogger at Questioning Transphobia, has begun a really great series on transphobic tropes. Her second post, Patriarchal Privilege, addresses transphobia in feminism. To some extent, this comes from a lack of understanding; women feel transwomen are “really” men trespassing in women’s spaces. Emily deconstructs this idea, outlining the discrimination and violence faced by trans people. As she says, “Trans people are systematically disempowered, on macro and micro levels. Why on earth does any of this sound like we’re getting monthly muffin baskets from the Patriarchy?” No kidding. The exclusionary “feminism” she calls out looks a lot to me like the operation of unexamined privilege. And like bisexual people facing monosexism, trans people fall into that interstitial space between hard and fast categories that makes them targets of prejudice from all sides–even within the LGBTQIQ community. Why is it that even among those claiming to fight for equality, there’s so often some group considered less equal than others?

–Erin Simonitch

I have been talking to mothers a lot lately, in part because my peers are increasingly married and starting families, but also because I am increasingly engaged in feminism and reproductive justice. Discussion about women’s rights, health, and experiences lead inevitably to motherhood and its place in our female identities—and often to conflict over what that place should be.

I myself am not a mother, nor do I particularly want to be. I am not motherly. I have always put other priorities above reproduction–education, career, activism–and besides, babies terrify me with their helplessness and fragility. Handed an infant, I hold it gingerly as I might an oddly shaped, wriggly Ming vase until it bursts into tears, at which point I relinquish it with a deep sense of relief. Nevertheless, I am assured by older female relatives that the maternal instinct will manifest, like some latent superpower, “when you have your own, of course.” I find this unlikely, and I’m suspicious of the implication that all women must have this aptitude. That if I do not have it or want to have it, there is something not quite right about me, even in this day and age. That all women want to be mothers. “Of course they do…”

But in talking to women who are mothers–feminist women, women of all generations, not just my “Gen Y”–and particularly to those who have chosen motherhood over a career, I hear, over and over, a sentiment that, at first, surprised me. That motherhood is devalued in our society–that other people, other women, look down on mothers for abandoning their career, implying that a woman cannot be a mother and a feminist. That they must work to gain respect and social status, when in fact motherhood is “the most important thing a woman can do with her life.” Even Rebecca Walker, the prominent third-wave feminist, recently had some harsh words to say about feminist devaluation of motherhood by her own mother, Alice Walker.

Knowing what I know about the abortion debate in the U.S., the ongoing erosion of Roe v. Wade, and the constant pressure brought to bear on women’s autonomy in the law, at first I couldn’t understand where these women were coming from. My experience, of course, is quite different. I see the message of exalted, sacred motherhood at every turn, at every level of public discourse. I see motherhood placed at the center of what it means to be a “real” woman, “natural” motherhood raised above all, my own choices dismissed as just a stage, an anomaly. “You’ll change your mind, you’ll see.” (And I do catch myself wondering, sometimes, what is wrong with me that I don’t want that.)

But then I took a step back, and I realized something stunning (to me.) They were right.

(more…)

So, unbeknownst to me, last week was the first-ever national week of action for reproductive justice (note to organizers:  please get the word out better next year!).  The RJ Network, organized by the very cool Third Wave Foundation, seeks to get youth involved in advocating for reproductive justice around the country. In honor of the week, here’s an awesome video:   

I think this video gets right to one of the keys of the RJ movement: the emphasis on the community, on community-building, and on strength through organizing. As lawyers and law students, it’s easy to forget sometimes that the courts are not the only — or even the best — way to effect social change. Especially now, when the federal courts are particularly unreceptive to civil rights and social justice, and when many states have similarly conservative state supreme courts. But even in an era of friendlier courts, organizing is not just a good tactic, but a vital one — one that is key to the success of the RJ movement. For a long while, the civil rights movement, and particularly feminist causes, have been seen as being very top down. And they have been. Feminist lawyers have pushed an aggressive litigation agenda, but sometimes without checking with their very constituencies. Reproductive justice reminds us that we can’t do that, and that we shouldn’t do that. Our movement will be stronger and our claim more powerful when it is diverse racially, ethnically, geographically, in terms of age, and in terms of education level and work status and immigration status.

So my hope for the (now past) official week of action and for the future many weeks of unofficial action is that we can keep in mind the importance of diversity of tactic in our movement, and that we can act with the knowledge that our legal precedents are only as strong as the communities they affect.

(via Feministing)

Last week, I wrote about why prisons are a feminist issue. This week, another feminist takes on feminists’ complicity in the mass incarceration movement. Writing in Make/Shift Magazine and reposted on AlterNet, Jessica Hoffman calls out white, wealthy feminists (who have long been the face of the movement) for their (our?) reliance on police and notions of community safety — an impulse that has devastated the black community. Hoffman writes:

In recent years, members of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence have incisively and repeatedly critiqued the white-feminist-led antiviolence movement for its reliance on (and, thus, complicity with) the U.S. criminal-legal system, which uses the rhetoric of “safety” to destroy communities of color, squash dissent, and create profit for private corporations. Yet the primary macro-level strategies of the white-feminist-led movement against domestic violence and sexual assault continue to rely on this system, with a major focus on legislation such as the Violence Against Women Act and the push for hate-crimes laws to include gender and sexual orientation.[3] On the micro/personal level, I have repeatedly seen white, class-privileged feminists unhesitatingly call upon police to protect and serve them; have listened to white feminists advise each other on which “authorities” to go to for protection from stalkers and other abusers; and so on.[4]

At both the macro level of feminist movement strategy and the micro/personal level of individual actions, I’m struck by the apparent lack of awareness of the prominent critiques made by feminists of color of law-and-order approaches to ending (or, even, finding “safety” from) violence. To be a self-identified feminist activist apparently unaware of (or, worse, deliberately skirting) the current work of not only INCITE! but also feminist icons like Angela Davis and numerous other voices calling for abolition of the prison industrial complex as a key element of social change seems to me to be part of a movement that is not only disconnected from but also damaging to some of the most vibrant and potentially liberating social-justice organizing happening today.

There’s no doubt that Hoffman’s rhetoric is inflammatory. And it’s not limited to talk of our prison nation — she indicts white feminists’ responses to immigration too. While it would be a mistake to say that I endorse everything Hoffman has to say (and I am sure that LSRJ would not organizationally echo her anger), she is very right to point out that at the moments where mainstream feminism and the rights/interests of other, marginalized groups have intersected, we as feminists have often not taken these other groups into full account.

Perhaps this is the affliction of every activist group — that its interests should always come first. But if feminism is to stay current in the fluid and intersectional world that is the present moment (see: Barack Obama), feminists have to do a better job of considering the complexities of our society before putting our significant political capital into action.

When I tell people that I am interested in both criminal justice and reproductive justice, they often look at me askance, or raise their eyebrows.  Don’t these two fields clash a lot, they ask? Well, yes, in some ways. But women’s health advocates and prison reform activists have more in common than many might think. Beyond the fact that there are more women in prison than ever before because women’s incarceration rates have skyrocketed since the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs,” women’s lives are effected by high prison rates in multiple other ways. Feministing’s Samhita draws the connections in her most recent (and last) post on the Nation’s Passing Through.  One reason, she says, that the women’s health and anti-incarceration movements need to start talking to each other is that women’s STD rates are exponentially higher in communities that have the highest incarceration rates, even in women who are not engaging in so-called risky behavior. A recent Washington Post Op-Ed has more:

One obvious reason is that conversations about sexual behavior, race and sexually transmitted infections remain taboo. Another is that the incidence of many STDs, particularly HIV, is concentrated in poor, segregated neighborhoods that are characterized by high rates of incarceration. Inner-city populations of African Americans and Latinos account for almost two-thirds of the 2.2 million Americans in prison nationwide, and two disturbing trends are increasingly present in these communities.  

One is the shift in the patterns of marriage and courtship that result when so many men are removed from a community. The other is an increase in the number of “multiple concurrent sexual partnerships,” in which individuals are engaged in sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. In many communities, when one sexual partner is imprisoned, the person left behind chooses another partner. When widespread, this behavior creates an efficient, effective pattern for introducing and maintaining an STD through a network of sexual relationships. 

As the Op-Ed, written by two public health academics, later notes, we as a society ignore the fallout of our addiction to incarceration at the peril of our health — and particularly of women’s health.  But the op-ed gets something seriously wrong:  it suggests that we can place blame for the high rates of HIV and other STDs at the feet of the women left behind when their men are dragged off to jail. We shouldn’t be placing blame on the community at all. And as Samhita rightly notes, it’s not quite so simple:

High rates of incarceration has such deleterious side effects that we have only begun to understand. Beyond dismantling and shaming entire communities, the onslaught of emasculating practices via police has created greater threats to masculinity, which backfire in the form of unsafe sexual practices, multiple partners and in its extreme form, rape.  

It may be true that, as some claim, the feminist/women’s health movement fanned the flames of the incarceration fury — particularly in the 1990s with the push toward victim’s rights. But it’s time to move beyond the divisive past and start to work from our commonality — that women and men, both inside and outside the prison walls, deserve better.