Undivided Rights

Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive Justice

Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, Elena Gutiérrez

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781608466177
• eBook ISBN: 9781608466641
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Undivided Rights captures the evolving and largely unknown activist history of women of color organizing for reproductive justice—on their own behalf. Undivided Rights presents a textured understanding of the reproductive rights movement by placing the experiences, priorities, and activism of women of color in the foreground. Using historical research, original organizational case studies, and personal interviews, the authors illuminate how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies. Undivided Rights shows how women of color—-starting within their own Latina, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities—have resisted coercion of their reproductive abilities. Projected against the backdrop of the mainstream pro-choice movement and radical right agendas, these dynamic case studies feature the groundbreaking work being done by health and reproductive rights organizations led by women-of-color.The book details how and why these women have defined and implemented expansive reproductive health agendas that reject legalistic remedies and seek instead to address the wider needs of their communities. It stresses the urgency for innovative strategies that push beyond the traditional base and goals of the mainstream pro-choice movement—strategies that are broadly inclusive while being specific, strategies that speak to all women by speaking to each woman. While the authors raise tough questions about inclusion, identity politics, and the future of women's organizing, they also offer a way out of the limiting focus on "choice." Undivided Rights articulates a holistic vision for reproductive freedom. It refuses to allow our human rights to be divvied up and parceled out into isolated boxes that people are then forced to pick and choose among.

1

Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Justice

“We’re sick and tired of being sick and tired!” With Fannie Lou Hamer’s words as their rallying cry,1 more than 1,500 African American women gathered at Spelman College in Atlanta for the first National Conference on Black Women’s Health Issues in 1983: “They came with PhDs, MDs, welfare cards, in Mercedes and on crutches, from seven days to eighty years old—urban, rural, gay, straight—in desperate search for themselves.”2 The conference gave birth to the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP),3 the first ever women of color reproductive justice organization and the foremother of the other organizations profiled in this book.

The histories of NBWHP and the other reproductive rights organizations formed by women of color in the 1980s and 90s are stories of activism, courage, and determination that challenge the common belief that communities who have suffered the most from restrictions on reproductive rights do not organize on their own behalf. This book retrieves part of that history by documenting the reproductive rights activism of eight women of color groups in the United States.

Accounts of the reproductive rights struggle in the US have typically focused on efforts to attain and defend the legal right to abortion, efforts led predominantly by white women. What little information is provided about women of color tends to center on the abuses they have suffered and represents only a partial history. Most of the reproductive health organizing done by women of color in the United States has been undocumented, unanalyzed, and unacknowledged. Turning the tide of this limited scholarship, Dorothy Roberts, Linda Gordon, Rickie Solinger, Jennifer Nelson, and others have brought to light both the struggles of women of color to resist reproductive oppression and the roles they have played in the fight for reproductive justice.4 Theirs and similar works have highlighted the external challenges confronting communities of color and constraining their reproduction—population control, sterilization abuse, unsafe contraceptives, welfare reform, the criminalization of women who use drugs and alcohol during pregnancy, and coercive and intrusive family planning programs and policies.5

However, Dorothy Roberts cautions us against seeing women of color as passive puppets.6 Therefore, this book focuses on what women of color have done for themselves, rather than what has been done to them. We put the activism of women of color in the foreground. By adopting this approach we neither discount the devastating consequences of reproductive abuses, nor deny the impact of structural forces such as white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. But these issues are the backdrop for the organizing and do not take center stage.

This book utilizes a series of organizational case studies to document how women of color have led the fight to control their own bodies and reproductive destinies and have organized to define and implement a reproductive justice agenda to address the needs of their communities. We selected groups that reflect a wide range of organizing strategies, issues, and challenges from four ethnic communities: African American, Native American/Indigenous, Latina, and Asian and Pacific Islander. To illustrate the range of organizing occurring within communities of color, we included two organizations from each—a national group, more well-known and often with a longer history of organizing, and an organization newer to the work and/or one that is grassroots-oriented. All of the groups varied in size, focus of programmatic activity, and budgets.

Included in this book are the National Black Women’s Health Project (NBWHP), Washington, DC; African American Women Evolving (AAWE), Chicago, Illinois; the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center (NAWHERC), Yankton Sioux Reservation, South Dakota; the Mother’s Milk Project (MMP), Akwesasne, St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, New York; Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH),7 Oakland, California; the National Asian Women’s Health Organization (NAWHO), San Francisco, California; the National Latina Health Organization (NLHO), Oakland, California; and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR), Denver, Colorado.

In writing the chapters on the histories of activism, we drew on unpublished theses and dissertations and the limited published material about the activism of women of color. For the organizational histories, we relied on interviews, organizational publications, personal accounts—both published and unpublished—and our own experiences and familiarity with the groups. While we are aware that we bring our own lenses to the project, we have taken our direction from the people we interviewed and have tried to tell the histories from their vantage points. Sometimes there were divergent understandings and interpretations of events. When this occurred, we attempted to determine the most accurate and inclusive account. However, because we could not interview everyone who had been involved in creating these histories, we realize there may be information and perspectives that we have not included. It is our hope that future scholarship and writing will expand on this work. We do not focus on internal organizational or personal debates and struggles, which we know are present in all organizations, because we found they obscured rather than illuminated events.

The interviews were guided by a set of common questions. We were interested in the founders’ decisions to start autonomous organizations and the problems their organizations faced, as well as the gains they made. We asked participants to define what reproductive rights meant, and whether they viewed their organizations as part of the reproductive rights movement. We wanted to know who had been supportive of their organizing and helpful in moving their agendas forward, and what types of support were provided. We asked questions about the obstacles to and opportunities for collaboration both with women of color and mainstream groups.

We also set out to document their methods of organizing and their most significant accomplishments, limitations, and challenges. We explored organizational goals and programs. Because access to and adequacy of resources are essential for organizing, we examined fundraising strategies. We asked about the impact of the groups in their communities, on public policy, and on the mainstream pro-choice movement.

These contemporary struggles for reproductive justice arise from a long history of oppression and resistance, beginning before 20th-century battles to legalize contraception and abortion. Thus, each pair of case studies is preceded by an introductory chapter that grounds the organizational histories in the larger history of the community.

After much debate on terminology, we decided to use the umbrella term “women of color” to describe the four primary ethnic groups in the United States.8 Since the term was coined by women of color in 1977 at the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, it has become a viable organizing principle in the United States for women who are most disadvantaged by white supremacy. The identifying language and terms that the various reproductive rights movements have employed to describe their work has evolved, depending on historical and political contexts. After legalization, the movement to defend legal abortion termed itself “pro-choice.” Women of color and white activists who advocated for abortion in a broader framework that emphasized opposition to population control rejected the pro-choice terminology as too narrow and instead used “reproductive rights,” “reproductive freedom,” and “reproductive health.” However, the distinctions between these terms have been blurred in the current context. Most pro-choice groups now use the language of reproductive rights—though their agenda is still focused on abortion rights. Some women of color organizations are using “reproductive justice” to recognize that the control, regulation, and stigmatization of female fertility, bodies, and sexuality are connected to the regulation of communities that are themselves based on race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality.9 This analysis emphasizes the relationship of reproductive rights to human rights and economic justice. In the case studies we take our terminology from the activists we interviewed. “Reproductive rights” and “reproductive justice” are used interchangeably.

Our research has yielded a tremendous amount of information, as well as experiences, insights, and perspectives that are critical to understanding the past and to crafting future organizing strategies. The remainder of this chapter presents the predominant themes of the aggregated histories and case studies. Despite significant differences among the groups, there are important similarities among them as well. All are engaged in (1) redefining reproductive rights to include the needs of their communities; (2) leading the fight against population control and asserting an inextricable link between the right to have children and the right not to; (3) organizing along lines of racial and ethnic identity in order to create the spaces to confront internalized and external oppression, forge agendas, and engage with other movements; (4) promoting new understandings of political inclusion and movement building that bridge historic divisions and create new alliances.

Redefining Reproductive Rights

Women of color in the US negotiate their reproductive lives in a system that combines various interlocking forms of oppression. As activist, scholar, and co-author Loretta Ross puts it: “Our ability to control what happens to our bodies is constantly challenged by poverty, racism, environmental degradation, sexism, homophobia, and injustice in the United States.”10 The groups in this book created their own definitions of reproductive rights—definitions that are grounded in the experiences of their different communities and that link oppressions. It is because of these intersections that women of color advance a definition of reproductive rights beyond abortion. Their critique of “choice” does not deny women of color agency; rather, it shows the constraints within which women of color navigate their reproductive lives and organizing.

Early in the abortion rights struggle, before these organizations were created, women of color resisted the coercion that masqueraded as “choice.” In a 1973 editorial that was supportive of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, the National Council of Negro Women sounded this important cautionary note:

...

Table of contents

• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the 2004 Edition and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Women of Color and Their Struggle for Reproductive Justice
• Chapter 2: The Political Context for Women of Color Organizing
• Chapter 3: African American Women Seeda Movement
• Chapter 4: Founding the National Black Women’s Health Project: ANew Concept in Health
• Chapter 5: African American Women Evolving
• Chapter 6: Native American Women Resist Genocide and Organize for Reproductive Rights
• Chapter 7: The Mother’s Milk Project
• Chapter 8: Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center
• Chapter 9: Organizing by Asian and Pacific Islander Women: Immigration, Racism, and Activism
• Chapter 10: Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health
• Chapter 11: The National Asian Women’s Health Organization
• Chapter 12: “We Will No Longer be Silent or Invisible”: Latinas Organizing for Reproductive Justice
• Chapter 13: The National Latina Health Organization
• Chapter 14: The Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights
• Chapter 15: Too much to Deny
• Bibliography
• About the Authors