For my previous Blog for Choice posts see 2011, 2010 and 2008.
Thanks to all the Harpies who contributed to the discussion that led to this post.
The theme for the 2012 Blog for Choice action day is “what will you do to help elect pro-choice candidates in 2012?” Which frankly is something I don’t have a whole lot of energy to blog around.
Bad feminist activist me.
I’ve voted Democrat in every election since I could vote, so it’s not like I can make the radical decision to start voting “pro-choice.” And I’m not a big political organizer, so door-to-door canvassing is pretty much out. And to be be perfectly honest, most of the politicians out there aren’t speaking my language anyway. I talked with my mother on the telephone last Sunday and she asked when my partner and I were going to make plans to move to Canada. It was a joke, but only quasi in jest, since my mother and I — though not identical in our political thinking — share a politics that’s to the radical left of the Obama administration, and certainly shares little in common with any of the Republican candidates.
So how do you go about taking action to “help elect pro-choice candidates” when, essentially, you don’t feel there are any pro-choice candidates?
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You work to change the culture. Which sometimes has the feeling of being that dung beetle from Microcosmos. It’s a long, slow slog and you’re probably never going to get the majority of folks to agree with you. At least, I know I’m not. If I woke up one morning and the majority of Americans suddenly shared my priorities for health and well-being I’d be flabbergasted, gobsmacked, and tongue-tied — not to mention bewitched and bewildered. But, you know: Not going to happen. And I accept that — or, at least, have learned to live with it the way one learns to live with a bum knee.
And this isn’t even a question of “feminists” vs. “everyone else” ’cause it’s clear that self-identified feminists are anything but 100% unified on the question of abortion, on the question of reproductive rights and justice, on the question of what “pro-choice” politicians should emphasize. When I asked Harpy readers to describe their ideal pro-choice politician, here are some of the responses I received:
- Drahill: “The first thing I’m going to look at is whether they support policies that make it easier to be a mother…
to be pro-choice, a candidate needs to support comprehensive maternity leave reform, favor WIC, favor food aid for mothers, favor comprehensive healthcare reform, favor reforming housing laws to make it easier to own a home and stay in your home, favor educational reform to make it easier for women and children to go to school, be invested in promoting preventive and mental health services… you get the idea ” - BearDownCBears: “My fellow Americans, as of this morning I have exercised extraordinary executive privilege by dissolving the United States Congress and establishing martial law. All private insurance will be nationalized and reorganized and doctors’ medical debt will be socialized to make up for the lower compensation they will receive. Publicly funded parental leave will be instated and an abortion clinic will be available within every 100 miles.”
- baraqiel: “Pro-choice has to come with pro-the ability to make choices to be meaningful … for example, pro-comprehensive sex ed (required in public schools, private schools, homeschooling…). Pro-education about contraception and access to contraception. Pro-enthusiastic consent.”
- Jenn_smithson: “I want a candidate who understands that the right to control my own body is the foundation of all other rights …
Any candidate who is prochoice needs to not only understand this but needs to articulate it as well. My rights are not a bargaining chip, full stop, and I’m sick of them being treated as though they are. - BeckySharper: “It’s essential that we keep the church, the state, and everyone else OUT the business of policing women’s uteri.”
While I won’t replicate the whole conversation here, since it went to 50+ comments, the salient difference that emerged in our own little corner of the feminist blogosphere was the divide between those who focus on abortion rights qua abortion rights and those who see the issue of abortion access as part of a much larger, densely interwoven, set of issues surrounding reproduction, family formation, and human rights. This exchange captures, in a nutshell, the larger disagreement:
mischiefmanager argues that:
Historically, the term “choice” was used by women’s advocacy groups to avoid the loaded word “abortion.” If you want to expand it to mean other things, that’s your own personal interpretation. Check the websites of pro-choice groups and you’ll see that although safety net questions are sometimes discussed, the focus of their work is on keeping abortion legal and accessible. That’s hard enough these days without bringing anything else into the equation.
to which Drahill responds:
Pro-Choice, now, is a political slogan. That does not mean that’s what pro-choice SHOULD mean. It sounds better and softer than “pro-abortion rights.” Let’s face it. Just as pro-life sounds nicer than “anti-abortion rights.” But that’s what they are, and I don’t see how you can argue otherwise. I’d really suggest you take up reading some blogs (seriously, Womanist Musings) that address pro-choice as reproductive justice. Because that is all about helping women in whatever choice they make. In reproductive justice, if a woman who wants to parent has an abortion because she fears not being able to find a place to live, the movement is regarded as having failed her. Because the movement did not fight for her choice and what she needed to exercise it. That’s why just defining pro-choice as abortion rights is easier – because once you look at reproductive justice and what it means, it’s so HUGE it can feel hopeless. But I think we still have an obligation to those women who want to parent. It’s thinking about all the women you DON’T see at the clinic and their families.
So on the one hand, we have folks who argue that “pro-choice” equals eliminating legal barriers to reproductive care and abortion specifically. So: focus on keeping abortion legal, obstructing fetal personhood amendments, keeping Planned Parenthood and other women’s health clinics open, and critiquing the misinformation campaign of Crisis Pregnancy Centers. All of this is important, obviously. Yet in my mind it stops short of what a robust “pro-choice” agenda should look like, because it does nothing to address pre-existing inequalities. Keeping abortion services legal, safe, and available across the nation is awesome and important — but that alone doesn’t ensure that those without resources or with constrained autonomy (prisoners, minors, women in the military, trans* folks, women of color, immigrants, those with limited financial resources, disabled women, queer women … the list could go on and on) will be able to access those clinics.
We always have choices, but our ability to make meaningful choices is limited by our material circumstances, by knowledge, and by fear. Some choices are over-determined by the systems (sociocultural and material contexts) in which we live and deliberate. As Talk Birth so eloquently argues, in a recent post on birthing and informed consent:
While it may sound as if I am saying women are powerlessly buffeted about by circumstance and environment, I’m not. Theoretically, we always have the power to choose for ourselves, but by ignoring, denying, or minimizing the multiplicity of contexts in which women make “informed choices” about their births and their lives, we oversimplify the issue and turn it into a hollow catchphrase rather than a meaningful concept.
Women’s lives and their choices are deeply embedded in a complex, multifaceted, practically infinite web of social, political, cultural, socioeconomic, religious, historical, and environmental relationships.
And, I maintain that a choice is not a choice if it is made in a context of fear.
(via Molly @ first the egg)
I’m with Drahill and others on the discussion thread here, since I argue that to be “pro-choice” in our world can and should mean actively fostering an environment where women will be trusted to make decisions, and have the material ability to meaningfully act on the choices they make. Our material resources — as individuals, as a society, as a globe — are not infinite. Many people on the comment thread pointed this out, and I agree. Yet our ability to prioritize, to re-shuffle the cards and place human health, well-being, and individual agency at the top of our list of what government at its best can ensure for its citizens … that is endless and constant. To return to the rhetoric of “choice,” we — as a society — have chosen to prioritize certain types of activities (wars of aggression, banking, environmental plunder) over others (sustaining human and environmental well-being). I believe as a society we aren’t hostage to those previous choices — though some of the consequences will continue to ripple for generations to come. We can make new choices, and craft new priorities.
That’s what I will continue to push for in 2012: The ideas of those people — inside and outside of the political machine — who want us to build a future in which all human beings will be able to make meaningful choices about their lives, their families, and their futures.
Cross-posted at the feminist librarian.
Abortion access does not exist in a vacuum, obviously, and I am unequivocally dedicated to bringing about a culture of freedom and fairness for all.
However, I don’t agree that the component issues can’t be broken out and worked on. The complexity of feminist issues is such that insisting that we get all or nothing will get us nothing. Look around this country and see how antis are stripping us of our right to abortion in state after state. There are TRAP laws, state invasions of privacy in the name of safety, violations of women’s First Amendment rights when we are forced to view or hear information we want to reject. Taxpayers are being required to pay for ultrasounds and patients are being sent to “crisis pregnancy centers” so they can have “educational” materials shoved down their throats before they can have abortions. The vast majority of counties in this country have no abortion provider. We must fight back NOW. We cannot afford not to.
I see pro-choice groups the same way I see environmental groups. Our environmental problems are, again, hugely complex, But saying that WWF or NRDC should address questions of consumer behavior, suburban sprawl, international wage inequity, and so forth, before taking action to protect the environment will get us stopped in our tracks. We have to have the larger discussions while working on the immediate crisis. Or else there will be no reason to have the discussion at all.
The lack of pro-choice Democratic politicians is why I vote Green every chance I get. The Green Party is the last that still has a definite, explicit pro-choice plank in their platform. And although third-party candidates can’t win the Presidency, they can win local or state positions. I vote Green to help establish the party and to keep pro-choice politicians in local and state office.
I am too tired to really add anything except that I only explicitly vote for candidates that are pro-choice and pro-equality. Yes, I am basically a single (double?) issue voter.
One of my favourite quotes comes to mind:
“Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
(I was at work when I initially posted and wanted to finish, so here’s the next bit.)
This particular passage also goes on to say:
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living… The social revolution of the nineteenth century [sic] cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.”
What I take from this, especially in terms of my engagement with pro-choice and feminist movements, is that the past is necessary to understand where we come from. From our past we can then begin to reconstitute the future, and redefine how or what we understand the meanings and our engagement. This doesn’t mean that change will occur quickly and in that necessarily changes society overall, but those little battles over access, gender pay equity, etc will help shape our future poetry and how we live.
MM: I’d have to inquire, based on your response, whether you know any women whose motherhood rights are challenged (predominantly, this means women of color, disabled women, poor women, mentally ill women, ect.). I just askd because your comment about “addressing the immediate crisis” comes off as saying to anybody whose motherhood fitness is challenged or limited “don’t worry, sit down, we’ll get to you later!” And that comes off pretty badly – it assumes that marginalized or put-upon women should just be expected to understand and wait their turn (when they’ve already been waiting for a damn long time).
And your point about environmentalism, I don’t think says what you’re thinking it says. So if environmental groups choose to limit their focus, does not place what they don’t address outside the scope of the movement. It just means that these groups don’t address them. The “pro-choice” movement’s declining to address more comprehensive issues of reproductive justice does not mean those issues are not worthy of addressing or outside the movement. It just means that the movement as a whole is failing to address them. And because those issues tend to affect certain segments of women more than others, it follows that large segments of women may feel excluded.
Like I said before, reproductive justice is a lot harder than focusing on abortion rights – because its so much bigger. But does that make the goal any less worth pursuing? No. Women who have their motherhood rights challenged have been working on these issues for a long time – but its only recently that they’ve started pushing the mainstream pro-choice movement to join them.
And really, perhaps you didn’t mean it this way, but you seem to be arguing motherhood rights aren’t under attack as much as other abortion-related rights? Thats subjective. Motherhood rights have been under attack for centuries (forced sterilization, eugenics, ect.). There was recently a post on Jezebel where many commentators jumped in to argue that a mentally ill woman should be able to be forcibly sterilized – if that’s not evidence of the need to fight for motherhood rights, well, I can’t think of a better example of how its all interelated. So, uh, no, women should not have to wait their turn to get justice for themselves. And the movement should acknowledge that.
It feels like there are parallels to the LGBTQ movement. Some people within the movement are fighting for things like gay marriage — one large, highlighted issue that affects some within the movement (monogamous gays and lesbians who want to marry their partners). Others within the movement are fighting for things like shelter for the 40% of trans* youth who are homeless.
There is a lot of criticism from some in the LGBTQ movement that “gay rights” gains are being made at the expense of other members — in other words, the idea that we should band together and put our time and money behind fights we can win, issues in the public eye that we have reasonable support for, such as gay marriage, even if it does nothing for whole groups of people in the movement. There are some who feel like we should take what gains we can right now, and we’ll get to the more marginalized members (trans* folk, queer folk) later, once we’ve secured these tenuous gains.
Then, there are others who feel like trans* and queer folk shouldn’t have to sit down and be quiet and wait our turn to get justice. There are some who feel like the homeless trans* youth and issues like gender identity discrimination in the workplace are more important than whether Adam and Steve can have a marriage vs. a civil union.
It feels like there is a connection to the issue of abortion. For some people, being “pro choice” (fighting for “gay rights”) means fighting for certain gains, like everyone having access to abortion (every state allowing gay marriage). For others, abortion (gay marriage) is just one aspect of a multifaceted struggle involving prenatal care, maternity leave, comprehensive sex education, etc. (gender identity laws, homeless queer youth, hospital visitation for partners, etc.).
I think it can come down to two important sets of questions: 1. Can we only focus on mainstream issues? And, if so, will it help more, in the long run, to fight for these certain gains (gay marriage as a form of accepting LGB people into mainstream society / wide-spread access to abortion as a drastic form of preventing unwanted pregnancies)? Will fighting for and securing these highly-visible issues do immediate good and pave the way for more nuanced changes for the marginalized people in these groups?
And 2. Even if the answer to the above is yes, is it fair to ask those at the margins to wait while those at the center get a voice and have their needs met? How do we tell other people that their needs must take a backseat for the greater good? Who decides what the greater good will be? How confident are we that, once we secure these high-profile rights (gay marriage / abortion), we will still be interested in helping those we told to wait? In my experiences in the LGBTQ community, sometimes once those at the center get what they want, they don’t move over to make room for those at the margins.