Why We Need A Reproductive Justice Bill of Rights (Trigger warning for graphic violence)
(this article was published in 2020. Look how much further we have fallen since then)
Why We Need A Reproductive Justice Bill of Rights (Trigger warning for graphic violence)
9/16/2020 by Michele Goodwin
Why We Need A Reproductive Justice Bill of Rights“The U.S. needs a reproductive justice bill of rights,” writes Goodwin. “Without it, we continue to risk the gravest atrocities carried out with the official endorsement of the state on women and girls.” Pictured: The February 2014 “Moral March On Raleigh” in North Carolina. (Stephen Melkisethian / Flickr)
Throughout the process of writing Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, I struggled to understand what accounts for this period of policing the womb, the vileness directed at women, and the various indignities cast upon indigent women by the state. I filled notepad after notepad with names and stories. Among the many disturbing narratives was that of 12 women sodomized and raped by police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who literally policed and terrorized their bodies. He raped one of his victims while she was handcuffed to a hospital bed. She testified that she had to think about survival while he raped her. Another victim was underage.
. . . .
These women were not policed because of pregnancy or the potential to become pregnant, but because of their race, poverty and sex. It is these very biases—poverty, sex and race—that motivate reproductive policing. On the one hand, this is nothing new; Black women experienced reproductive horrors during chattel slavery, and in many cases their reproductive rights barely improved during Jim Crow, when eugenics policies resulted in coercive state sterilizations—so much so that in Mississippi forced sterilization against Black women became known as the “Mississippi Appendectomy.”
Sims regularly tortured Black women he rented as human research subjects, nightly lacerating their wombs and conducting experiments, denying them anesthesia in the process. He was doubtful of their ability to experience pain.Today he is hailed as the “father of gynecology,” and the namesake of many gynecological devices, like the Sims vaginal speculum—though several petitions now call for them to be renamed. And until recently, a statue of him adorned Central Park in New York City. (Unsurprisingly, in 2017 someone spray-painted the word “racist” on said statue, months before its subsequent removal.)
. . .
The Third Reich in Nazi Germany learned from this, borrowing directly from the Virginia eugenics law upheld by the Supreme Court. This is how the Germans started their eugenics efforts. In fact, Joseph S. DeJarnette, superintendent at a Virginia hospital, lamented “the Germans are beating us at our own game.”
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiCN57cXgAYukrf?format=png&name=small
. . . .
Importantly, it is for the reasons above that I also call on Speaker Pelosi and members of Congress to enact a Reproductive Justice Bill of Rights or New Deal. American lawmakers as well as judges should be accountable to the girls and women of our nation. And it’s not just eugenics that makes this moment urgent for a reproductive justice bill of rights: It’s also the attacks on sex education in school, including mandating harmful, abstinence only instruction; the rollbacks on contraceptive access; high rates of unaddressed maternal mortality; threats to abortion access, including during the pandemic; and slashing of funding associated with breast and cervical care screening—among other assaults. And given the high rates of women’s mass incarceration in the United States, we need a reproductive justice bill of rights, because of extensive medical neglect women experience in America’s prisons and jails. Importantly, the reason for a reproductive justice bill of rights is because without it, we continue to risk the gravest atrocities carried out with the official endorsement of the state on women and girls in the United States.
https://msmagazine.com/2020/09/16/eugenics-state-forced-sterilization-we-need-a-reproductive-justice-new-deal-or-bill-of-rights/