National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript #33-05 Enduring Choice
August 17, 2005

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2005/3305.html

Beck: This week on “Making Contact”...

Hartmann: The main goal of a top down, population-control style family planning program is to reduce birth rates as fast and supposedly as efficiently as possible.

Ross: So, in a very short period, I had a full-term pregnancy, an abortion, and a sterilization.

Woman #1: Just because I had had sex one time, doesn’t mean I have to keep having sex, doesn’t mean I have to keep saying “yes” anytime anybody wants to have sex with me.

Olson: A growing number of women are seeing the link between their reproductive health, their civil liberties, the environment, and economics.

On this edition, we hear about the common thread that connects women from all walks of life. From prison cells to the barrios in Fresno, California, women of color are organizing around the broad theme of reproductive justice.

I'm Sarah Olson, your host this week on “Making Contact”, a program creating connections between people, vital ideas, and important information.

Ortega: When I hear the word sex, it’s just sex …

[laughing]

So I don’t know what to say…

Olson: On a scorching hot summer day in Fresno, California, a group of high school girls gather at the offices of Barrios Unidos , an organization that works with at-risk youth. These are just ordinary girls in high school with ordinary concerns like pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, drugs, gang violence, and making ends meet as teenage mothers.

Ortega: At first I was scared, but when the baby comes it’s real hard. Cause if you don’t have help, or the dad’s not around, you’re not getting a lot of help. It’s a hard job to do because you have to buy clothes and diapers, and it’s not easy at all.

Olson: Nicole Ortega is a 17-year old senior at Fresno High School, and the mother of a two-year old son. When she was younger, Nicole’s parents both had drug problems, and she and her sisters went into foster care. Nicole says her parents are back on track in recent years, and have supported her during her pregnancy. And it’s a good thing, she says, because the father of her child was abusive and hasn’t been around that much since their son was born. Nicole and her friends talk a lot about the drugs and the crime that riddle their neighborhoods. But these girls are clear about what they want to be when they grow up, and what they need to do to get there.

Ortega: What I’m worried about is just to keep my baby safe. Keeping him away from all these drugs, and all these gangs and everything. And I just worry about going to school, finishing school so I can get a good job and support me and my baby.

Olson: Attitudes about sex can be very different in immigrant families. This creates a unique set of needs for young women of color, who are just beginning to learn how to navigate their own sexuality. Judy Lee is a youth organizer with Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, based in Oakland, California. The group is helping young Asian women to learn and talk about their reproductive health. Lee says in her family even seemingly simple conversations can become downright embarrassing.

Lee: There’s a language barrier. There’s certain words that we use in English but there’s not a word that we could explain it in Vietnamese. As in sex -- easily you could say that in English. Sex. But in Vietnamese, we don’t have the word sex. We have to describe it. It’s kind of awkward. So it’s kind of hard talking about it. And my family, we don’t talk about sex very often, at all. My parents are really strict about sex. I’m just taught that I learn about sex through my husband, and that’s it.

Olson: Lee says, to include young immigrant women like herself in conversations about reproductive health, it sometimes helps to think about reproduction in broader terms than just a debate about abortion or sex.

Paredes: Just as Judy had said, I think today, younger women are being allowed to look at all kinds of issues in relation to reproductive justice.

Olson: Dana Jin Paredes is the lead organizer with Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. She’s all about supporting the struggle against injustice, in its many different levels. So, what exactly are these struggles?

Paredes: We are able to join the fights for a woman’s right to choose, and we’re also able to join the fights to shut down medical waste incinerators that are spreading toxins in our community and affecting our reproductive systems. We are also able to join fights to support women who are facing violence in their lives. We are also able to join fights to ask for better conditions for families who are receiving welfare and families who need to go to public assistance for their health care. We are also able to join fights for demanding access to comprehensive sex education in our schools. Today, the fight for reproductive justice is more inclusive.

Olson: Some health advocates say reproductive justice is the marriage of the pro-choice movement and the social justice movement. Others say it’s a look at women’s rights through a global human rights framework. Dana Jin Paredes says it’s very simple.

Paredes: Reproductive justice is when all women and girls have the social, political, and economic power and resources to make healthy decisions regarding their bodies, their health, and their sexuality for themselves and their families in all areas of their lives.

Olson: The term reproductive justice was introduced in 1995, when a group of women’s health organizers got together at a conference at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The women of color in attendance began to discuss how their needs were not being met by the mainstream pro-choice movement. Loretta Ross participated in that conversation. She is the Executive Director of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based organization that’s working for reproductive justice in its broadest sense. She agrees with Paredes, that it’s important to approach reproductive health holistically.

Ross: By keeping the focus on women’s lives we can see that women experience violence at different times in their lives, they have to deal with reproductive health issues at different times in their lives. They have to deal with the lack of housing or the lack of a health care system at different times in their lives. So, when you keep women in the center of the lens, then the intersections become apparent, because you can’t flatten a woman out to just a fertile womb.

Olson: And Ross is in a position to know. She has spent over three decades working in women’s health movements and her work is motivated by her own experiences growing up in the South in a time when abortion was not yet legal.

Ross: When I was 15, I became pregnant through incest. It was 1968 and it was five years before Roe v. Wade, so I was forced to have that child. Which is not an easy thing to do – to have a child out of incest. But that was the law of the land at the time. A few years later, I became pregnant again, and I had a legal abortion-- because in Washington DC, they legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. So this was in 1970. Then, seeking to prevent future pregnancies, I accepted an intra-uterine device called the Dalcon Shield. And it was provided to me at a family planning clinic in Washington DC. Three years later that Dalcon Shield sterilized me. So in a very short period, I had a full term pregnancy, an abortion, and a sterilization.

Olson: The Dalcon Shield is one brand of intra-uterine device, or IUD, is a triangle-shaped piece of plastic with a string hanging from it. Unfortunately, that string served as a wick for bacteria entering the uterus. The Dalcon Shield became notorious in the late1970s when more than 700 thousand women were sterilized by the product. The women joined a class action lawsuit and succeeded in banning its sale in the United States in 1975. Inexplicably though, the Dalcon Shield is still distributed in developing countries.

Betsy Hartmann is the director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College. She says doctors commonly believe women in the third world are more likely to die during childbirth, so unsafe contraception is still better than no contraception at all.

Hartmann: Safer contraceptives should be the ones that are promoted, especially in areas where people don’t have access to healthcare. So why is it, for example, that higher risk contraceptives like sterilization, IUD are often more heavily promoted than giving people access to condoms, the pills, etc.?

Olson: According to Hartmann, one answer to that question is that the development and distribution of contraceptives is often done by people who are more concerned with population control than with providing additional help and resources to women. Over the decades, population-control enthusiasts have blamed the allegedly high birth rates in low-income or minority communities for the rise in communism, the destruction of the environment, and more recently, the global spread of terrorism. One result of all this has been a rather authoritarian model for family planning.

Hartmann: The main goal of a top-down, population-control style family planning program is to reduce birth rates as fast and supposedly as efficiently as possible. So women’s health is virtually ignored. And women’s rights are not considered a central concern. So for example, you would have current sterilization programs in India, which would offer women incentives to be sterilized or herd them into sterilization camps. Or you have, on a less dramatic level, you have programs that only push the so-called more effective contraceptives like Depo Provera, or the IUD, or Norplant, without offering women a full range of choice . And I think this happens all over the world, still, very much today.

Olson: It’s true that women are suffering from the painful effects of invasive and long-term birth control. It’s also true that women in the U.S. are suffering from another effect of population control theories.

Rivera: This country has had a eugenics movement.

Olson: Lourdes Rivera is the managing attorney at the Los Angeles office of the National Health Law Program, and a founding member of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice. Eugenics refers to the pseudo-scientific movement, whose goal is to control human reproduction for the so-called improvement of the white race. The term was introduced in 1883 by a scientist named Charles Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. By the early part of the 20 th century, eugenics had been embraced by all kinds of people in the U.S., including Margaret Sanger, who would later go on to found Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The U.S. government funded programs throughout the 20 th century that limited the birthrates of low-income women and women of color in the name of reducing poverty. By 1980, these programs were sterilizing hundreds of thousands of women each year, often without their knowledge or consent.

Rivera: What that basically meant was forcing policies on women, particularly African-American women. Latina women. Native American women, and women with disabilities. In that rubric of eugenics there were the desirables and the undesirables, and the women of color, and the women with disabilities, were considered to be undesirable. And even though we don’t have a eugenics movement anymore in this country, we still have some of the lasting effects of that movement today.

Olson: This has created a lot of distrust of the mainstream pro-choice movement among communities of color and low-income communities. While mainstream pro-choice advocates continue to focus almost entirely on access to abortion, many women of color are alienated by their unwillingness to address the diversity of women’s reproductive experiences.

Rivera: What communities of color object to is that when people talk about population control, what they are saying is that it’s because low income people and people of color are having so many children, that we are the cause of poverty, that we’re the cause of social ills and crimes, and it’s diverting attention from the true causes which is economic injustice, racism, and social injustice.

Olson: Rivera says when you don’t address the underlying structural causes of social problems, you lose sight of the basic human rights of all women. One group that feels this loss acutely are women in prison.

Susan: In here, there is no yearly pap smear, there’s no check-ups. Nothing like that. You basically have to request these things. So a woman can basically do five or six years in here, and there will never be a pap smear, never be anything like that.

Olson: Susan, which is not her real name, has been in prison since 1995. After finding abnormal cells on her cervix, and two cysts on her ovaries, the prison’s doctor decided t o operate. The only gynecologist serving the nearly four thousand women in the prison assured her that after the operation she would still be able to have children.

Susan: When I came up out of surgery, he told me that he removed two cysts. I think one cyst was on a fallopian tube and he had to partially cut that. But he said that everything else, he did the biopsy, he said everything was fine and that I don’t have cancer. But I have everything else. Well after that, I never got a follow-up. Now, after six months had passed, I had dropped like 60 pounds. After surgery, the pain had increased, and I didn’t know what was going on, and I hadn’t had a menstrual cycle. So then we started debating, I started debating with my doctor. I said, “Wait a minute, are you sure they didn’t take out my ovaries?” He said, “No. You’re just going through surgical menopause.”

Olson: Over the next two years, Susan felt her concerns were ignored, and her requests for additional medical treatment were denied.

Susan: No, I wouldn’t be left with the chance to have children anymore, and why are they treating me as if I still have reproductive organs when they know good and well that it was already removed? And that’s what they found out for me.

Olson: Susan’s case is not unique. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union have reported widespread medical abuse in women’s prisons in the U.S.

Susan: So many women. It’s amazing because women are coming up off the street that have only been incarcerated for 6 months, and maybe go home in another six months. But they’re doing these hysterectomies. Comb biopsies. Ofectomies. They’re doing them like it’s a quota that has to be made. We have a joke around here saying that they use our body parts for cloning or for scientific reasons, or whatever. But for real. The joke is not even funny anymore because it’s starting to seem that way. I can see so many young girls that are now walking up out of here with either no uterus, or half a uterus. It’s like we’re being mutilated in here.

You're listening to “Making Contact,” a production of the National Radio Project. If you’d like more information or for a cassette or CD copy of this program, please call 800-529-5736. That’s 800-529-5736. You can also visit our website at radioproject.org.

Olson: Another issue that people don’t know a lot about is the debate over so-called fetal rights. Lynn Paltrow is the executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, based in New York City. In 1990, Paltrow represented cancer patient named Angela Carter in a landmark court case involving a court-ordered Cesarean section.

Paltrow: Angela Carter was critically ill. She was 25 weeks pregnant. Everyone - there was no disagreement in this case – everyone felt she has fought all her life to stay alive and that’s what she wants to do now. But a hospital neonatologist decided that fetal rights existed to the point where they should get a court order to force Angela to undergo a C-section that could kill her. People were saying, “Don’t worry, the court will never order this woman to undergo a C-section, there’s been testimony it could kill her.” They in fact ordered the C-section, taking the position that she was going to die anyway; that the fetus had more rights than she did. They cut her open. The fetus didn’t survive, and she died within two days, with the C-section listed as a contributing factor.

Olson: The courts ultimately overturned the decision that forced Carter into having the Cesarean section, but it was too late for her. Propelled in part by conservative Christian lobbyists on Capitol Hill, the concept of fetal rights is gaining strength. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act elevates the status of fetus to person. The act is more commonly referred to as “Connor’s Law,” and was voted into law in the wake of the Laci Peterson murder trial. The act was sponsored by Republican congresswoman Melissa Hart from Pennsylvania, and later passed the Senate by just one vote. It was signed into law on April 1, 2004.

In many states, prenatal health programs provide healthcare and nutrition subsidies to women, but only if they’re pregnant. Paltrow says it’s also not unheard of for a hospital to take custody of a woman’s child if they decide she’s an unfit mother.

Paltrow: So, this quite startling notion that there is a legal obligation to provide a perfect pregnancy when you yourself have zero rights to healthcare in America… the government that doesn’t provide health care for its citizens, not criminally liable. The people who fail to provide adequate parental leave and a safe environment for children, not liable. But the woman herself, who is not entitled to safety, housing, healthcare, is somehow supposed to provide her fetus with a perfect environment, is supposed to overcome whatever health problems she has during the nine months of her pregnancy or potentially face criminal charges or the loss of custody of her child.

Olson: Class and race are two motivating factors when deciding whether a woman is fit to be a mother. One example of this type of discrimination is the thousands of Native American children in he 1970s and 80s who were forced into boarding schools or white foster homes against the will of their mothers. Andrea Smith is the co-founder of the group Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She’s also an Assistant Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Smith says this type of unfair treatment has its roots in 19 th century colonialism.

Smith: Women reproduce the next generation, so if you want to destroy a population, you have to destroy women’ abilities to reproduce. And also, women often are taking care of children, so they are often seen as that element that you need to control so that the future generation will accept the colonial project. So, if you look at the history of Native women in particular, for instance, it wasn’t just a policy to say, kill off Indian people in massacres, but it was always the case that Native women were routinely sexually violated and mutilated. And so, the purpose of this was not only to destroy us as a people, but to destroy our sense of being a people.

Olson: Another way to control people, Smith says, is to deny them resources by making them unaffordable. The Hyde Amendment was passed in 1977, just four years after the Roe v. Wade decision and was the first in a decades-long attack on women’s access to safe and legal abortions in the U.S.

Smith: Well, the Hyde amendment basically restricts federal funding for abortion services. So you can’t use Medicare for it, or you can’t, if you’re in the military, you can’t get abortion services. And you particularly can’t get it if you are in Indian Health Services because it’s a federal agency. And this Hyde amendment, I think goes to illustrate both sexism in the racial justice movements, and the racism in the mainstream white dominated reproductive justice movements. Regardless of how you feel about abortion services, it shouldn’t be the case that one group gets discriminated, and has less access to abortion services, and that is essentially what this act does.

Olson: Today, in addition to the ban on federal funding, 33 states have prohibited Medicaid funding for abortions, which means that poor women in particular, will have a harder time getting access to them. According to the National Network of Abortion Funds, as many as one in three women who want to have an abortion are unable to do so because they can’t afford it, add to this the fact that over 80% of counties in the U.S. do not have an abortion clinic, and with parental consent laws, waiting periods, and interstate transit prohibitions, getting an abortion legally has become increasingly difficult.

Music

Olson: As many low-income women of color realize, however, access to abortion is by no means the only issue affecting their reproductive lives. If women live in a polluted environment, they risk losing their ability to have children at all.

Winchester: My name is Isabelle Winchester and I am a mother of three and I have my newborn for four months and a half.

Olson: Isabelle Winchester lives in a largely immigrant community in San Jose, California. She began working as a community organizer with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition after she had five miscarriages she suspects were caused by pollution from the factories in her neighborhood.

Winchester: The doctor never knew what was going on with me. I had never an answer – you know, this is what’s causing your problems. And I was just worried, I was always being seen by a doctor since the first time when I got pregnant. So what was wrong? They said you are healthy. Your blood pressure is fine. Your heart is fine. All my health, generally I was fine. But why the miscarriages were happening, I didn’t know.

Olson: Winchester isn’t just worried about her own ability to have children. She’s also concerned about the impact that pollution will have on future generations. And she believes her concerns are well-founded.

Winchester : I learned that there are a lot of toxins that have short and long-term effects on our bodies. Unfortunately, a lot of these toxins that we have in the neighborhood, they’re really, really long-term toxins. That means, our generations after us are going to be suffering because we are transmitting, since they’re born, we are transmitting all of this illness.

Olson: The idea that we are transmitting toxins from one generation to the next is not a new one. Biologist Rachel Carson wrote about it more than 40 years ago in her 1962 environmental classic, Silent Spring. Incite!’s Andrea Smith calls it environmental racism, and believes it’s clearly linked to reproductive justice.

Smith: Almost 100 percent of uranium mining takes place on or near Indian land. So to just give you an example that illustrates these connections, would be the Marshall Islands, where you see it in its most dramatic form, where the US government just exploded all these nuclear bombs. And they were basically exploded without protecting the residents there. So as a result of that, babies are being born without bones and are called “jellyfish babies”. And pretty much everybody dies prematurely of cancer. The life expectancy went from 70 to 47 years. And many of the communities decided to stop reproducing because they said we will never actually be able to reproduce babies that don’t have major side effects. So it really became a genocidal policy. So that’s where you can clearly see how the effects of environmental racism very clearly target the reproductive rights of indigenous women.

Olson: One of the important things to remember, says Loretta Ross of SisterSong, is that there’s a long history of women of color leading organizing efforts towards reproductive justice: whether by fighting attempts to control women’s fertility in the eugenics movements, or by addressing environmental racism and economic injustice.

Ross: It’s clear that as women of color work on reproductive rights issues they don’t flatten it out, they don’t just talk about it as to have an abortion or not. It really is about to have a life or not. To have full human rights or not. They connect the dots.

Olson: Keeping women in focus will mean widening the lens to include poverty, environmental justice, criminal justice and the other myriad issues that are central to women’s lives. For Making Contact, I’m Sarah Olson.

That's it for this edition of “Making Contact.” Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Alice do Valle, Gopal Dayannini, Kaaryn Gustafson, Rachael Roth, and Ronald Rucker. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio.

“Making Contact” is an independent production, funded primarily by generous gifts from people in the community. We are committed to providing a unique forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you'd like to support our work or if you have ideas for future programs, we'd love to hear from you. For a cassette or CD copy of program number 33-05, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. That's 800-529-5736. You can also visit our website at radioproject.org.

Lisa Rudman is our Executive Director, Tina Rubio, Senior Producer, Justin Beck and Pauline Bartolone, Associate Producers, Dorian Taylor, Communications Manager, Esther Manilla, Outreach Coordinator, Tom Evans, Development Associate, Emily Polk, Production Fellow, Megan Kaiser and Lotten Chan, Production Interns, and I'm your host and Independent Producer, Sarah Olson.