• 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. 

The subject line of the email sending me this article read “omg omg omg omg omg.” How else would one react to the following:  an Australian obstetrician/gynecologist, who performed countless surgeries on countless women over the course of his career, has been found to have botched many many surgeries — and to perhaps maliciously alter many more. In one case, a woman went into the hospital to have a small lesion on her labia removed. As she slipped into unconsciousness (from the anesthesia), he leaned over and whispered to her, “I’m going to take your clitoris too.” Sure enough, she woke up to the searing pain of genital mutilation. Because of her trauma and embarrassment, the woman didn’t speak up for two whole years. Because no one was checking credentials, neither this woman nor the countless others who visited Dr. Graeme Reeves, knew that he had been barred from practicing obstetrics in 1997 because he had refused to treat a woman’s puerperal fever. The woman later died. The medical board found that the doctor had “impaired mental capacity”. But he didn’t stop practicing, and he even lied his way into a job in 2002–the position in which he later mutilated Carolyn, the woman whose story is related above. There’s more:  

 Another woman went in for surgery on an ovarian lesion, and ended up with both ovaries, both Fallopian tubes removed; and a kidney gone, also, after complications ensued.

Another woman reports that Reeves failed to use gloves when performing a gynaecological examination, and used an “intimate, sexual” touch, as well as touching her breasts unexpectedly.

Another woman says that Reeves spent over an hour painfully attempting to insert an IUD after she had an abnormal Pap smear, saying “I haven’t got this right”. He performed no cervical biopsy, and she was later found to be riddled with cancer throughout her pelvis. 

So how did Dr. Reeves get this far? Why did more women not speak up?  And why, for the love of all that is holy, is Dr. Reeves’ medical malpractice insurance not covering care for Carolyn’s injuries? Like Hoyden (linked above), I’m going to say that this is a product of patriarchy at work. Hoyden writes:

This isn’t a borderline case, a known but unfortunate side effect, a medical slip: this is a seriously impaired doctor practising for many months in completely inappropriate ways, mutilating, and raping patients - and nobody around him, not his colleagues, not nurses or other staff, were able to stop him. Did they convince themselves that it “wasn’t that serious, really”? Did they convince themselves it was none of their business? Did they fear personal repercussions should they blow the whistle? Why did nobody so much as check his registration when he was employed? 

No one spoke up because women are told to feel shame about their bodies, and are made to feel like deviants for talking or thinking about their sexual and reproductive health. Carolyn waited two years (two years!) before speaking up about what Dr. Reeves did to her. And while I can’t for the life of me begin to explain why Reeves did this, I can’t help but think that it’s in some way connected to some sort of patriarchy-fueled desire to mark/own/control women’s bodies.What’s more, our society (this took place in Australia but is reflective of trends worldwide) continues to tsk-tsk men like this but not really to punish them. Dr. Reeves is not practicing any more, true, but he’s not in jail. Seems to me he’s much more dangerous than the average non-violent drug offender who finds him or her-self serving a long prison term, a victim of the US’s overly harsh drug laws. So now, 11 years after the first complaint was lodged about Reeves, he’s finally being held back from raping and injuring any more women (even if not by jail cell bars). But 11 years!? Makes me wonder if we’ve made much headway tackling subconscious misogyny and antipathy toward women’s sexual lives. 

A book to add to my very long list of books to read: Dr. Susan Wicklund’s “This Common Secret:  My Journey as an Abortion Doctor.” In her book, Dr. Wicklund, an abortion provider who flies into underserved areas to perform abortions, takes on the abortion taboo.

We don’t talk about it,” she said in a telephone interview. “People say, ‘Nobody I know has ever had an abortion,’ and that is just not true. Their sisters, their mothers have had abortions.”

She’s right. We don’t talk about abortion. We don’t talk about how common it is. We don’t question loudly enough our tacit acceptance of abortion as something shameful. And - and this is a hard pill even for many RJ advocates to swallow - we don’t talk about how even with all the prevention in the world, abortion would still exist, would still be central to women’s reproductive health, and must still be legal.

That said, Dr. Wicklund’s not perfect. It seems she too is focused on the line of rhetoric we have been fed — the idea that the central problem of abortion opponents is that they do not support prevention, say. Yes, this hypocrisy is central to their advocacy, but it’s only one of many many hypocrisies. What about the fact that the antiabortion movement is also, on the whole, against childcare subsidies and universal healthcare, and even SCHIP?  What about the fact that a so-called “pro-life” stance should include helping protect the lives of teenagers by teaching them, through comprehensive sex-ed, how to prevent STDs? What about public financing for abortions (are you listening Mr. Hyde, you freedom of medal winner you?) so that women who want to terminate their pregnancies can do so as early as possible - when it’s safest and when Dr. Wicklund actually performs abortions?

I don’t want to bite a generous hand - and Dr. Wicklund certainly gets a lot of it right. But if we’re going to stop being so ashamed to talk about abortion, we’ve got to really talk. Not only about abortion per se, but about abortion as an integral part of a patchwork of social justice initiatives and conversations.

A long running debate about diversifying “feminism” and about choice vs. reproductive justice has popped up again, this time in a guest post on Feministe by La Lubu, and in some of the reactions to her post.

La Lubu takes on a lot of the tired strains of our mothers’ feminism:  the focus on middle-class white women, the centering of abortion, the centrality of gatekeeping (who are the “real” feminists?.  She writes:

Although I identify as feminist, there are times when I feel alienated from feminism—or perhaps I should say, some of the narratives of dominant feminism (even when those expressions don’t necessarily come from the mainstream organizations, spokespeople, or media that traditionally represent feminism). I feel like the Outsider in a movement that should feel like home. My view is that our expressions of feminism (and everything else) is intimately connected to our identities; that it is impossible to separate those various facets of identity from one another—that those parts of ourselves are indelibly integrated into a whole; that feminism is necessary for us and the world; and that blogs can be an effective way to parse out our conflicts with one another and bridge the gaps in understanding in order that feminism remain a viable movement for positive change. The key word in that last sentence being “can.”

She identifies as forces that make her feel marginal in feminism the exclusive dominant feminist narratives (with the notable exception of Sojourner Truth);  a dismissiveness of the struggles of mothers (a byproduct of the focus on abortion); and an ignored classism. These and more.

La Lubu is right to identify these issues as part of what this generation of feminists inherited.  But what she fails to address is the push right now among feminists and activists to address some of these problems (the work’s not done — only starting, but it’s worth noting nonetheless). A key area where this is happening is in the rhetoric shift that is in evidence in the transformation of Law Students for Choice to Law Students for Reproductive Justice.  The name change, and the refocusing throughout the abortion rights movement, was brought about by a recognition of the problems that La Lubu points out — the things that have made so many people feel distant from the dominant feminist and abortion rights (pro-choice) narratives. Reproductive justice, as I discussed in my first post here, recognizes that we can’t fight for abortion rights in a vacuum. Abortion rights are meaningless if they are not accessible to everyone (young, old, immigrant, citizen, rich, poor). And they’re meaningless if not contextualized in a society more broadly respectful of women’s reproductive lives and that provides health care, child care, real family leave, real workplace protections for people of all genders and gender identities.   But not everyone is convinced.  For some, even those who support these initiatives, the language of RJ doesn’t seem like the right choice (bad pun intended).  Cara, writing at The Curvature, believes that the more expansive ideals of reproductive justice can be folded into the notion of “choice.” Though she identifies that there are problems with using the word “choice,” she writes:

Reproductive choice is also about the choice to give birth and raise a child. It is about the choice to have or not have children, the choice to have them when they are wanted, the choice to use birth control. I think that the media certainly dos seize upon the concept of “pro-choice” as “pro-abortion” and as being mainly concerned with abortion. But that doesn’t make it true.

I’m not so sure. Cara’s definition (read more of her post for an expanded discussion) still keeps a laser focus on childbearing. Choice as the meaningful opportunity to bear or not bear children is vitally important. But it’s not enough. We need more. We need the resources not only to make informed and free decisions about pregnancies, but also to provide for the children we do bring into this world, and for ourselves. That means education, jobs, environmental policy, and healthcare. And probably, much more.