In Nashville, Tennessee, a routine traffic stop turns into a nightmare for expectant mother Juana Villegas. Driving without a license would normally earn her a citation, but instead, Juana is arrested. An immigration officer at the police station finds she is in the country illegally. Imprisoned and awaiting a court hearing, she goes into labor three days later. At the hospital, the guard will not leave the room while she changes into a gown, forcing her to undress in front of him. While recovering, Juana is shackled by wrist and ankle to the bed; her ankles are shackled together when she gets up to go to the bathroom. The guard has disconnected the phone in her hospital room so she cannot call her husband. When she is taken back to county jail, the authorities take her newborn son from her and gives him to her husband, whom she is still not allowed to see.

The sheriff’s deputy takes away the breast pump the sympathetic nurse has given Juana. Unable to pump, Juana’s breasts become painfully engorged and infected. Her child, denied her milk, quickly develops jaundice. The sheriff’s office ignores the damage done to both mother and child while Juana waits over the long 4th of July weekend for her day in court, in pain and unable to sleep.

All of this occurred pursuant to Nashville’s 287g deportation law, permitting immigration status checks at traffic stops. If Juana had been white, she would have received a citation and sent on her way by the sheriff. Because she is Latina, she was instead treated, in her own words, “like a criminal person.” (Story broken by local Latino blogger Tim A. Chávez at Political Salsa and covered there in great depth; picked up by Daily Kos, the New York Times and RH Reality Check.)

Biologist Susan Shane discovers her 7-year-old adopted daughter has begun to enter puberty. Alarmed, she makes a doctor’s appointment and searches the internet for clues on what has caused her little girl to prematurely develop breasts. What she finds is startling: scientists have linked chemicals in polycarbonate plastics (used in food packaging, water bottles, and baby bottles) and in phthalates (in food packages, time-release capsules, shampoos, lotions, and deodorants, among other things) to early puberty in girls.

Susan’s daughter is Black and has probably been exposed to these damaging environmental toxins since birth. In part because U.S. government’s WIC program discourages breastfeeding by dispensing free formula, 95% of Black women bottle-feed their children–and four times as many Black girls as White girls begin puberty around age 8. And early puberty puts them at heightened risk for breast cancer, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Susan stops using plastic water bottles and lunch containers, and her daughter’s pubertal symptoms disappear. “But I cringe as I watch her classmates line up for school lunches heated in plastic, and eat and drink food carried from home in plastic containers,” Susan says. “Some of the girls have already grown prominent breasts and with all that I have learned, I am worried about their futures.”

These two stories illustrate intersecting oppressions beyond those of gender, injustices that can’t be entirely linked to that old, familiar villain “patriarchy.” What we’re talking about here is the operation of kyriarchy perpetuating reproductive injustice for immigrant women, poor women, and women of color. We cannot blame patriarchy alone for these injustices.

So what is kyriarchy?

(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

Our next intern dispatch comes from Lisi Owen, who is an LSRJ intern in Manila, Philippines. Here’s more about Lisi, and then her first fabulous post.

Lisi Owen is a rising 2L at the University of Denver (DU). She wants to pursue a career in public international law and hopes to some day be able to work for the U.N. At DU she is involved with Amnesty International, LSRJ, the Denver Journal for International Law and Policy, and the DU Law Civil Rights Clinic. Outside DU she volunteers with the Colorado Lawyers Committee, the African Community Center, and Dress for Success Denver.

—

Hello from the Philippines! As Emily told everyone last week, this summer LSRJ has placed interns in Thailand, the Philippines and Nepal. I am the intern in Manila, Philippines, and am working with EnGendeRights, Inc., a women’s rights legal NGO.

Our biggest project for the summer is working to repeal an executive order of former Manila Mayor Jose “Lito” Atienza that effectively bans modern family planning services (pills, IUDs, ligation, injectables, vasectomies, etc.) in Manila City. Executive Order No. 003 was instituted in 2000 shortly after Atienza took office, and although a new administration has now taken over, the EO has yet to be repealed.

The effect of the contraception ban has been felt most heavily by poor women who are unable to afford contraceptives and other family planning services from private hospitals or who are unable to spend the time and money to travel to other cities where such services are available. For detailed accounts of the burden the ban has placed on these women, you can check out a report compiled by local Philippine NGOs and the Center for Reproductive Rights, in New York, entitled Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila’s Contraception Ban on Women and Families, available on CRR’s website under publications.

While we are working hard to pressure the current Mayor, Alfredo Lim, to repeal the executive order, and to pressure the national government to maintain a more pro-family planning stance, we have already made some progress in terms of actually addressing the family planning needs of women in Manila. Through a partnership with Marie Stopes we were able to provide free ligation services for women in Tondo, Manila, which is one of the poorest areas in the entire Metro Manila area. Additionally, last Friday in honor of World Population Day the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network held a reproductive health fair, also in Tondo, at which hundreds of women availed of family planning services. Such an event is unprecedented in Manila, and was a huge achievement given the difficulty NGOs and other healthcare providers have faced in the past in providing family planning services in Manila.

I must reiterate Emily’s point about how amazing it is to actually see the accumulation of my academic knowledge “filled in by the color of experience.” Reading about international law and its implementation and actually seeing it on the ground, so to speak, are two entirely different things. It certainly is inspirational and exhilarating to be a part of the latter!

As some of you may know, this summer LSRJ has set up a series of fantastic international opportunities to send law students into the field, and fight for reproductive justice abroad. LSRJ has put dedicated activists in Thailand, the Philippines, and Nepal. Our crew will be blogging about these experiences throughout the month of July. This first post is by Emily Kane. Emily is a rising 3L at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson, AZ. A native of California, Emily spent her two years in between undergraduate and law school in Washington, DC at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC) doing advocacy work predominantly in the areas of reproductive justice and judicial nominations. She is currently spending her summer as an LSRJ International Intern in and around Mae Sot, Thailand working on international reproductive justice advocacy.

In Thailand, where I am one of two LSRJers placed, we are working on a project through the New York based Global Justice Center. Specifically, we are asking two major questions of international human rights law: 1) are women (and their partners) protected from government pressure and interference in making their family planning choices?; and 2) if maternal birth rates are abnormally high, at what point can a government be blamed? These questions, perhaps seemingly uncomplicated, have not been asked in quite this way and represent uncharted territory in the reproductive justice world. In seeking these answer, we are scouring the net (thank you Westlaw and Lexis Nexis!) and the countryside (interviewing Burmese refugees in western Thailand).

As with all summer law jobs, it is amazing to see the outlines of classroom conversations and mountains of text filled in by the color of experience. Last fall, I took a course about the UN and human rights, related treaties, and the processes by which these treaties are actualized. Reading CEDAW for class last November, while fantastic, cannot compare to reading it now as we try to apply it to the project before us.

Struggling with language barriers, gauging foreign cultural norms, and mining through the vast universe that is international human rights law has been humbling. At the same time, studying the law and (perhaps) finding new avenues to help women attain the international human rights to which they are entitled is emboldening.

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.

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. 

..But not in the way you might think.

For some time now, abortion rights advocates and other social justice activists have been pushing to bring women’s rights into the rubric of human rights. A Center for Reproductive Rights button that I’ve often seen pinned to jackets and bags at rallies reads: Reproductive Rights are Human Rights. The same could of course be said for women’s rights more broadly — women’s rights are human rights. But the U.S. has been slow to recognize them as such, and has snubbed international human rights bodies (like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) even when it does recognize something as a human right. Women’s rights organizations fight against sexual exploitation and the enslavement of women around the world, again relying on human rights norms.

Which is why it’s so jarring to see radical anti-woman and anti-abortion activists trying to usurp these terms. As Salon’s Broadsheet reported yesterday, “a group of African-American antiabortion activists will be holding three events in the Bay Area this month in support of the idea that “abortion is the Darfur of America.” The leader of the event will be San Francisco’s Walter Hoye, the founder of the Issues4Life Foundation, who calls abortion “the leading cause of death in the African American community.” The rally’s organizers, like George W. Bush and other anti-abortion extremists, also compare abortion to slavery, and Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. Hoye also likens opposition to reproductive justice and abortion rights to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. From Broadsheet:

“‘It is not the first time a segment of the community has had their rights denied,’” he’s quoted as saying. “‘It is a civil rights issue because it is dehumanizing and not giving proper status as a citizen. Most people on the opposite side think it is not a person, just like they did during slavery. It is not the first time this country has done something wrong.’”

While I would agree with him that Dred Scott was wrong and that the U.S. has an ugly history of treating Blacks as less than full citizens, that’s where our agreement ends. And it’s worth noting a gaping hole in Hoye’s legal argument. Again from Broadsheet:

I have to admit to being a little confused by the logic here. Are we calling abortion genocide? Or are we saying that fetuses are slaves? Can you have civil rights if you don’t have fingernails? And do either of these comparisons make any sense? It seems as if they share the same general tactic: Think of something really, really bad, and then say it’s like abortion. This could lead to great bumper stickers: “Abortion = Auschwitz.” “Osama Bin Laden [hearts] Planned Parenthood.” “Your Doctor Raped My Fetus.” Attention-grabbers, sure — but not the most logical arguments on the block.

What’s more, Hoye, like so many other anti-woman extremists, not only fights against abortion rights, but also against the comprehensive sex education programs and healthcare reform that could prevent unintended pregnancies in the first place, and could bring birth control usage rates among poor communities to levels equaling its use in wealthier areas. So Hoye, again like so many others with whom his views are aligned, pushes a lose-lose situation for women: continued lack of access to information and contraception coupled with an inability to terminate pregnancies that a woman does not want to or cannot bring to term.

And Hoye does all of this in opposition to the NAACP, the Nation’s leading Black civil rights organization. Rev. Amos Brown, the President of the San Francisco NAACP, isn’t mincing words. He says:

“San Francisco’s top civil rights issues are education, economic empowerment and political engagement,” Brown said. “African American students are behind every ethnic group in this city academically. People who are learned and informed do the right thing. If not, they engage in destructive behavior. These pro-life people are demagogues and ideologues…”

The bottom line is that abortion is a civil rights and human rights issue, but not in the ways that Hoye thinks it is. Abortion rights, and related reproductive justice initiatives, protect and advance the civil rights of women in the U.S. An expansion of funding for education and contraception and an end to the Hyde Amendment would ensure that no woman is denied her right to self-determination (a right so central to civil rights) simply because she is poor or because she lives in a certain part of the country or a certain state. If we really care about civil rights and not just the rhetoric surrounding them, this is the side we should be on.