Reproductive Justice is about economic & political & educational & environmental equity
The right to safe and legal access to abortion care — to decide when and whether to add children to the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, life equation of Human vs. Already Precious Resources — is at the foundation of every other issue that impacts life in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
I walked the beloved beaches of my southwest Michigan hometown today, something I haven’t done in years. I prefer quiet stretches anchored in civilization. It reminds me of weekdays in late summer when the boats have quieted and Illinois schools are back in session, when once again the lapping fresh water and soft, smooth sand belongs to those of us who were lucky enough to grow up here. I like it when evidence of human existence is left behind. The kind that makes the world more beautiful: a circle of sand-blurred odd-sized rocks that formed the mote of a once existent castle, a cairn, a stack of gnarled driftwood collected and left behind by a toddler.
And I am lucky. Life looks pretty good for me, doesn’t it? I’m white, affluent (enough), I didn’t go to college but I benefited from an excellent public school education, and look at my beautiful kids and dogs and home and, and, and…. It wasn’t always this way. But my family’s ability to recover is absolutely tied to the opportunities we enjoy as White People, mostly floating somewhere in middle class America: to access the minimum of a free (and excellent) public school education, to get reliably hired for above minimum wage jobs, to own real estate. And businesses, too. Because we could get loans to buy houses in nice neighborhoods where property is valued and where those values rise.
My husband attended state college on a baseball scholarship and also received some academic funds, but didn’t finish. He is a ridiculous two or three credits away from having a degree. He has nationally recognized expertise in his field as well as countless certifications thanks mostly to good jobs that paid for the training. He started his career as a firefighter/ paramedic/ police officer (he was an Eagle Scout, too, y’all), and now he is a corporate security consultant who, among other things, helps schools and universities prevent workplace violence, including mass shooter devastation. After being a single mom for the first six years of my daughter’s life and raising her alone with no child support, it turns out I married well. But he was a single dad when we met, divorced and paying child support. We were basically two disasters limping along, bloodied and beaten by life, but together we’d figured out that we could conquer anything.
Us against them is really us — We The People, She The People, LGBT The People, Middle Class Families The People, ALLL The People — against the Big Corporate Interests embodied by our embarrassment of a president (Trump) and his obnoxious family and their like.
A woman’s right to safe and legal access to abortion care — to choose for herself and her future when, whether and with whom to have children — is at the foundation of every other issue progressives, liberals, moderates, and, in fact, 8 in 10 people across every demographic, including every faith, believe should be legal. I’m truth, it’s at the core of everything we experience in the world, from education (early, public, post-secondary, all of it), to family leave, to healthcare, to voting access, etc. — all the bottom line things of being able to participate equitably in our government and in our economy. Choice, you see, is the hot gooey center of economic and political power. But not everyone has access to choice, and so therefore, it is a deeply privileged word.
For a trans man who still has female reproductive organs and who is at increased risk of being raped, access to abortion care and birth control and STD testing, and cancer screening can be critical, and is often out of reach. Trans Black women are at the greatest risk of being raped and murdered. And they likely have among the most difficult times accessing healthcare in general, education, voting, particularly where there are voter I.D. and exact match laws, housing, jobs, everything —perhaps with hijab-wearing Muslim women and their families, AAPI women and their families, Black women and their families…you get the idea — because they are the most likely to be targeted, vilified, misunderstood and thus discriminated against by even some of the ‘nicest’ people. LGBTQ+folks are often left out of protected classes and in many states can still be denied housing and jobs because of who they are and who they love. Indigenous women are at dramatic risk of disappearing off the face of the earth entirely, as if they never lived at all, like a whisper in an empty room. Latinx women (and men and children) are at increased risk of labor trafficking. Black women are three to four times more likely than their white counterparts to die in childbirth, even if they are well educated. Basically if you add “of Color” to any individual who already experiences some layer of oppression, including disability — just being women, for instance — or discrimination or struggles to access of any kind, you’re turning up those difficulties, those barriers, several degrees.
All of which is to acknowledge that, comparatively, I had it pretty easy. Because if the extreme segregation that shapes Michigan, just over the bridge from my house live people who, if they were seen walking the beach near where I live, they’d likely be hassled by a Pemit Patty, asked what they are doing there, have the police called on them.
I come at the issue of reproductive freedom and justice having been a young single mom and experiencing firsthand how our economy is set up to fail families of all kinds. I experienced poverty viscerally, as any single mom does, probably because I felt like I alone was failing my daughter. Every day the electricity was shut off. Every day I had to take back bottles and cans from my dad’s office to buy bread and milk and eggs to feed my daughter. Every day I had to raid his change jar to wash our clothes (which was actually the reason he had change jars). As I’ve written before, in those moments, I was still privileged because I wasn’t digging those bottles and cans out of a trash can in an alley after dark, or after a lakeside small town festival or hanging out in parking lots begging coins off of repulsed or pitying or frightened restaurant patrons. Too few are just plain kind. Though I likely would have if it had been necessary (I’d have done just about anything to avoid asking for help), and I have UNlearned to judge those who must. Alas, I had a dad with an office with bottles and cans that he didn’t need to take back for their deposit to feed himself.
I also understand this issue as a mature, married mom who watched my husband get downsized from two jobs, battle depression, and I believe he was suicidal for a period of time while we were both jobless, for all the same reasons. My husband felt like he alone was failing our family because the system fails all of us. And men are set up to carry the world on their shoulders, like an Ikea house where you just get the second wall standing up straight and the first wall caves in. Credit for that analogy goes to friend and mentor Ann Imig in reference to being national director and founder of the multi-city live storytelling show, Listen to Your Mother for ten years, the results of which produced over five hundred shows and over two thousand videos depticting the variety of experiences of motherhood, and thus, familyhood.
Not to mention that motherhood in the best of circumstances is just hard sometimes (all the time), yo?
At 30 years old, I found myself dropped rather suddenly into motherhood — wide awake and sober as fuck — while working, going to grad school, and attempting to parent. I began searching for other mothers who felt like I did: Deeply grateful while also occasionally wanting to launch themselves into oncoming traffic. Deeply connected and devoted to their children while also profoundly bored, and erased in the monotony and mind-numbing reality of kid-rearing. — Janelle Hanchett
The second time my husband was downsized, we had college-aged daughters who had to sink or swim on their own, which resulted in burdensome student loans. But they were also white, attractive, thin, recipients of the same excellent public school education my parents and I enjoyed, and therefore they, too, benefited from being highly employable. Even if it was at minimum wage in the service industry, they were also very tip-able, whereas some of their peers — like those in the LGBTQ+ community, or in the Muslim community, or Black or Hispanic or disabled — who get shorted and stiffed regularly, even though they are working just as hard or harder. What our girls quite likely experienced in the service industry in Michigan are economic downturns in our seasonal economy, and harassment, sexual and otherwise, by customers as well as coworkers and supervisors. Our girls benefited, however, from having parents who could speak English and communicate effectively and who were aware of how the world works and able to help them complete FAFSA forms and access the assistance that was available to them. None of which means that they didn’t struggle, too. Take foster kids though, who bounce from home to home, many of whom end up on the streets. How are they supposed to complete the forms and documents necessary to obtain student loans, or even believe that college is an option for them, or feed themselves and go to school. Now imagine if they had a child to care for.
It’s all well and good — and, of course, relevant if a pregnant individual decides it is so — to acknowledge the existence of a mass of cells, but skipping a meal or several so that your child can eat, or watering down a bottle because you don’t have two cents to rub together, let alone fifteen dollars for a sixteen pack of infant formula because your milk dried up because you weren’t getting enough nutrition, or you couldn’t take breaks from waiting tables to pump at work, or because you were binding your breasts because you couldn’t afford top surgery, those realities can no longer be erased. Or maybe you couldn’t work at all because you didn’t have daycare to go to a job interview, let alone to go to a job because your abusive husband doesn’t want you to have one and won’t ‘watch’ the baby, let alone the other three kids under five you already have together because you can’t afford or access birth control because you don’t have insurance or a doctor or a Planned Parenthood clinic near enough so that you could get birth control for free if only you had more than one car because the abusive husband or boyfriend likes you pregnant and therefore dependent on him for everything, otherwise what else would he have to punch so he can feel like a man because that’s what he learned by watching the never-ending cycle of abuse and poverty and lack of education or jobs in his family growing up in Appalachia where the coal industry dried up long ago and no system or person in charge saw fit to make sure people were taken care of.
Flash forward to my early fifties and I’m a predictably overweight two-time sexual assault survivor. If I were to get pregnant now, I would be at increased risk of preeclampsia and a host of other complications. I’m mothering four children, two of whom I didn’t give birth to (stepdaughter and nephew). At what point is my ‘mom card’ full enough that I get to choose for myself whether or not (NOT!) I want more kids or whether I want to or would survive putting my body through a pregnancy? With maternal death and infant mortality rates that are RISING in the richest country in the world because healthcare has become more impersonal and cookie-cutter, and resources stretched thinner because of anti-abortion legislation and an aging population; versus what we need, which is more specialized and better care that is more accessible. Of the one in four women who will access abortion care in their lifetime, 56% are already mothers. We know what’s at stake. We know what our resources — including mental and emotional ones — can support.
Pain is pain. And there is no pain worse than not being able to care for your children in the most basic of ways; to take them to the beach. And build a castle made of sand. Only to be stuck in a Purgatory of watching the water wash it away again and again and again.
