Having just returned from the 2010 CLPP conference, From Abortion to Rights to Social Justice:  Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom, at Hampshire College this past weekend, my head is buzzing with new ideas, inspiring words, and the sense of being part of something much larger…a movement with an important history and a hopeful future—at least judging by the number of engaged young people attending and leading this major convening of reproductive justice activists.  Workshops, trainings, and plenary panels spread across three days covered a wide range of issues—including economic justice, racial equality, freedom from violence, immigrant rights, climate justice, health care reform, and LGBTQ rights—all of which inform our understandings of what true reproductive justice will look like.

One of the most powerful aspects of the experience for me was connecting with people who do RJ work in many different capacities—as grassroots organizers and educators, as medical professionals and professional activists, as college students and as parents.  Spending much of my time working with law students and lawyers, it’s all too easy to get used to speaking in certain ways and hearing the same kinds of voices in my daily conversations.  (more…)

I founded National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) in order to do cross–issue work. Having had the privilege of working in many of the main-stream pro-choice organizations and having worked extensively with the founders and leaders of the Reproductive Justice Movement, I came to the conclusion that women’s reproductive rights and health would never be secure if the focus of our legal work remained on the defense of abortion rather than on the women who have them. Women’s lives are not just influenced by whether or not they can end a pregnancy, but also by all of the political, economic, and social conditions that enhance or limit their ability to be full and equal participants in society. I also became clear to me that the mainstream pro-choice movement was missing an extraordinary number of opportunities to build alliances and strength across issues.

As a result, NAPW has worked to build bridges between reproductive rights and drug policy reform advocates, identifying shared interests and the strong relationship between the war on abortion and the war on drugs. NAPW has also taken the lead in building bridges between those who defend the right to choose abortion and those who defend the rights of pregnant women at all stages of pregnancy, including during labor and delivery. NAPW believes that “Birth Justice” must be fully part of the definition and agenda of the Reproductive Justice Movement.  In this post, however, I want to focus on one case and one example of how failure to do cross-issue, multi-strategy work undermines the effort to defend Roe v. Wade, and more importantly, the women who become pregnant and sometimes have abortions. (more…)

Introduction

While stereotyped as hyper-fertile African American women are affected by the opposite characteristic: we are more likely studies say, than white counterparts between the ages of 25 and 44 to be and remain infertile.

If you did not know this, do not be ashamed.  Most physicians don’t know it either.  A recent Centers for Disease Control report says 6.1 million U.S. women between the ages 15 and 44 had trouble conceiving; 2.1 million married couples experienced infertility, and 9.2 million women had made use of infertility services.

In a study of  US physicians’ perceptions of fertility, only 16% of the responding physicians correctly identified African Americans as the racial group most at risk for fertility, 82% thought white women were most at risk. While stereotyped as hyper-fertile most studies say that African American women are more likely than white counterparts between the ages of 25 and 44 to be and remain infertile.

The Research

Most fertility research involves wealthier white women, because they are the biggest consumers of fertility clinics whose patients or patients’ data are available for research studies. The story of African American women’s fertility, emerging from the most recent empirical research available seems to be this. (more…)

On Sunday, Americans will unite in front of television screens across the county, but two things will divide them: team affiliation and abortion. Yes, abortion will be part of this year’s Super Bowl festivities because Focus on the Family, the uber-conservative “family values” group, has purchased an advertising slot allegedly featuring quarterback Tim Tebow’s mom discussing her decision not to terminate her pregnancy despite her doctor’s recommendation. The message being: “If I’d had an abortion, my son never would have won the Heisman.”

Although Americans are used to taking sides on Super Bowl Sunday, how will they react when they’re asked to take sides on one of our nation’s deepest cultural divides during the Big Game? Some national women’s and reproductive rights organizations, including LSRJ, have already reacted–they’re petitioning CBS to pull the ad. This seems like a reflexive, even if justified, reaction. Though I haven’t seen the ad, I’m relatively certain that if it crossed my screen on Sunday, my TV and I would have it out–as we often do when I’m blindsided by bigotry and intolerance wrapped up in American flags, bald eagles, and yes, football uniforms. However, reproductive justice organizations aren’t being blindsided by the ad, so we have the time to formulate a well-reasoned, articulate response. (more…)

The beginning of the new year is a time for reflection, optimism, and goal-setting. In this spirit, Harvard Law Students for Reproductive Justice presents its New Year’s resolutions, and we encourage your chapter to create its own.

For this semester:

1. Meet with administrators from Harvard’s health service to see if we can find out the motivations behind the opt-out policy.

 — Harvard allows anti-choice students to receive a refund of the portion of their health insurance fee which funds abortion.  This “refund” has amounted to roughly $1 per student, and there are student organizations which hold drives to encourage people to opt-out.  In the past, HLSRJ has held response drives, collecting $1 from pro-choice students and donating the proceeds to worthy organizations.  This year, we split our donation between Planned Parenthood and a local abortion fund.  However, several of our board members this year would like to find out why Harvard allows students to opt-out, and how exactly the process works, in hopes of creating awareness and possibly getting this policy changed.

2. Host a State of the Uterus event. (more…)

Because most participants in the insurance exchange would receive some federal subsidy (the New York Times reports that “anyone earning less than $88,000 for a family of four — four times the poverty level — would be eligible for a subsidy under the House bill”), insurers in the exchange are strongly incentivized to cut abortion coverage from their offerings. The result?  A de facto ban on abortion coverage within the insurance exchange – a ban which would affect even those who don’t receive federal health subsidies.

There are many stories to be told here, but I’ll limit myself to just a few. First, even if we’re not losing the culture war, Democrats apparently think we are. Disturbingly, 20 Dems with pro-choice track records voted in favor of the Stupak Amendment; at least 11 of them are in vulnerable positions for 2010, and they presumably believe that a vote for reproductive health is more dangerous than a vote for health reform. (Nate Silver points out that voter polls indicate the contrary.) The Left collectively needs to grapple with some large questions around the future of RJ and the Democratic Party.

Our second story: Congress hasn’t simply sold out women’s health; they’ve specifically sold out the health of low-income women. As RJ activists, we should be particularly attuned to intersections of economic justice and reproductive health, and to the ways in which the Stupak Amendment furthers the economic stratification of abortion access. (more…)

A recent NY Times pair of articles focuses on the human, medical, and social costs of implanting multiple embryos via IVF and IUI, resulting in a spike in both multiple births and a litany of health risks to these babies. The articles, and ensuing barrage of public comments, can be read here: “The Gift of Life, and Its Price,” “Grievous Choice on Risky Path to Parenthood.” In IUI, parents who conceive multiples also face the decision of whether to terminate some fetuses using the procedure termed “selective reduction”. IUI is much cheaper than IVF, and more readily covered by insurance, but the chance of success is lower and ability to control multiples non-existent.

The most startling assertion in the IVF article was an analysis by reproductive health experts and providers explaining the financial and business motivations on providers to disregard medical guidelines by implanting more embryos than may be safe for mom or her babies. Fertility practices want to boost their success rates and attract clientele in a highly competitive and lucrative medical field, and parents apparently think that implanting more, or rejecting selective reduction in IUI, will secure greater chances of a viable pregnancy and satisfy their emotional or religious needs to a degree that makes the risks worth taking. If the underlying reason for the increase in multiple implantations and subsequent births is really a symptom of our profit-based medical system, some suggest we utilize insurance schemes as a way to address this issue. If insurance companies are required to cover IVF, whereas many now only cover IUI, they could regulate the financial incentives by only reimbursing doctors for single implantations. (more…)

I can’t help but recall Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” when I read the internet buzz around the recent U.N. data analyzed in a “FEWER EMITTERS, LOWER EMISSIONS, LESS COST,” a report from the London School of Economics. 

The New York Times Science Blog reports that the data suggests:

[T]hat meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 billion. Between 2010 and 2050 12 billion fewer “people-years” would be lived – 326 billion against 338 billion under current projections. The 34 gigatons of CO2 saved in this way would cost $220 billion – roughly $7 a ton [metric tons]. However, the same CO2 saving would cost over $1trillion if low-carbon technologies were used.

The blog is entitled “Are Condoms the Ultimate Green Technology” and the author, Andrew Revkin, writes, “I recently raised the question of whether this means we’ll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation. This is purely a thought experiment, not a proposal.”

Really? Not a proposal? Pardon my skepticism, but why entertain such a “thought experiment” when the forced sterilizations and “contraceptive incentives” (read coercive family planning) that took place in the Global South at the hands of Western trained academics and physicians are well within the institutional and personal memory of many in the international family planning community? Population experts from that time still lament that the Programme of Action that came out of the 1994 Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt was “hijacked by feminists.” Yes it was, and as a consequence we have an international document adopted by 179 countries stating that, “The empowerment of women and improvement of their status are important ends in themselves and are essential for the achievement of sustainable development,” and that,  “Reproductive rights…rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so…free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”

These statements and the birth of the Reproductive Justice movement may be the most positive consequences ever to come out of a hijacking.  (more…)

At Comic Con this year, “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane revealed that Fox would not be airing an episode of the new season focused on abortion.  As previous references to abortion on the show have been in line with the taste and sophistication that we have come to expect from Family Guy (read: sarcasm), we probably aren’t missing much. However, the uproar that has been raised about Fox’s censorship has brought has called attention to the relative dearth of portrayals of abortion in the media. The website for a documentary called “The Abortion Diaries” has a by-no-means comprehensive list of choice stories in U.S. media.  Especially in recent years, it seems that a show will either have a character consider an abortion then back out at the last minute (sometimes with an accompanying miscarriage to avoid actually having a baby on the show), or they will have the abortion and have a tremendous amount of guilt over this procedure. In the most extreme example, Jack and Bobby had a character get an abortion, and promptly die in a car accident.

For one of the best representations of choice on television, however, prospective viewers should watch one of the first. Maude, a spinoff of Norman Lear’s All in the Family, was the first primetime TV show to have the main character choose to have an abortion. The episode Maude’s Dilemma (conveniently available online) illustrates what choice was like for women before 37 years of guilt were forced down our throats. Maude wants to make the decision that is best for her family and herself. They ultimately decide that they don’t want to be parents of a teenager when they turn 60.

When CBS broadcast the episode in 1972, two affiliates decided not to run the episode, and 32 were pressured to not air the rerun the following summer. There were also 24,000 protest letters mailed in response to the two airings.  But the network still decided to air the episode. Which leaves the question, 37 years later, why is the question being stifled?

-Jake Johnson

My support of the right of women to obtain abortions has always sprung from my belief that women (and people in general) should have the utmost control over what happens to their bodies. This belief has always made my stance on abortion easy to delineate: for me, no one should be able to control a woman’s body for the benefit of a potential human being who has not yet come into living being. However, I must admit that the issue of pre-implantation trait selection threw me for a loop. Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) already exists that allows us to screen for genetic diseases and even to choose the sex of an embryo before implantation in the uterus; it does not seem far-fetched to assume that we may soon have technology that will allow us to choose for other traits in our future children, such as height, skin color, or perhaps even sexual orientation. While many may say that technology will not be advanced enough to control for such traits until far into the future, it is still an interesting thought experiment to think about how far a woman’s right to choose extends; does the right to choose only encompass a woman’s right to determine if and when she has a child, or does it also encompass a woman’s right to choose, as much as is scientifically possible, what type of child she has? While selecting against embryos and fetuses that have major genetic disorders is relatively uncontested (but even here, there is no consensus), is it appropriate for women to be able to choose what non-essential traits their child has? If a woman really wants a light skinned, brown eyed, six-foot tall male child, and technology is available that would enable her to select for those traits, does supporting reproductive choice mean we must support her decision to have precisely that kind of child? There are so many arguments for and against this, and there is such potential for abuse of this technology, that I anticipate my ambivalent stance on this issue to continue for quite a while. 

-Tina Sinha