Josie Sustaire, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Oregon School of Law)

I was raised by my stay-at-home mom.  She told me on numerous occasions that I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up.  I believed her.  I grew up adoring Punky Brewster, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna.  These were girls who refused to fit a mold.  However, I mostly clung to these role models to avoid the other predominant role models I saw on television shows: the moms.  Family Ties, Growing Pains, Roseanne.  I was inundated with images of the stay-at-home mom.  I knew early on, however, that I did not want to be a stay-at-home mom and I disliked the idea that the yardstick against which I would be measured was the at-home mom model.  I know I’m not the only girl to have been raised by parents who told her she could be anything she wanted to be nor am I the first girl to not want to be a stay-at-home mom.  So if this is true, then why are there so few women in leadership roles?  Well, I don’t have the answer, but I have a hunch.

Two of my classmates recently sent me two different news stories addressing this very issue.  The first was an article about Marissa Mayer, who recently made a command decision at Yahoo! to put an end to telecommuting.  This decision has sparked fierce debates (seriously, just Google Marissa Mayer and telecommuting).  This article makes it clear from its title “Marissa Mayer is killing telecommuting, and that’s a good thing,” that Marissa Mayer’s decision was the right one.

For starters, I fundamentally disagree with this approach.  As a woman, I despise when women (the author is a woman) tell other women the “right” and “wrong” way to either parent or run a company because, of course, you can’t do both.  Intelligent, successful women should be fully aware of the fact that what works for one doesn’t work for all.  What I found most troubling is that the author completely ignores the fact that Mayer, despite having axed telecommuting, just had a private nursery built next to her office, an option not available to the other women in her building.  So, as much as I can appreciate the focus on actual interpersonal communication and face-to-face interactions among staff, I find it difficult to look up to a woman who sets two separate standards, one for her and one for all other women below her.

The second article sent to me was a story about Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.  Sandberg, in her 60 Minutes interview points the finger at women.  She believes that women are their own worst enemies and that women have put up their own barriers to success.  Now, I’ll agree that there are undoubtedly women who make certain decisions that aren’t the pursuit of reaching the top rung of the ladder but I won’t stand with Sandberg and point the finger at one group.  We are ALL to blame for this.  The lack of female leaders isn’t attributable to just some women making some choices, I would wager that it is much more likely to be attributed to a society that still measures a women’s success in a 1950’s framework.

I have a number of titles, at school and at home.  Wife, mommy, part-time chef, partly-part-time housekeeper, student, group leader, mentor, friend.  I wear each of them proudly and at times I am slow to switch gears and I make mistakes.  I’m not perfect.  But I manage and I would like to think I manage fairly well.  I want to succeed just as much as I want my husband, marriage, and my children to succeed.  I don’t feel compelled to choose one title over another.  In fact, when the media, movies, or Momsters make me feel as if I do, I get angry.  I asked a Federal court judge recently who raised five children how to combat the sneers and snide comments from the PTA moms (aka Momsters).  She leaned in and whispered, “You don’t need to worry about them because you know.  You know about you and your family and they don’t.”  At first, I thought, “what the hell kind of advice is that?”  But now I know what she meant.  I am the only one who truly knows what works for me, not the Momsters, or my classmates, professors, advisors, the media, movies, or even powerful female executives. 

Rosie Wang, Resident Blogger (’14, Columbia Law School)

The Utah Senate has passed SB60, a bill that would force health care providers to collect information from women seeking abortions on their ethnicity, the stage of pregnancy, and the reason given for the procedure. While the federal government already provides this data, this bill is a preventative measure to ensure that even if federal government changes its approach, Utah will still have access to this information. This is troubling because the sponsor of the bill, Senator Margaret Dayton, has previously expressed interest in challenging race-selective abortions as well as targeting specific cultural preferences that supposedly give rise to sex-selective abortions. The information sought to be gathered by SB60 sounds like it could be a stepping stone to a number of racially charged campaigns that disguise their anti-abortion agenda with a veneer of concern about women and people of color. This is a strategy that has been attempted before, with billboards accusing black women who seek abortions of committing genocide. This bill also sounds like a precursor to so-called “Prenatal Non-Discrimination Act” or PRENDA, which would have required health care providers to report women they suspected of seeking an abortion for reasons based on the fetus’ gender or race. PRENDA purported to be pro-women but was actually a way to both scrutinize and stereotype women based on race and create arbitrary obstacles to abortion access.  PRENDA failed in the House of Representatives last May.

Senator Dayton’s assumptions about the makeup of society and people’s ability to function within it suggests that she is not aware of the effects of being denied reproductive choice. It is her stated belief that the “traditional family is the fundamental unit of our society” is blind to the fact that “traditional families” account for only 7% of the US population. It is her belief that “personal initiative is better than government programs,” when unplanned pregnancy perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Dayton’s focus on personal initiative sounds like another way of saying that she would not be in favor of investing in programs targeting poverty, hunger, and poor health outcomes that would help women considering abortions post-pregnancy. Legislators who ignore the reality of family structures and what it takes to sustain them can hardly be presumed to be using this type of information to the best interest of women.

Rosie Wang, Resident Blogger (’14, Columbia Law School)

Going into the midnight premiere of Django Unchained, the only real context I had was that (1) It was a Quentin Tarantino movie and (2) in Spike Lee’s opinion, it was racist. Coming out of it, I thought, “Wow, that was breathtakingly racist.” And not because of the copious use of racial slurs (which is what Mr. Lee objected to).

There’s something much more subtle and insidious in it’s portrayal of slavery: It adopts wholesale and without irony some of the worst plantation tropes and erases and reinterprets the historical narrative of black women’s lack of reproductive autonomy.

In Django Unchained, a German bounty hunter frees a slave, Django and partners up with him in capturing criminals. Django is dedicated to finding and rescuing his wife Hildy, who now belongs to a plantation owner who has male slaves killing each other for sport. It’s supposed to be okay for Tarantino to write and tell this story because it is a revenge fantasy of slaves rising up against their masters and thus subversive and empowering. However, there is a lot that goes wrong in the execution of this idea.

The black body is on sensationalistic display in a way that no white body equivalently is. Hildy is put in the “hot box” for trying to run away, and has water splashed over her nude body when she is released. Django is suspended upside down, naked and about to be castrated after his true intentions to save his wife are revealed.  Nearly naked black men fighting to death appear on screen multiple times. These are fraught images because the institution of slavery viewed black women’s bodies as  open for sexual consumption and black men’s bodies as threatening and open for torture. The way Django Unchained offers images of naked black bodies for visual consumption is exploitative and revels in the morbidity of the scenes, rather than aiming for historical accuracy.

With no historical background knowledge, someone watching the first scene depicting a plantation might think that a black woman’s life under slavery consisted of swinging on oak trees in hoop skirts – as long as she didn’t try to escape. In reality, coerced reproduction and rape is the way that slavery was sustained and slave owners’ wealth multiplied after the 1807 ban on the slave trade. The monetary worth of slave women being auctioned was determined by speculations on her reproductive capacity. Slave owners would pair their slaves with multiple partners and force them to engage in sexual activity without regard for any person’s consent. Slave women were especially vulnerable to sexual assault by their masters and the resulting children from such rapes were targets of violence by the master’s wife.

Harriet Jacob’s narrative of her own experience, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describes her 55 year old master beginning sexual advance on her when she was 15. She eventually forms a relationship and has two children with another white man as the only method for escaping him. Children were often sold away from their mothers, dashing any potential of forming family bonds. Hildy is 27, and some mention is made of her role as a sex worker, but the very real reproductive consequences are never addressed. The legacy of all this is an entrenched distrust of the medical system among many black women which leads to poor health outcomes and the stereotype of not being able to be trusted to make their own reproductive decisions.

Josie Sustaire, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Oregon School of Law)

Suppose a woman chooses to have a child.  Suppose that she elects also to raise the child after it’s born.  You may be thinking, “Great.  Good for her.”  But suppose that the woman also happens to be addicted to drugs.  Are you still excited for her?  Is she any less suitable to invoke her rights?  What should be done?  Legislators in Alabama have answered these questions by prosecuting women who expose their children to drugs while pregnant.  The Alabama statute, Ala.Code 1975 § 26-15-3.2, was originally put on the books to protect children from exposure to meth labs.  However, the law has been expanded through litigation to encompass fetal exposure to drugs in utero, essentially offering legislator’s a backhanded way of circumventing a woman’s rights.

“Laws concerning a pregnant woman’s treatment of her fetus are not without precedent,” Ada Calhoun points out in her New York Times article on the subject.  “Since abortion was legalized in 1973,” she says, “hundreds of women across the country have been arrested for harming their fetuses, with charges ranging from child endangerment to first-degree murder.  Emma Ketteringham, the director of legal advocacy at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a New York-based reproductive-justice group, predicts a grim future if laws like Alabama’s stay on the books.  “Everyone talks about the personhood of the fetus,” she remarks, “but what’s really at stake is the personhood of women.  It starts with the use of an illegal drug, but what happens as a consequence of that precedent is that everything a woman does while she’s pregnant becomes subject to state regulation.”

And, as if to add insult to injury, medical research has shown that quitting cold turkey while pregnant can be fatal to the fetus.  So, that same hypothetical pregnant woman who abuses drugs, if she has access to adequate medical care, may be told by a medical professional that she should not quit but rather should maintain acceptable levels to avoid miscarriage.  Given the research, maintaining low levels of the drugs in order to save the fetus seems much safer.  BUT if the state that the woman lives in has a law like Alabama, she will still face criminal charges once the baby is born and traces of drugs are found in the baby’s system.

There must be something we can do about this.  We must find a way to reconcile the rights of women with the interests of the state in ensuring the health and safety of infants.  Why does a woman’s rights have to be sacrificed?  How can Alabama legislators believe that two wrongs can make a right?  What we can be sure of is that Alabama has no plans of backing off.  Over 60 women have been incarcerated for child endangerment and the legislature has submitted proposed amendments to the statute to explicitly apply to in utero exposure.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I love the babies.  I want what is best for them.  But how can locking their mother up for 10 years (mandatory sentence in Alabama is 10 years to life) because she is a drug user be the best option?  Sure she should not have used drugs while pregnant, but hindsight’s 20-20 and what’s done is done.  What can we offer her moving forward?  Drug treatment options seem like a much more beneficial option.  I would also encourage changing regulation of methadone clinics due to the risk of methadone exposure to fetuses.  There may not be an easy solution, but we certainly can’t go on like this.

Note:  The Guttmacher Institute has a state policy pdf that states “No state specifically criminalizes drug use during pregnancy,” and I have submitted a request for clarification and am currently awaiting their response.

This article was published by The Center for American Progress.  

Elizabeth Chen is a Policy Analyst for the Women’s Health and Rights Program at the Center for American Progress and a Law Students for Reproductive Justice law fellow.

The Family and Medical Leave Act was signed into law 20 years ago today and was a great first step toward supporting workers and workplace fairness. The law ensures that employees can receive 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave to recover from a serious medical condition, provide care for a seriously ill family member, or care for a new child. Workplace leave, however, is not just an employment issue—it is also a matter of reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice stands at the intersection of traditional reproductive rights concerns, such as the decision whether to become a parent, and social justice issues. In addition, it centers on the reproductive health needs of the most marginalized populations, including women of color, low-income individuals, and individuals with disabilities, among others. In our 2006 report,“More than a Choice: A Progressive Vision for Reproductive Health and Rights,” we set forth four cornerstones essential to a progressive reproductive health, rights, and justice agenda, including policies that support the ability to become a parent and to parent with dignity—meaning being able to financially, emotionally, and physically support a child’s basic needs—and the ability to have healthy and safe families and relationships.

Workplace leave is crucial for all people, but especially for low-income individuals seeking to become parents and have healthy families—a right to which we are all entitled. Historically, though, some parenting has been privileged at the expense of others, and not everyone has been able to exercise this right.

Laws and social movements, for example, encouraged white women to stay out of the workforce in order to provide full-time care for their children, while driving women of color—especially black women—into paid work, thus preventing them from being full-time stay-at-home caregivers to their children. Harvard Law Dean Martha Minow has documented how welfare policy for mothers in the late 19th century provided income support for them to stay at home. When access to such income support became increasingly available to black women during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, however, the rhetoric surrounding welfare became more negative. University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Dorothy Roberts explainsthat, “The central message of welfare reform is that recipient mothers are deviant for staying home and would better serve their children by finding jobs.”

To this day, programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provides income support for families living in poverty, require work in the formal economy—or training for it—driving low-income parents into the workforce. Unpaid work within the home, including caring for families, does not satisfy the program’s requirements. This is not merely a historical remnant of former cultural biases—as recently as the 2012 presidential election, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) claimed that he would require mothers receiving income support to either work outside the home or lose the support.

Furthermore, parenting itself is highly gendered in law and society, making it difficult for men to assume caregiving roles. Sex-role stereotypes, often historically codified in law, cast white women as caregivers and white men as breadwinners. Masculinity throughout the 20th century was defined by this stereotypical family wage system, even though working-class men and men of color were largely excluded from that system.

The gendered breadwinner-caregiver model has become increasingly destabilized over time. In fact, as we noted in our issue brief, “The New Breadwinners: 2010 Update,” in 2010 women were either primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families with children. Yet gendered caregiver bias persists and can result in employment discriminationagainst men when they request leave to care for their children.

Given the devaluation of caregiving, while also recognizing that most parents—especially low-income ones—must work, how can we support working parents as both workers and caregivers? The Family and Medical Leave Act was a step in the right direction: By protecting the jobs of workers caring for a new child, the law reflects policymakers’ recognition that caretaking after birth or adoption of a child is essential, and that workers should have the flexibility to take time off to do so.

The law also furthers equality and disrupts sex-role stereotypes by applying equally to both men and women. Under the law, men and women alike have the opportunity to take time off to care for family members—and the percentage of men taking leave for caregiving purposes hasincreased steadily over time. Even former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, initially anopponent of women’s equality under the law, acknowledged the crucial work that the law does to “attack the formerly state-sanctioned stereotype that only women are responsible for family caregiving.”

Workplace policies such as the Family and Medical Leave Act give workers the opportunity to care for their families with dignity by permitting them to continue to work and also to spend crucial time bonding with their new children. Under the law, workers can also take time off to care for a seriously ill family member, including a child, expanding the ability for parents to meet the needs of their children.

Unfortunately, the Family and Medical Leave Act doesn’t go far enough. As we noted in our 2009 issue brief, “Labor Pains: Improving Employment and Income Security for Pregnant Women and New Mothers,” the law only covers a subset of workers.  According to new statistics released by the Department of Labor, more than 60 percent of workers do not qualify for the protections of the law because they or their employers do not meet one or more requirements for leave. Moreover, because the leave is unpaid, almost 50 percent of workers report not being financially able to take the leave. Guaranteed leave does not enhance the ability for individuals to parent with dignity if they do not qualify for it or cannot afford to take it.

Workplace leave is crucial for people with children to be able to parent with dignity and have healthy families. The ability to care for children when they are born or adopted, or when they fall ill is essential to a holistic and comprehensive vision of reproductive health, rights, and justice. The Family and Medical Leave Act was a good beginning, but we must continue to fight until all Americans have the ability to care for their children without jeopardizing their job or their income.

Ash Moore, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Oklahoma College of Law)

It is the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I’m in law school so you may think you’re about to be bombarded with legalese and a disconnected opinion. But I have a different and important perspective – a personal one.

When I was a teenager, I was raped. Gang raped. And as cliche and trite as it has become, I was ashamed and felt like it was my fault. So, despite my better judgment, the first thing I did was take a hot shower. I washed away all evidence of the crime even though I knew exactly what I was doing. After the shower, I went in to denial. I tried to pretend like it didn’t happen. I didn’t get tested for STDs and I didn’t do anything about a potential pregnancy.

Then, in a couple of months when I started throwing up and feeling like I was getting fatter, reality set in with a vengeance and brought sheer terror with it. I didn’t know anything about pregnancy except how it came about and I knew it was a possibility.

At that point, I was more determined not to tell anyone than I was before. What if they didn’t believe me? Or what if they did and they were furious I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do? Either way, what was I going to do if I was really pregnant? I knew abortion was an option, but I didn’t want to kill something growing inside me.

I could give a baby up for adoption, but my life would be permanently changed and maybe ruined in the meantime. I didn’t know if that option was selfish, but I didn’t make a mistake, this was forced on me. Couldn’t I put myself first for a second?

I could keep the baby. But I truly believed that wouldn’t be the best thing for the baby. I wouldn’t be able to give it the kind of life it deserved. I would struggle, not have money, and be a young parent (with or without help) which is hard on the people I knew who had young parents.

Whether you think it was right or wrong, abortion was a huge part of the decision process. And the longer I thought about it, the more it seemed like the most rational and right choice. I’m deeply religious and that caused a huge problem and huge internal struggle. Would God understand? Would He approve? Would I be condemned? I knew no matter what decision I made, I would never be the same again.

Most people agree that abortion should be available for rape victims. So I wasn’t in the same position as the women struggling with restricted rights today. But what was the same was the excruciating decision process and fear. What the pregnancy test result was and what I ultimately decided are irrelevant.

What is relevant was that I had a tough decision to make and no matter what I decided, more options made the tortuous experience a little easier. It made me feel like others had struggled and came to the same decision I did; no matter what I chose, I knew I would never blame or fault anyone for making a different one in that impossible situation.

No matter how someone gets to the point where they need to make a decision regarding a pregnancy (through rape, mistake, health or money problems, or other things I may not be able to think about right now), I believe all the choices I had should be available to every other woman (and more if we can find them).

I think access to all the choices should be easy because the decision making process is hard enough. I think most women probably walk in to a doctor’s office or adoption agency after as much thought, pain, and tears as I went through. Any obstacles to make these personal decisions harder are cruel and unusual punishment.

If abortion is the ultimate decision, I believe no doctor or spectator has a better idea of the heartbeat about to stop than the woman who has to live with the decision. As you can see, abortion isn’t my story. But it’s an important part of it. And it’s an important part of society. No matter what you would choose, imagine, as I did, the process without one or more of the choices.  Then look me in the eye and tell me you want to do that to another living, breathing, caring, concerned person who is only trying to think about the best decision she can make for herself and her family. It should never be harder than it was for me. Or you. If you know the feeling.

Elisabeth Smith, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Washington School of Law)

Over Christmas my cousins and I were watching television and we just kept flipping channels until we got to TLC and saw some women dressed up in 1950s garb turn from black and white to full color. Heard of Wives with Beehives? The show is basically a Real Housewives variant, but all the women live a “vintage lifestyle”. Other people have talked about the show, but I want to highlight something besides its antiquated notions of gender roles.

All of the women go on and on about the magic of the 1950s.  Dollie calls the 50s “a very romantic period. It’s romantic to have a husband [who] you love, and beautiful children [who] you take care of and a beautiful home you take pride in.”  Here’s where I take issue with this show. Traditional gender roles aren’t my cup of tea, but a show about 4 white women mooning over the romance of the 50s without any recognition that the decade wasn’t all moonbeams and starbursts for everyone is gross.

Let’s start in reverse order. The home.  After World War II, “FHA underwriters warned that the presence of even one or two non-white families could undermine real estate values in the new suburbs. These government guidelines were widely adopted by private industry.” [Click here @ 1:30:55]  So if you were a white GI you could take advance of the GI Bill and get a home in the new suburbs. A GI of color had far fewer options. As Dalton Conley, a sociologist, a points out “basically, the whites moving to the suburbs were being subsidized in the accumulation of wealth, while blacks were being divested.” If a beautiful home is one component of the magical 50s, it was out of reach for many people.

Okay, two: beautiful children with whom you spend your time. In the 1950s, African American women worked outside the home in large numbers so they if they spent their day with children, those children probably weren’t their own.   Another statement made by one the “Wives with Beehives” underscores this reality. When the women discuss whether any of them have dishwashers, one replies “I don’t need a dishwasher, I have Maria.”  Wow. So living a vintage lifestyle also includes vintage racism!

Yikes, people, yikes. I get that these women have chosen to make the 50s their thing, but seriously, what we say on tv does have effects.

Rosie Wang, Resident Blogger (’14, Columbia Law School)

As the year comes to a close, and law school finals draw close, my already questionable domestic skills really go by the wayside.  I have no real groceries besides frozen tater tots and a jar of capers, my desk is in disarray, and my laundry is perilously close to what can only be described as a underwear crisis. It’s times like these that I can’t help wondering, how do people who work and have kids and other obligations keep up with their housework if even I can’t? How do actual lawyers do this? The answer to this question turns out to be a complicated one, involving gender roles in parenting, housekeeping, and work.

For example, did you know that 84% of married women who are lawyers have a spouse who is employed full time compared to only 44% of married men who are lawyers?  Thus, lawyers who are men are more likely to have a partner shoulder the majority of housework and childcare. This phenomenon isn’t unique to lawyers however, as 55.1% of men compared to 72.1% of women spent time on childcare on the average day. Perhaps even more worryingly, the class divide between women is growing so that even if more educated, more well off women have increased their access to paid maternity leave over time (27% in the early 1970s to 66% in 2006-2008), women who do not have their high school degree’s access has stagnated at 18% through the same time period. All of this matters for reproductive justice because there is a gender-based imbalance in career consequences related to getting married, starting a family, and having children.

Wrapped up in this imbalance is also the debate on the division of domestic labor and it’s impact on marriage.  One study reports that the equal division of housework is correlated with higher rates of divorce (in Norwegian married couples). On the other side,  it doesn’t seem unimaginable to me that communities where the norm is for women take on all the household responsibilities would also stigmatize divorce more, pressuring couples to stay together despite unhappiness or incompatibility.

Stress rates, measured by levels of cortisol, were measured in married women and men, and declined in married women when their husbands shared the housework.  Stress rates for men, on the other hand, did not  decline in married men unless men had more time to relax, at the expense of their wives’ leisure time. Alternately, a different study promisingly shows that men have higher levels of well-being and lower levels of work-family conflict when making an equal contribution to the household work. How can these be reconciled? The former study was conducted on 30 dual earner couples in Los Angeles, and the latter over 7 European countries. Maybe the difference lies in the sample. By changing innate attitudes in our country towards work as gendered, perhaps we can change stress levels and happiness levels for the better across the board.

Rosie Wang (’14, Columbia Law School)

My parents have been joking for 15 years that when I have children, they’ll move close by so they can help babysit them and tutor them in math. This scenario has always absolutely horrified me because (1) learning the times table at age 4 was an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone and (2) who said I wanted kids? Its a matter I’m ambivalent on, but start feeling actively resistant towards on principle, once people knowingly say that I’ll change my mind and or rehash the tropes of parenthood being the noblest calling. This may have contributed to me amusing myself as a young adolescent by reading “childfree” livejournal groups that served as forums for people to discuss the stigma they felt from not wanting to have children. Specifically, there was a childfree group that I read out of interest in some of the feminist, pro-choice ideas, and a childfree “hardcore” group I read out of a morbid fascination with people who had built up so much resentment that they called parents “moos” or “breeders.”

This movement, more extreme parts included, is still alive and well. And looking at it from a reproductive justice angle is fascinating. Believe it or not, it is possible for reproductive justice advocates who work for healthy mothers and infants and for who say they actively dislike children and mothers to find common ground. For instance, some women who do not have children feel taken advantage of by the workplace accommodations given to women with children. From a different point of view though, you could say both groups of people are on the same side. Both women with and without children want their choices to parent or not to parent respected. Rather than developing antagonistic feelings, the answer may be better found in working together to develop workplaces that do not ask women without children to “pick up the slack,” but instead hire more employees so that no one has to disproportionately sacrifice their life outside of work.

On another workplace angle, as recently as 1991, courts have reviewed cases in which employers have banned fertile women from job duties that may cause birth defects with both an assumption that their female employees would all have children and an assumption that they knew what was best for these women. The posts I used to find the most interesting were by people who had never had children chronicling the frustrating experience of being denied tubal ligations by doctors who were sure they would regret it. Though the reproductive justice movement was founded by women of color, who have historically experienced forced sterilization, it makes perfect sense that it also champions the rights of the “childfree” to be voluntarily sterilized. The recurring theme is a familiar one from legislative battles surrounding abortion and contraception: Those with power arising from political clout, a professional degree, or employment position are trying to control how those with less power how to live their reproductive lives. And though the ability to choose is usually associated with the right to time and space having children – it is just as much of a reproductive right to choose to never have children.

Catrina Otonoga, LSRJ Summer Legal Intern

Sometimes, the internet is a glorious thing. Information! Reconnecting with old friends! Shopping! Finding delicious recipes I’ll never make! And sometimes, the internet is like walking down back alley in New York City that is home to the largest rats you’ve ever seen. Sometimes, a woman posts a demonstrational video on breastfeeding to the internet, and that video gets turned into porn through editing. Sometimes, the internet is wonderful, and sometimes it is so completely awful. This is one of those awful times.

After becoming a first time mother who was initially fearful of breastfeeding, and then finding her breast-feeding mojo with the help of a lactation consultant, MaryAnn Sahoury wanted to pass that mojo on to other ladies in need. So, in 2010, Sahoury agreed to appear in an instructional breastfeeding video shot by Meredith Video Studios. A few months after the shoot, Sahoury Googled her name and found that the  footage of her instructional breastfeeding video had wandered from its ownership by Meredith Corporation to YouTube, and finally, was spliced into pornography that was being shared on porn sharing cites XTube and YouPorn.

While the story itself is enough to incite emotion, the comments have been a trip down feminist history lane. News sites covering the story, like Huffington Post, Jezebel, and USA Today are flooded with them, many of them lambasting Sahoury for breastfeeding in public, for not having the dignity to at least cover up, and for having the audacity to show other women how to breast feed. And while it’s safe to say that these commentors don’t know Sahoury, it’s not for lack of wanting. They claim to know exactly who she is and how she lives,“emotionally screwed up” woman who doesn’t understand what “should come naturally” to her, and who was probably complicit in the video being turned into porn. Bottom line: she was asking for it by not being modest enough. And while a few of these comments speak to the responsibility of men in these situations, most are countered with the fault and blame being directed at Sahoury. We are reliving the battles fought by other mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers.

Lately, women in this country have faced an avalanche of criticism that starts the day they have sex, and continues throughout their parenting choices. The misuse of the video is more than just a rouge act; it is part of a systemic cultural effort to undermine and eliminate the voices of women. Sahoury has made a clear choice in how she wants to use her body and in how she wants her body to be seen, and that choice has been violated, with little acknowledgment or attention, other than the sheer shock value of it. Sahoury exhibited a powerful action: reclaiming her body for her daughter’s nourishment, and using it to empower other women who would like to make the same choice, or to discover that it isn’t for them. To have Sahoury’s video turned into porn is not entirely shocking to me; the internet often twists and turns words and actions into beings that are far from their original intent. What’s shocking to me is that the public conscious is endorsing this mantra every day: stay inside, cover up, have a little more modesty. Sounds to me like the public conscious needs a new Jiminy Cricket.