Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

*The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blogger herself; she is not speaking on behalf of Law Students for Reproductive Justice.*

Many of my law school colleagues and I have dipped our toes in the immigration law pond.  In my experience, when people ask me what type of law I am most interested in, and I say, “immigration law,” it invites a conversation that I don’t want to have.  I’m hesitant to speak about immigration because I never know if the person on the other side will be an individual who has no idea that our immigration system is broken and will use language that is derogatory to me and the clients I’ve worked with.

With the start of Utah’s legislative session this week, I am not only feeling this hesitancy but anger.   Representative Herrod, who has announced that he will join the U.S. Senate race to upseat Senator Hatch, has decided to sponsor legislation that would gut the Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act passed last year.  The Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act would create a guest worker program for those who are undocumented in Utah but would like to legally work and live in the state.  In order to get a permit, individuals would have to get a background check, take English and civic classes, and their tax contributions would be tracked.   Aside from the constitutional issues at hand and the likely possibility that the federal government will not give a waiver so that the state can implement this legislation, many immigration advocates were excited because the bill was solution-oriented.  Herrod’s legislation would convert the Accountability and Enforcement Act to the Utah Illegal Alien Family Transition Pilot Program.  Don’t you love the name?  His legislation would only allow individuals who have either (1) overstayed their visas or (2) let their visas expire and have children of a certain age and that were born in specific countries apply. Individuals who came into the country without inspection or through non-legal means could not apply.  The bill would allow local enforcement agencies to detain individuals who they suspect of being in the country without any legal status and punish law enforcement agencies that do not comply with enforcement laws by withholding state funds from them.   Before any of this happens, the bill states that our congressional delegates must lobby for amending federal immigration statutes so that Utah may implement this program.  Herrod said this about his bill, “The forgotten person in all of this has been the legal immigrant. We’ve passed laws that are aiding those who come here illegally. That is wrong; we need to work on laws that aid the legal immigrant.”

What Herrod has forgotten or does not want to acknowledge is that in some places in the world there is no functioning way to legally migrate to the U.S.  If I have to wait at least ten years to migrate from Mexico through a family based visa or if my only other option is to be sponsored through an employer, that is not a functioning immigration system.   I am all for state legislation that pushes the federal government to reform our broken immigration system, but legislation that guts another bill that may be unconstitutional is a waste of time and only foments a heated debate.

Reproductive justice isn’t just about abortion and contraceptives, but about improving the lived realities that impact people’s ability to decide when, how, and if they want to parent.  Because many immigrant women have no legal status, they are more subject to intimate partner violence, lack insurance coverage, and are vilified through the media as mindless, breeding machines whose sole purposes are to birth “anchor babies” and “terrorists.” Immigrant women are clearly part of this struggle. In Utah alone, immigrant women already have been targets of gender-specific threats.  In 2010, Concerned Citizens of the United States compiled a list of 1300 individuals who they thought were in Utah without legal status, asking them to be deported, and sent the list to media outlets.  The list included names, social security numbers, and even pregnant women and their expected due dates.    Herrod’s bill isn’t going to help most immigrant women and it definitely isn’t adding anything new to our country’s immigration debate. 

Last week, the Speaker of the House announced plans to introduce legislation that further restricts abortion access in the new health care plan. Last week, the Philadelphia District Attorney, Seth Williams, indicted Dr. Kermit Gosnell on eight counts of murder in the deaths of seven infants and a Bhutanese refugee. These deaths occurred in a clinic that provided abortions to mostly impoverished women, women of color, and immigrant women. The incredibly unsanitary conditions of the clinic, and the horrendous way the women seeking abortions were treated (or more accurately, not treated at all) are described here.

I believe (as do many others) these two events are connected. The events demonstrate that when abortion is used as a pawn in a political (democratic v. republican) chess game, the health and lives of impoverished women, women of color, and immigrant women are put at risk. Even if the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” goes no further, abortion has been more deeply entrenched in the political discourse as a “sacrificial lamb” that can be used to appease a specific group of people.

Reproductive justice activists and lawyers must not only fight against the many barriers women in marginalized communities face in accessing reproductive health care, but also must focus on ensuring that the reproductive health care women receive when (if) these barriers are overcame is safe, effective, and comprehensive. I kept this post short in the hopes of fostering a discussion about what lawyers, law students, community folk, and other RJ activists can do/are doing in response to the existence of clinics like Dr. Gosnell’s.

Lara Shkordoff

As most of you heard the Nelson-Hatch amendment failed in the Senate this week. Many reproductive organizations, among others, launched a visible grass-roots campaign to make sure that this Stupak-like amendment was not included in the Senate’s version of a health reform bill. Some were critical that pro-choice groups did not work proactively enough to defeat these measures before the debate entered the public arena.  I had informal discussions with friends regarding the matter. On one hand, I am frustrated that advocates for reproductive justice are once again in a reactionary position (defeat Stupak-Pitts! defeat Nelson-Hatch!) rather than proactively advocating for expansive and inclusive reproductive justice measures. I am also concerned that other important reproductive justice issues are being ignored in the public debate. What about affordability, prevention, and immigrant rights?   

On the other hand, I do not think it is fair to place all responsibility and blame for the passage of the Stupak amendment on just two organizations. I have heard some say that advocates hoped to work quietly behind the scenes to avoid turning the federal health reform debate into an abortion debate. What is the appropriate role for reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations? What can we learn from the Stupak-Pitts and Nelson-Hatch advocacy efforts? How can we work better moving forward?

Jennifer Smith

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…)

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