Reproductive Justice

Reproductive Justice

Reproductive Justice is a term that was used by women of color in 1994 and is defined ideally by women’s complete autonomy of their own bodies. In Kimala Price’s article What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm she further specifies that reproductive justice would further be defined by including women’s and girls’ complete control of their physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being. Reproductive justice incorporates the use of human rights as well as social justice to maintain a grip and a prominent voice on issues such as “poverty, economic injustice, welfare reform, housing, prisoners’ rights, environmental justice, immigration policy, drug policies, and violence.” (Price 2010, 43). There are three main goals for reproductive justice today. Those goals are having the right to have an abortion, having the right to have children, and having the right to parent those children. Once these rights are fully gained, women will be able to live their lives without being harassed or coerced into doing one thing over the other.

This is an important task because, as it stands, women’s bodies are the most understudied bodies in medicine. This does not seem to make sense given that we would not be able to continue the human race without female-aligned bodies. One would think that there would be more study done on women and the preservations of their bodies. Instead, they are constantly being controlled and given obstacles to overcome. In terms of sex, they are the ones given birth control in the form of shots, pills, and Intrauterine Devices (IUDs). Even though eggs are already limited as is, they stress that women take preventative measures that could cause potential long-term harm to their bodies. There are millions of sperm easily made, yet they haven’t made anything as elaborate as birth control pills for men. Instead the birth control methods for men are as follows: “condoms, withdrawal or pulling out, outercourse, and vasectomy.” (Birth Control for Men 2014). The only one of those contraceptive options that actually affects the male aligned body is the vasectomy. The rest of them are completely dependent on the self-control of the male-aligned body. However, this does not change the fact that these options do not pose a threat to the hormones in the male’s body or the male’s body in general, while birth control for women can cause long-lasting side-effects after stopping usage of it. The surgery for that is very brief and the recovery is just as easy. Whereas the hysterectomy has a recovery time of 2 months and the recovery time for a vasectomy is a week at most. There are many different ways for the female body to be disrupted and so few contraceptive methods to disrupt the male body or even restrain the male body as heavily as they do the female bodies.

 There are institutions built solely for the purpose of deterring women from getting abortions and they willfully give them tests and erroneous information that, ultimately, coerce them into believing that they don’t want the abortions even if it would be detrimental to their health or economic status. They sometimes persuade the mothers to listen to the unborn child’s heartbeat so that they can feel some sort of attachment to the child and/or guilt trip the mothers into not wanting the abortion. This is a system set up to keep girls and women from having the complete autonomy of their bodies for which reproductive justice stands.

This could be looked at through a lens of historical trauma for women of color. When slavery was rampant in the U.S., it was very much a status that was inherited through the mother. Meaning that if the mother got pregnant and had children, her children would be born into slavery. This was a self-sustaining system and there was no way around it since women and girls are the sole beings that can bring forth more children.  The mothers were not entitled to the children they bore. Most of the time the slaves would be raped and forced to carry and have the children of their masters so that the masters could increase their plantation’s capital. This was because slaves were viewed as commodities and not as humans. The more slaves a slaveholder had the higher his plantation’s net worth. Slaves were merely property that could produce and take care of more property in their slave owners’ eyes. With this history in play and the acts of New Jim Crow laws always evolving, women of color are kept at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are influenced to have more children or prevented from getting the tools that they need to prevent pregnancies from happening. The New Jim Crow laws keep people of color poor in multiple ways. One method is having many barriers in the mothers’ way of getting abortions and preventative birth control. Another way is by making laws that largely affect impoverished black communities by incarcerating the male in the relationship who is stereotypically the only main source of income in the household. If the main money maker is taken from the home and the mother is left at home without healthcare access, sufficient money, or adequate food there are two possible outcomes: If pregnant, the baby will be malnourished and both the mother and child will die; if post-delivery, the baby becomes a financial detriment and the mother can no longer afford the baby. It will only further put the mother into poverty and she would also likely die and/or be in debt after the childbirth. Reproductive Justice is working to make these things less likely to occur. Even though the main focus of Reproductive Justice is on women of color and their reproductive rights, they also work with other human rights such as LGBTQIA+ rights, violence against women, environmental rights, and anti-poverty policies. (Price 2006, 49).

An organization that is currently a large contributor in Reproductive Justice now is Sister Song. Sister Song believes that Reproductive Justice isn’t just about abortion, it is “about access” and “not choice”, and “is a human right” (Sister Song 2017). Sister Song says, “Mainstream movements have focused on keeping abortion legal as an individual choice. That is necessary, but not enough. Even when abortion is legal, many women of color cannot afford it, or cannot travel hundreds of miles to the nearest clinic. There is no choice when there is no access.” This is one of the main points of Reproductive Justice. It can not be made widely recognized if the access aspect is not a centralized point that takes place. Consequently, it is about access and without access there is no choice, which is just another form of enslavement that can not be easily shed. Sister Song was founded in 1997, three years after the term Reproductive Justice was coined. Their headquarters is located in Atlanta, Georgia and they have several other sites all over the U.S.

Reproductive Justice is relatively new and still trying to gain upward mobility within society. This is explained in the book Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice by Jael Silliman. “Most of the reproductive health organizing done by women of color in the United States has been undocumented, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged.” (Jael Silliman et al., Undivided Rights, 7). The underrepresentation of women of color is not a new coincidence it is something that is reinforced and perpetuated by a white America. Systemic racism and Hypermasculinity make the credibility of the movement hard to promote; however, it is nothing that can be easily taken lightly. History shows that the more white people oppressed and placed restrictions on communities of color, especially black ones, they always pushed back and worked on making their voices heard so that progress could be made. This made it so that they could get closer to the rights and equalities that they knew they deserved.

References

Price, Kimala. 2010. “What is Reproductive Justice?: How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 42-65. Accessed March 23rd, 2017. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/410195/pdf.

Reproductive Health Access Project. “Birth Control for Men.” Last modified February 1, 2014.

http://www.reproductiveaccess.org/resource/birth-control-men/?gclid=COzYtIu4p9MCFUYvgQod90cBsA.

Silliman, Jael, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. 2016. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice. Haymarket Books. Online edition. https://books.google.com/books?id=rDqHDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Sister Song: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. “Reproductive Justice.” http://sistersong.net/reproductive-justice/. Accessed July 19, 2017.

Siren Gatlin