I have been interning at LSRJ for over a month now, and it has been a great learning experience, even though much of what I have learned makes me simultaneously sick to my stomach and incredulous that such egregious violations of human rights can still go on in this day and age. I attended LSRJ’s first Summer Networking Lunch last week at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), a legal services and advocacy organization that, as the name implies, works with incarcerated parents, with an emphasis on prisoners from Communities of Color and low-income communities. Most of us are aware that in the U.S., incarceration disproportionately impacts People of Color, the poor, and other marginalized populations. However, it was not until this Networking Lunch that I began to more fully realize that the harms done by incarceration unjustly impacts, not just the individuals who are imprisoned - many of whom are sentenced for non-violent drug offenses - but also their families and communities. Those sentenced to prison are taken well outside of their communities – presumably to take them away from the “influences” that made them turn to crime in the first place – where they are separated from their loved ones and are unable to maintain ties to their community that, if preserved, would perhaps make reintegration into society much more successful. This is especially hard for prisoners with children; even though a great many of those incarcerated are imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses, incarcerated parents are regularly disallowed from even basic physical contact with their children for more than a year. They also have very little time to even see their children, as those looking after their kids must take time off of work and expend resources they probably don’t have to bring the children to the prison, where there is no real place for kids to be comfortably. Families, and therefore the community at large, are further ripped apart if family members of prisoners (often grandparents of those incarcerated) who are perfectly able and willing to take care of these kids are disallowed from doing so because of laws that restrict the placement of children with ex-felons – even if the felonies were for crimes completely unrelated to children and were non-violent and occurred many years ago. Though it might seem reasonable at first to disallow placement of children with felons, in many cases, it seems that placing children with family members who love them and their incarcerated parents, who will work to keep the family together and who are invested in the success of these kids, is much better than taking children completely out of their community and placing them in homes at great distance from all of their social ties, and often into communities that in no way resemble the ones from which they came. In this way, many communities not only lose members due to incarceration, but also lose a lot of bright kids due to the repercussions of the incarceration of their parents – and this loss of human capital is often permanent.

-Tina Sinha

I’m short on time this week, so here’s a round-up of links, including follow-ups on some of the stories I talked about in my last post.

Outlaw Midwives, a Manifesta.

Mostly pregnant middle and upper class educated white women have the economic and racial privilege and choices to have a ‘natural/normal’ birth. These women, a small segment of the global birthing world, create their natural experiences by exoticising, fetishizing, imitating and co-opting the practices and images of 3rd world brown women childbearing cultures. Natural/normal concept is really code for ‘preferred’, it is the elite white women who have the preferred childbirth and normal body. Their body, lifestyle, childbearing, mothering, and inevitably, their children set the standard through their privilege and access for what is normal and natural.

It’s not about ‘natural’ birth, vs. medical interventions vs. Cesarean. It is about empowerment.

At Salon: Bristol Palin stammers the truth.

Bristol told Van Susteren that telling her parents she was pregnant “was, like, harder than labor,” and described sitting on the couch with Johnston and a best friend there for support, so petrified about making her announcement that she was “just sick to my stomach,” so much so that finally, her best friend had to blurt it out for her. Bristol continued, “I don’t even remember it, because it was just like something I don’t want to remember.”

Amanda Palmer talks more about her controversial song, “Oasis”, and her personal experience of abortion.

I would have to say the worst part about getting an abortion wasn’t the surgery itself, it was having to deal with people screaming at me outside of the clinic, and literally shoving up against me, and shoving pictures of mutilated fetuses in my face. I think, if anything else, when it comes down to it, writing that song was my way of processing that kind of assault, and just making it into a joke, which is how I process it, and that’s got to be fair.

More on Nadya Suleman and the “octuplet debate”:

From RH Reality Check: Missing the Point on Large Families– “Instead of focusing on those who make questionable choices, why not focus on those who have no choice?”

From Lisa at My Ecdysis: Mother of Fourteen, Nadya Suleman– “What I find interesting, though, is that throughout history and the world, there are women exactly like Suleman who raise their multitude of children with much less media and attention than Nadya Suleman. There are women who are neither scorned or criticized for the number of children they have. They are ignored. The reaction our country has had to Nadya Suleman confounds me.”

From Alas, a Blog: Nadya Suleman Receives Death Threats and Return of the Revenge of the Daughter of the Welfare Queen.

Julie writes: this is about “the worship of motherhood and the hatred of mothers.” And I don’t think you can have one without the other.

Nojojo writes: I can’t help wondering how much of the rage I’m seeing — not merely outrage, but murderous incandescent fury — is because the Welfare Queen specter has been raised in Americans’ minds, perhaps conflated in some weird-ass way with The Arab Threat and maybe even The Brown Conspiracy To Outbreed White People? (Suleman’s fertility doctor appears to be Indian, see. We’re all in on it!)

This issue, by the way, is something I didn’t talk about in my last post, and should have–the fact that Nadya Suleman is a woman of color. I think it has everything to do with the way people have responded to this story.

It’s hard to believe it’s the last day of my internship with LSRJ. This summer has been fabulous. I’ve learned so much and gotten to participate in some fun events, like testifying before the California Commission on the Status of Women at their public hearings. We’ve had great guests for our Networking Lunches and heard about a wide range of issues–from transgender rights to the latest anti-choice proposition in California to young women’s activism and perspective on RJ issues.

My internship project paired me with Generations Ahead, a brand new organization that focuses on assisted reproductive technology and its implications for reproductive justice. I learned a lot about policy work and about some cutting-edge issues and got to know the GA staff. Today when I stopped by to say goodbye I learned that GA is guest blogging at RaceWire right now, so I’m going to use this space to do a little cross-pollination: Truc Thanh Nguyen, Project Director of Racial Justice and Human Rights, writes about the relevance of reproductive technologies to social justice movements.

And while you’re exploring the web beyond Repo Repro, check out the Generations Ahead website to find out more on what they’re about. This org is gearing up to do some great and necessary work in a relatively unexplored area of reproductive justice. I certainly hadn’t fully considered the impact of reproductive technologies before I started my work with them. My perceptions have definitely been widened on these issues.

I should also note that it’s International Blog Against Racism Week. As it happens, I did that here. But don’t let the fact that IBARW only officially lasts until tomorrow stop you if you haven’t had time to post on your own blog this week. Every week should be a week to speak out against racism and injustice.

It’s been fun! Thanks to everyone who read and everyone who commented on my posts. Blogging here has been an unexpected bonus in a summer of exciting RJ work.

–Erin Simonitch

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 give 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…)

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. 

Editors’ Note: Today we’ve got a very special guest post from Kara Loewentheil, the president of the LSRJ board and a 3L at Harvard Law School. Kara brought this story to my attention and I suggested she write about it, since I couldn’t think out of fear that my head might explode. Luckily, Kara was able to keep it together. Here she is:
Although the conversation in question took place over the summer, it is only now making its way through the blogosphere: a taped recording of a phone call in which an anti-choice organization, posing as a racist prospective donor, offers a donation to Planned Parenthood of Idaho if they will use the money specifically to perform abortions on African-American women because, the fake “donor” said, “the less black kids out there the better.” It’s hard to even know where to start with how disturbing this story is, on multiple levels. First, of course, there is the fact that anti-choice organizations are using their time and money to try and trick reproductive health care providers into saying or doing something that can be used to stir up negative publicity. It’s this kind of duplicitous behavior aimed at not only tarnishing the reproductive justice movement but diverting its resources away from patient care and into defensive action and media response that many reproductive justice activists find incredibly frustrating.

But more important, of course, is Planned Parenthood of Idaho’s reaction to the fake donation offer. The charge of racism is particularly weighted in the reproductive health care and reproductive justice movements. While reproductive justice itself is a movement that was born out of the experiences of women of color in particular, the mainstream reproductive health and rights communities have often unfortunately been out of touch with the needs of marginalized populations, particularly poor women of color. The history of experimentation on the bodies of poor women of color in this country has given rise to a healthy skepticism about the ways that the mainstream medical community behaves in treating the reproductive health needs of women from these communities. It’s thus clear that even assuming the best of intentions, reproductive health care providers must go above and beyond in distancing themselves from this legacy.

Planned Parenthood of Idaho apologized for the caller’s responses and called her approach “a serious mistake.” Bloggers and activists have disagreed on how to interpret the tape - whether the Planned Parenthood employee was happy and eager to accept the donation, whether she was confused and flustered, etc. It’s impossible for us to know. You can hear the tape recording of the phone call here and read the transcript here, and see what you think for yourself.

Hopefully we can all at least agree not only that reproductive health care providers should be very clear about their rejection of such offers, and that we would all be better off if the anti-choice organizations making these calls would put their time, money, and volunteer energy into doing something that actually improved reproductive health care for women and their families.