I have been invested in reproductive rights for some years
now, especially since I’ve come to identify as a feminist. I don’t know if we
all went through a “I’m a liberal, but I don’t understand how you could kill
babies?” phase, but I certainly did. I’m lucky to come from a very liberal
family, however, (My mom was attending pro-abortion rallies in the 80’s!) and I
got over it. My sister interned at a Planned Parenthood during her college
career, I got a Tumblr, I figured out reproductive rights from a very broad
standpoint fairly early in my feminist awakening. College has only helped me
expand my feminist understanding.
I have been to the national CLPP conference twice, and hope to continue going, with Allegheny College’s
Reproductive Health Coalition (ReProCo). CLPP, short for Civil Liberties and
Public Policies, is an organization out of Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts. CLPP aims to “[build] the movement for reproductive freedom”,
and its conference each year spans my reproductive issues, “from abortion
rights to social justice”. The amount I have learned about reproductive justice
from these conferences is staggering. I’ve not only expanded my knowledge of
abortion, but I’ve heard from and grown more accepting of alternative and/or
socially unacceptable motherhood practices and realities.
CLPP opened
my eyes to the injustices women face in
this country in regards to reproductive freedom. The right to abortion is
only the beginning of this struggle. The rights of incarcerated mothers, of sex
workers, and of women of color to their children and to their safety are
threatened and circumvented every day. The most powerful moment of the
conference for me is always the abortion speak out, where people who have personally
had abortions get up in front of a huge number of people at the conference and
tell their story. People of all ages (one woman who told us her story had had an
abortion before it was legal!), races, economic classes, disabilities, and
gender identities tell their experiences with the unjust abortion system in
this country. It’s one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen.
The least
talked about subject in relation to pregnancy in this country, around the
world, is men who are able to get pregnant. This group is primarily made up of
AFAB (assigned female at birth) trans people, but I can only assume it includes
a subsection of intersex individuals that is not talked about often. Susan
Bordo doesn’t even bring up the idea of the pregnant man, in fact several
statements she makes “The current battle over reproductive control emerges as
an assault on the personhood of women”
(Bordo 72) (italics included in original) directly dispute the existence of
male-identifying people who have uteruses and are able to get pregnant.
The
pregnant man is more common than you would think, given the uproar about Thomas
Beatie in 2007 and beyond. Though he is the most prominent man who has given
birth in the media, this article follows a study
of 41 trans men who have given birth. It shows that men who get pregnant face
not only public ridicule, but a lack of accessible medical care because of
ignorance and bigotry. When talking about reproductive rights, we always get
caught in the trap of saying “women”, but reproductive rights are vital for
these trans men as well. As the NPR article says, “building rapport with patients anywhere along that spectrum
begins with the simplest step: with the physician finding out which pronoun the
patient prefers, and using it.”
Reproductive rights is often interpreted
as the right to have a safe, affordable, accessible abortion. Obviously, this
should be available to anyone who needs it, but reproductive rights goes beyond
that. Bordo tells us how involuntary sterilization is used to keep “undesirables”
from having children that may also have these undesirable traits. Involuntary sterilization
was used primarily against people with disabilities until the 19030’s, when it
started to be used as a weapon against poor women, “to the prevention of
parenthood in those individuals deemed unable to care adequately for their children” (Bordo 76). This is incredibly
problematic thinking for a number of reasons.
Who decides, who deems, who is
unable to care for their children? A single mother with two jobs can raise a
child just as well as a comfortably middle class woman who can stay at home.
This may require extra support from the community and possibly from the
government, but who’s to say that that child is any less worthy to eat and to
exist than the comfortably middle class child? Women on welfare should have exactly
the same reproductive rights as other women. But in this country, “the pregnant,
poor woman (especially if she is of non-European descent) comes as close as a
human being can get to being regarded, medically and legally, as ‘mere body’”
(Bordo 76).
Women who are pregnant don’t need to
be poor, however, to be reduced to incubators for babies. Bordo brings up many
concerns about women being forced to bring children to term against their will,
or when they can’t consent to it. A C-section was forced on a woman who was
terminally ill, killing both her and her baby. (Bordo 77) C-sections have been
forced on women despite their religious objections (Bordo 78), something we
hold so dear in this country that we let children die at the hands of their
religious parents, but god forbid the child should not be born at all. “The pregnant
woman is supposed to efface her own
subjectivity, if need be” (Bordo 79).
Getting pregnant is seen as a
choice, and along with this choice is the assumption that the pregnant person
would want anything for their child
to be born, even if it meant their own health, or even life. This is absolutely
true for some women, and I acknowledge that. But for somebody’s right to their
own body to be taken away as soon as they get pregnant (or two weeks before she’s
pregnant, if you can believe some conservatives) is incomprehensible to me. Women
and people with uteruses should always have the final say when it comes to
their bodies. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch.
Citations
Bordo, Susan. “Are Mothers Persons?”. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California
Press (1993). pp. 71-97. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment