WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5976 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-09-11 09:00:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-09-11 09:00:00 [post_content] =>Spoiler alert: It's not that straightforward.
I have a confession to make: Over the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly difficult for me to understand why queer people raised in Christianity would want to remain practicing Christians as adults. This opinion is largely born of my own experience, and informed by the experience of countless others who have also had to overcome the self-hatred inflicted on them by anti-LGBTQ theology. I mean, why would I want to be part of a “big tent” religious affiliation in which a majority of my erstwhile coreligionists believe my very existence is sinful, including some—surely a larger proportion than most respectable Christians would like to admit—who think I deserve to be put to death simply for existing? As I see it, were I to continue to claim Christianity today, I would be submitting to the perpetual framing of my queer existence as a theological problem to be solved. And even if I were convinced that adopting “affirming” theology would solve that problem in my favor, the effort feels unnecessarily exhausting in the face of another option: simply refusing to defend my life in theological terms at all. No theology, no problem.
The mainstream punditocracy (both conservative and liberal) doesn’t see it that way, of course—and lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how profoundly Christian privilege shapes our national discourse on the intersections of queerness, religion, and secularism. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how legacy media outlets take it for granted that religion, and especially Christianity, is a good thing, full stop, for both individuals and for society, a position that condescendingly implies that the nonreligious just don’t know what’s good for us. I’ve also wondered how this conversation might change, and how we all might benefit, if we could open it up to the many queer people directly affected by but largely excluded from taking part in it.
Despite my own stance on religion, I know many LGBTQ Christians feel empowered by reclaiming their faith from bigots, making it into something loving and inclusive and fabulous. Some of them still believe in miracles and a literal resurrection, and, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know that humans really choose whether or not we believe in the things that are at the core of our identities. As someone committed to embracing pluralism as essential to democracy, I respect queer Christians and believe we can hold space for each other. We are as we are: Each of us is individually complicated, and those of us who have left high-control Christian backgrounds are not all going to land in the same place.
The premise that religion is unequivocally good for all of us, however, is one I’ve long been skeptical of. It also, frankly, offends me—because it suggests that secular Americans, including the many queer people who have consciously disaffiliated from religion for very good reasons, are to blame for any suffering or unhappiness in our lives, when this distress is in fact largely caused by stigma, unequal treatment, and, often, rejection by our religious families when we choose to live as our authentic selves.
The doyens of the punditocracy insist that people have “metaphysical needs”; that dangerous political extremism will inevitably fill the void for those without religion (which makes American polarization at least partly the fault of us secularists); and that religion is necessary for community, social support, and good mental health—all of which, by their logic, secular people must lack. We’re expected to sit back and take it when The Atlantic and The New York Times tell us, if not exactly in so many words, that they know better than we do what we need to thrive. That the actual people who embody America’s rapid secularizing trend don’t deserve a say in how the story of American secularization is told, because we’re basically petulant children refusing to eat our vegetables.
But is any of this conventional wisdom based in truth? (Spoiler alert: It’s not.) And if we could sweep aside the dogma and the taboos in order to have a more nuanced discussion of American religion and secularism, what might both queer Christianity and queer secularism have to teach us all?
As for queer Christianity, it’s currently having a moment. A few weeks ago, Christian singer-songwriter and drag queen Flamy Grant topped the iTunes Christian music chart, staying at number one for nine days—the first time a drag queen had ever achieved the feat. Although her star was already rising, Flamy Grant’s meteoric leap to the number one spot was fueled in part by a hateful, viral tweet from charismatic evangelical Sean Feucht, best known for the massive anti-mask in-person worship concerts he held in various American cities during the COVID-19 pandemic—often without obtaining the necessary permits. His hateful rhetoric wasn’t surprising. Two years ago here in Portland, Oregon, Feucht used street brawlers, including Proud Boys, as his security detail—the kinds of gun-fetishizing Christian nationalist thugs who in recent years have taken to using intimidation and harassment in all-too-often successful attempts to shut down LGBTQ events and silence queer folks and our allies.
For anyone looking for evidence that Christianity and LGBTQ people are at odds with one another, Feucht provides a data point. But Grant’s spectacular popularity in turn offers a counterpoint: Clearly, unabashedly queer Christian art resonates profoundly with millions of Americans. The phenomenon reminds me of the time I observed a Jesus cosplayer at Orlando’s 2017 Pride festival giving out hugs to attendees, at least one of whom was moved to tears. Seeing that, you couldn’t help but feel something positive and powerful, whether you yourself believe in the ostensibly resurrected Jesus or not.
Even so, it has long been clear that American agnostics, atheists, and humanists trend disproportionately queer for what seem to me like obvious reasons—quite a few of us come from Christian backgrounds, and Christianity has typically not been kind to us. Although it did not use a nationally representative sample, American Atheists’ 2019 Secular Survey found that a striking 23% of its 33,897 respondents, drawn primarily from members of secular advocacy organizations, identified as LGBTQ. According to Gallup, less than a third as many Americans (7.2%) identify as LGBTQ overall.
But what about religious LGBTQ people? Earlier this year, the researchers Kelsy Burke, Andrew Flores, Suzanna Krivulskaya, and Tyler Lefevor attempted to answer this question, crafting a survey that asked members of the LGBTQ community (though also not a nationally representative sample) about their religious affiliation, reporting on their findings and conclusions for Religion News Service (RNS). According to the researchers, 36% of respondents reported a religious affiliation, a finding they framed—oddly, to my mind—as indicating that queer Americans are more religious than we might expect, given an ostensibly prevailing media narrative, fueled by Supreme Court decisions in favor of “religious freedom,” that queerness and faith are inherently at odds.
But this perception of American media outlets is in itself biased—and demonstrably false, as I’ve attempted to illustrate above. Our legacy media constantly sings the praises of religion, and the Flamy Grant phenomenon has only further proven that religion journalists are more than ready to celebrate queer Christianity, too. Indeed, in their rhetorical attempt to “save” queer religiosity by emphasizing how “high” 36% is, it seems to me that Burke, et al. were participating in what I consider the quintessential religion of America’s public sphere: faith in faith itself.
A hint of this pro-faith bias shows through in the way that the researchers summarized the findings of a separate study, in the same story, about religious affiliation and mental health outcomes among sexual minorities. “Although faith and participation in religion have been clearly linked to better health in heterosexual people,” they tell us, “these effects are less strong for LGBTQ+ people.” However, what the study they link to, a meta-analysis, actually says is this: “The relationship between R/S and health disappears or becomes negative when participants are sampled from sexual minority venues (e.g., bars/clubs; r = .01).” That’s social scientist speak for, “Religion and spirituality has either no impact or a negative impact on queer folks’ mental health when a study’s sample is drawn from queer community spaces.” This is clearly not the same as a “less strong” positive effect on mental health outcomes—in fact, this finding suggests that what really matters is community and social support, and that in at least some cases queer people are actually better off finding that outside of church than inside it.
With that in mind, I turned to Joshua Grubbs, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico and a fellow exvangelical whose expertise includes the relationship of religion to mental health, for an assessment of the state of the field. “Broadly speaking, religion provides two major positives for wellbeing: purpose/meaning-making and community,” Grubbs told me. But religion doesn’t provide that for all of us. If a person’s “religious affiliation is causing feelings of purposelessness, lack of meaning, or lack of community/belonging,” Grubbs explained, “it’s likely that the religious affiliation is causing harm to mental health.” He added, “In premise, if people are actively involved in community outside of religion and if they are able to find purpose/meaning in other things, they are quite likely to do just as well without religion as they would with it.” Unfortunately, as Grubbs noted in our email exchange, this is often difficult (but not impossible) to do in the United States.
To me, one way we can begin to address the media bias is obvious: Both religious and nonreligious queer folks should have and deserve representation in our national discussion of religion, secularization, and American society. They also both deserve to have their choices to be religious or secular respected. As for the RNS report, despite its shortcomings, I applaud the authors for undertaking original research on the relationship of LGBTQ Americans to religion. More of that should be done. But while data is important, so are our actual voices: Crucially, the report contains no qualitative data or quotations from members of the LGBTQ community, represented only as statistics.
Like the American religiously unaffiliated generally, the queer unaffiliated are particularly underrepresented in a public sphere being gatekept by the priests of the Great American Faith in Faith. The fact is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to making meaning as a human. We do not all have “metaphysical needs.” We have human needs, needs to belong and be supported, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, to find meaning in our lives—and while religion provides that for some of us, for others it is downright toxic. What might a more robust, nuanced, inclusive conversation about religion, secularism, queerness, and society look like? I think it would benefit us all to find out by bringing more secular Americans, and more queer Americans, whether secular or religious, into the elite public sphere to challenge the punditocracy’s demonstrably false idea of religion being a universal path to wellbeing and happiness.
[post_title] => Are Religious or Secular LGBTQ+ People Inherently Happier? [post_excerpt] => Spoiler alert: It's not that straightforward. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => religious-secular-lgbtq-queer-people-happiness-christianity-religion [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5976 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )
Identity
- Reproductive Health - deals with delivery of services
- Reproductive Rights - addresses legal issues
- Reproductive Justice - focuses on movement building
Reproductive justice goes beyond efforts to safeguard abortion rights. It is not solely dependent on courts, political parties, or sympathetic politicians and physicians. It’s about empowering women and girls to make decisions not just about a particular pregnancy but throughout their entire reproductive lives. Reproductive justice can only be achieved when all women have not just the same rights on paper, but the power, freedom, and resources necessary to exercise them.
What are the principles of reproductive justice?
Reproductive justice is a broad concept, and as such it touches on a wide range of issues. The list below is not comprehensive—however, it does provide a useful framework for understanding just how multifaceted the fight for reproductive justice can be:
- The right to remain child-free
- The right to end one or multiple pregnancies
- The right to free health care, including abortion
- Easy access to every kind of health care, including abortion and other reproductive services
- The right to raise as many children as one wants
- The right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment
- The right of every child to a safe and healthy home
- The right to support a family
- The right of all mothers, including those charged with and convicted of crimes, to see and care for their children
- The right of pregnant women and mothers in prisons and jails to be treated in accordance with international human rights law
- The right to nonjudgmental and medically sound health care, including abortion, prenatal care, and care for new parents and newborns
- The right to create a birth plan honored by all health care providers assisting in a birth
- Respect and support for essential care work performed inside and outside of the home
- Freedom from food deserts, contaminated water, and state violence
- Freedom from prosecution for struggling with drug addiction while pregnant
- Freedom from forced or coerced sterilization
- Freedom from forced or coerced abortion
- Freedom from shame and stigma
Who coined the term ‘reproductive justice’?
After organizing an informal Black Women’s Caucus at a national pro-choice conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in Chicago in 1994, a group of Black women social justice advocates came up with the term and defined the framework. They recognized that the mainstream feminist movement of the time, which was led by and represented the interests of middle- and upper-class white women, was not familiar with or equipped to meet the needs of women of color, trans people, and other marginalized women.
These women, who called themselves the “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice,” argued for a new and broader conception of reproductive freedom rooted in internationally recognized human rights standards developed by the United Nations. Advocates of reproductive justice seek to unite the struggle for reproductive rights with the fight for social justice. The women who coined the phrase published a full-page statement with over 800 signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call to announce the birth of a new movement.
When did the reproductive justice movement start?
Though many of the ideas behind it have existed in some form for decades, it officially began in 1994, when a group of Black reproductive rights advocates who participated in a number of national conferences in the U.S. and the International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, gathered in Chicago to pioneer a new reproductive rights framework. They hoped that framing these rights as a question of “justice” would better address both the full spectrum of women’s reproductive rights and the particular experiences and concerns of Black and/or low-income women. They shared frustrations about the status of Black women’s reproductive health around the globe and the limits of a pro-choice movement rooted in narrow notions of privacy. And they urged the larger movement to contextualize abortion care as one crucial aspect of a broader spectrum of human rights, including bodily autonomy and the full range of reproductive decision-making.
Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. “In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda,” which employs a reproductive justice framework, focuses on three key policy areas: abortion rights and access, contraceptive equity, and comprehensive sex education.
How does reproductive justice relate to intersectionality?
The concept of reproductive justice is an outgrowth of intersectionality, which is itself related to the original meaning of identity politics as defined by the Black socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective. Members of the Collective believed their identities and the various forms of oppression they experienced as members of different but overlapping groups—Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and working-class people—uniquely suited them to fight these oppressions.
Intersectionality means that all forms of oppression are interconnected, and all people experience oppression and discrimination differently as a result of their particular identities. As the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” And in the words of SisterSong, “Marginalized women face multiple oppressions and we can only win freedom by addressing how they impact one another.” Reproductive justice is about recognizing, honoring, and easing the lives of all child-bearing people by fighting all forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, able-ism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and economic injustice—not only in isolation, but when and where they intersect.
Why does reproductive justice matter?
Reproductive justice matters because it relates to the lives and experiences of every person capable of giving birth. By significantly broadening the lens through which most people view reproductive rights, it covers a far wider range of human experiences, is relevant to and supported by many more people, and has the potential to transform millions of lives by harnessing the collective power of various social movements—for economic justice, criminal justice reform, and civil rights, among others—that are connected but too often siloed.
Reproductive justice in childbirth
Until the mid-1800s, women in the United States managed their own birth experiences with little oversight and intervention. Abortion was common throughout the nineteenth century. It was only in the latter half of the century, when medicine became a respected profession and the American Medical Association was established, that physicians lobbied to have abortion banned. Their concern was not about the morality of abortion, but the financial and professional implications of being forced to compete with midwives and purveyors of home abortion remedies.
Tensions arose around that time, and persist today, between midwives, many of whom were trained in traditional healing practices, and formally educated and/or state-licensed physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners. The conflict was partly between an authoritarian and patriarchal medical establishment and the women giving birth and the midwives they trusted to assist them.
Women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities typically had and have fewer choices about where and how to give birth and who may attend them when they do. Reproductive justice advocates seek to eliminate these disparities and ensure that all women can give birth safely, comfortably, in the company of their chosen attendants, and in the setting and manner of their choosing.
Reproductive justice in schools
A key aspect of reproductive justice in schools is comprehensive sex education, which can help students prevent unintended pregnancies and increase their odds of graduating.
Teenagers who are given partial or no medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and/or STIs and explicitly or implicitly taught to be ashamed of their bodies and sexuality are likelier to become pregnant or cause a pregnancy—a circumstance which interrupts their educations more often than not. Students who are pregnant or parenting should not have to choose between raising children and completing their educations. They deserve time to recover after giving birth, permission to make up missed work, child care, transportation, counseling, health care, personalized graduation plans, flexible schedules, and freedom from stigma. As the novelist Toni Morrison said in a 1989 Time interview in response to a leading question ("You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?”) about teen moms, “They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons…That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it. I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black—or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money.” The U.S. will not achieve reproductive justice until it is willing to invest the necessary resources in all of its children.
Reproductive justice in workplaces
In 2014, then Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), a woman of color and a veteran of the Iraq war who lost both legs in a 2004 helicopter crash, was 46, pregnant, and in her third trimester. Because her doctor had advised her not to travel at that stage of her pregnancy, she appealed to her fellow Democrats to make a one-time exception to the Democratic caucus’s ban on proxy voting so she could participate in House Democratic caucus leadership and committee member elections.
Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders denied her request. Far more disturbing than what happened to Duckworth, who went on to become a U.S. senator, is what happens to women in retail and service industry jobs on a regular basis. Employers routinely deny pregnant workers basic accommodations like access to bottled water, the ability to sit down, and extra bathroom breaks. In 2014 Bene’t Holmes, a 25-year-old single mother and Walmart employee who was then four months pregnant, asked her manager for the less physically demanding job duties her doctor had recommended. Her request was denied. The next day she had a miscarriage at work.
Reproductive justice means supporting whatever choices women make about their reproductive lives, not forcing them to choose between supporting their families and following a doctor’s advice. It means fighting to ensure both that every woman who wants to end a pregnancy can do so and that every woman who wants to continue one can do so safely and with dignity. And it means that employers and governments must support workers while they are becoming and once they have become mothers. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort. Despite the best efforts of mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators, and social workers to keep them open after the war, President Harry Truman shut them down as soon as Japan surrendered. It shouldn’t take a world war for governments to meet people’s needs.
Reproductive justice in prisons
Women in many countries, including the United States, have been arrested and incarcerated for ending or attempting to end unwanted pregnancies and/or endangering fetuses, which is particularly ironic given how the state often treats incarcerated mothers. It is cruel and illogical to imprison pregnant women for possibly jeopardizing a nonexistent baby by, for example, using drugs while pregnant and to separate mothers convicted of crimes from the living children who need them. The treatment of pregnant and nursing women and/or mothers in prisons and jails, including for pregnancy-related crimes, is clearly connected to poverty, xenophobia, and racism.
In 2017, a U.S. government official denied an abortion to a teenaged immigrant detainee who was pregnant as a result of rape and said she would rather harm herself than continue the pregnancy. In 2014 a Pennsylvania woman named Jennifer Whalen was charged with a felony and three misdemeanors, including endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to prison after helping her 16-year-old daughter end an unwanted pregnancy by ordering the abortion pill online. Whelan, a single parent who worked as a nursing home aide, said her daughter did not have health insurance and could not afford a hospital abortion.
In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, began arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests showed they were smoking crack. In some cases, Dorothy Roberts wrote in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY a team of police officers tracked down expectant mothers in their neighborhoods. In others, officers appeared at hospital maternity wards to haul away women in handcuffs and leg irons hours after giving birth. According to Roberts, one Charleston woman spent the final weeks of her pregnancy in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail. When she went into labor, she was taken to the hospital in chains, where she remained shackled to the bed throughout the entire delivery. All but one of the 48 women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston that year were Black. And in 1978—five weeks into a 40-year sentence, with no painkillers or sterilized medical equipment of any kind—22-year-old Debbie Sims Africa gave birth to her son Mike in a Pennsylvania prison cell. She cut the baby’s umbilical cord with her teeth, hid him under a sheet, and relied on her fellow incarcerated women to hide the noise by singing or coughing when he cried. She couldn’t keep her baby with her under jail rules and knew it would be difficult to conceal his existence for long. After three days, she told the authorities, who promptly took him away.
Reproductive justice demands that all women terminating or carrying a pregnancy, giving birth, and/or raising a child be treated like human beings in life-altering circumstances. Then President Trump signed a law banning the shackling of pregnant women in 2018. Far more remains to be done to guarantee reproductive justice for incarcerated people.
Who invented intersectional feminism?
Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with having coined the term in 1989, when she published a paper entitled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a collection of interviews with pioneering Black feminists, Demita Frazier, one of Taylor’s interviewees, questions that narrative. “I have to talk to the young woman—Kimberlé Crenshaw…who says that she coined the term intersectionality,” Frazier says. “I always laugh when I read that because I remember the day we were sitting at the women’s center in Cambridge, drafting our probably third or fourth draft of the [Combahee River Collective] statement, I said, ‘You know, we stand at the intersection where our identities are indivisible.’ There is no separation. We are as Black women truly and completely intact in our paradox, and there’s nothing paradoxical about oppression [laugh]” (How We Get Free, Haymarket Books, p. 123).
In the 1970s, Frazier and her fellow Black socialist feminists conceptualized identity politics as the idea that Black liberation, feminism, and the fight for economic justice didn’t have to and shouldn’t be disparate and conflicting movements; it was only by coming together to fight all forms of oppression that organizers could truly free all people. In 1977 the Collective issued a statement which proclaimed, among other things, that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work…and not for the profit of the bosses,” but added, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”
Many of the core concepts of intersectionality can be traced back to nineteenth century figures like the abolitionist and women’s rights crusader Sojourner Truth, who wanted to be recognized for and freed from the specific indignities she had suffered as a Black woman in the United States. Truth is said to have challenged attendees of the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, to include women like her in their conception of women’s rights: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
Reproductive Justice Around the World
Defending the rights and dignity of all women often means confronting state power, as Irish women did when they took to the streets to demand the repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did when they protested their countries’ abortion laws en masse in 2020. Women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries followed suit in 2021. In the last decade and a half Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has waged “aggressive campaigns” and led mass popular protests “organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights” that have helped liberalize abortions laws throughout the region, as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.
Reproductive justice in the United States
Abortion is, for now, legal in the U.S. but heavily restricted. Women, many of whom are poor, immigrants, and/or women of color, have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. United Nations human rights monitors harshly criticized the state of Texas for a particularly draconian 2021 anti-abortion law which, they said, violated international law by endangering women’s lives and denying them the basic right to control their bodies. Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer tasked by the United Nations Human Rights Council with fighting to end discrimination against women and girls, characterized the law as “sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst,” adding that it has “not only taken Texas backward, but in the eyes of the international community, it has taken the entire country backward.”
The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among developed nations. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., which is more than double the ratio of most other high-income countries. It has far more OB/GYNS than midwives and an overall shortage of maternal health care providers of any kind relative to births. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave to women who have just given birth.
Government officials have sterilized thousands of U.S. women without their full knowledge or consent and required many more to have fewer children than they wanted in exchange for desperately needed financial support. These policies have disproportionately affected Native Americans, Black people, Latinas, low-income people, and people with intellectual disabilities. From 1950 to 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at over three times the rate of white women and over 12 times the rate of white men.
Reproductive justice in Canada
Inducing an abortion was a crime in Canada until 1988, when the country’s Supreme Court determined its abortion law was unconstitutional and struck it down. Abortion has since been legal at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy and is covered as a publicly funded medical procedure under the Canada Health Act, but provinces such as New Brunswick place limits on these funds. In New Brunswick only hospital abortions are covered by insurance; abortions at private clinics are not insured. As in the United States, access to abortion varies widely throughout the country. Inhabitants of many rural provinces and territories have access to only one or two providers. Canadian officials have a long and ugly history of sterilizing Indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.
Reproductive justice in India
India allows abortion during the first trimester with approval by a medical practitioner and under specific conditions, including when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when a patient’s life or health is at risk. In cases involving severe fetal anomaly, a three-person medical board composed of a gynecologist, a pediatrician, and a radiologist must confirm the diagnosis in order for a pregnant person to access care, a requirement that is particularly difficult to fulfill outside of major cities.
Activists in India have been seeking to reform the country’s abortion laws for over a decade. In March 2020, a new set of amendments to the 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act were introduced in parliament. Critics have suggested the proposed amendments were inadequate and not framed “within a rights-based context for a person seeking abortion.”
Reproductive justice in Poland
Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The government instituted a near-total ban on abortion in October 2020, triggering the country’s largest protests since the fall of communism. In September 2021 a 30-year-old woman named Izabela died of septic shock after doctors refused to perform a life-saving abortion. “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, thanks to the abortion law, I have to lie down. And there is nothing they can do,” she wrote in a text message to her mother shortly before her death. “They'll wait until it dies or something begins, and if not, I can expect sepsis.”
Draconian abortion laws notwithstanding, Poland has one of the world’s lowest maternal mortality rates. Its National Health Fund, for which the vast majority of Polish residents are eligible, covers most of the costs associated with giving birth in a hospital. The government also covers uninsured women during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Low-income parents receive a government allowance for their first child, and parents of two or more children get around $130 per month per child. Every woman, regardless of insurance status, gets a home visit from a midwife within days of giving birth. The Health Ministry guarantees a woman's right to choose the place and method of birth, decide who is in the delivery room, and be with her newborn for at least two hours after giving birth.
Reproductive justice in El Salvador
Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. El Salvador is one of four countries in Latin America with no-exceptions abortion bans. In 2021, the authorities freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison for what the authorities claimed were self-induced abortions. A fourth woman was released in 2022. In 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for the death of a Salvadoran woman sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide after losing a pregnancy in 2008. The woman, who had two children, died of cancer in prison two years later, partly as a result of inadequate medical care. Among other reforms, the Court ordered El Salvador to tighten regulations governing doctor-patient confidentiality and, in a ruling that applies to countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, ruled that health care providers can no longer report women seeking abortion care and other reproductive services to law enforcement.
Reproductive justice in Ghana
In 2022, Ghana’s national health insurance program expanded to include free long-term contraception with the goal of sparing millions of women already covered by the country’s national health insurance program from paying out-of-pocket costs for effective long-term contraception. Ghana has high maternal mortality rates—its maternal mortality ratio is 308 per 100,000 live births—high rates of sexually transmitted infections, and low levels of contraceptive use. Women in rural communities have a particularly hard time accessing birth control and other reproductive health care services. Abortion is still a criminal offense in Ghana, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest, serious fetal anomaly, and/or risk to the woman's health. Around 22–30 percent of maternal deaths in Ghana are thought to be the result of unsafe abortions.
A few last words on reproductive justice
In the last 25 years, reproductive justice advocates have worked to broaden the view of an occasionally myopic pro-choice movement overly focused on electing Democrats and pressuring sympathetic administrations to appoint liberal justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Having a Democrat in the White House and a more liberal Supreme Court does make it likelier that American women will retain certain rights. But it would profoundly improve the lives of all U.S. women, and women and people capable of giving birth around the world, if governments treated control over one’s reproductive and family life as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege reserved for those with the means to obtain needed services.
“Every child a wanted child” has long been a credo of the pro-choice movement. Reproductive justice seeks to take this laudable goal several steps further by challenging us to build a world in which every child is not only “wanted” by its parents at birth, but well provided for. It offers a path to creating societies that truly honor life by treating all who are capable of creating it, and every person born, as worthy of love, respect, and care—and investing our collective resources accordingly.
[post_title] => A beginner's guide to reproductive justice [post_excerpt] => Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-beginners-guide-to-reproductive-justice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:02 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3955 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )