Mermaid Musings

I recently returned from the Annual Organizing Conference of the National Network of Abortion Funds (great women, all!) And I am inspired, yet again, to reflect on the current state of the women’s reproductive rights movement - or as it is slowly coming to be better understood - the Movement for Reproductive Justice.

A very inspiring activist and academic who has been working in the budding RJ movement, Marlene Gerber-Fried, shared her list of 10 reasons why "Choice is Inadequate." I am going to reproduce and expound upon her list here. To keep it to the original 10 I am collapsing #2 and #3 so that I can add #11 which she mentioned, and, frankly, I find it to be one of the more compelling reasons, but that is my personal bias.

1. Choice doesn’t resonate. Especially with women who already have limited choices in life, because, for example, every day is a struggle for survival, the idea of abortion as a "choice" is somewhat hollow.
2. Choice doesn’t capture the complexity of reproductive decision-making. There are so many things that weigh in on a woman’s decision of whether or not to have children. The concept of choice leaves no space to talk about reproductive oppression, the abuses that women of color have suffered (e.g. forced sterilization, birth control experimentation, etc).
3. Choice doesn’t support motherhood. We need to put the right to have children at the center. Most women choose to have an abortion because they want to be good mothers but they don’t believe they can at this time. We need to honor women’s role as mother.
4. Choice perpetuates a disconnect between abortion care and health care. Abortion is a medical procedure, one of the safest medical procedures around. It should be treated as an option in a woman’s routine reproductive health care.
5. Choice is a conservatizing notion. The women (and men) who struggled to make abortion legal in the United States saw it as a beginning, a first step in giving women the right to be full participants in our society. Instead, the tremendous backlash has made Roe v. Wade the pinnacle of our achievement; we have been fighting for almost four decades now just to hold on to legality - instead of pushing for access. The rallying cry in the late 1960s was "Free Abortion On Demand." Today, it’s "Safe, Legal and Rare." blah.
6. Choice is a market concept which, again, trivializes the decision. We make choices in the supermarket about which brand of cereal or toothpaste to buy. The decision to have an abortion is more profound than the idea of choice allows us to express. Women take the decision much more seriously that the concept of choice implies.
7. Choice leaves the focus on the individual and does not allow for any examination of the social, political or economic context in which a woman makes reproductive decisions.
8. Choice lacks moral force. It is particularly lacking when you consider that our opposition calls itself ‘Pro-Life.’ Not that I think they are anything of the sort, but it is easy to see how they have won the rhetoric wars when they are arguing Life while we are arguing choice. Of course, this is easy enough to remedy - because in fact we are talking about WOMEN’S LIVES while they are talking about the potential life on an unborn fetus. We just need to start having those conversations.
9. Choice doesn’t move people to action. We need a compelling positive vision, one that moves people to care about women as human beings and to see women’s lives as worthy, and their roles in rearing children as valuable.
10. Choice is a sanitization that obliderates women’s sexual rights. Women need abortions because they have sex. It is consistently amazing to me how much our society denigrates women who enjoy sex (for sex’s sake, not for procreative purposes).

We who believe that women have an absolute right to control their bodies and make their own decisions regarding reproduction really need to start using the Reproductive Justice framework. We need to take inspiration from the women of the 1960s and 1970s who were unapologetic in their demands for reproductive freedom. At the same time, we need to listen to the women who were excluded from those movements (the women of color, queer women, and in some cases poor women) and put their needs and their concerns at front and center. Because women’s lives are at stake. We have lost so much ground by just hanging onto the small victory of Roe v. Wade - which is increasingly looking like we’re going to lose.

As Marlene said, Roe was meant to be the floor, not the ceiling. We need to see reproductive rights in the context of women’s whole lives, which includes the social, political and economic contexts that women live in. We need to see it as a part of creating social justice, not just for women, but for everybody.

We need to assert Free Abortion On Demand, along with Universal Health Care, Free Childcare, and Human Rights for EVERYONE.