A must-read post by Amanda on what happens when abortion is criminalized and women’s bodies become crime scenes.
For it turns out that “forensic vagina specialist” is a real job in El Salvador–like Lindsay says, the job is basically to be a womb auditor, to make sure that women who had abortions didn’t have the kind where they did it themselves, just the natural, god-given abortions. This is because abortion is illegal in El Salvador. And if you miscarry, you have to submit to an investigation by speculum to make it very, very clear to you that if you think you can be both female and own your own body, you’re sorely mistaken.
The full audio of Rachel Maddow’s interview with Jack Hitt on this subject is here. It’s amazing how little women’s health matters when it’s time to get to punishing the fornicating bitches–even when they have women with ectopic pregnancies on their hands, hospitals are forced to get them to burst before they operate.
Because any other way would be murder!
Amanda compares this to the Duke rape case, and the way that women’s bodies are brutalized, and how that violence is tied up with sexuality.
The prevailing them, of course, is physical humiliation and especially mutiliation. Bad pregnancies mustn’t be interferred with, lest we deprive the sadists of the pleasure of knowing their laws have forced women to endure having the ovaries burst open for no good reason. Strippers are for killing and raping. Only doctors go to prison under abortion bans–that’s because the patriarchs aren’t satisfied with orange jumpsuits for women who fuck. They must pay in having their ovaries burst, their vaginas split open. Nothing less that blood and bruises and being treated like your body is a crime scene will do.
The other prevailing theme is that when you’re a woman, anyone can do whatever they want to your body and expect the patriarchy to come running to their defense. Oh yeah, anyone but you. You do with “your” body what you like, and you’re a fucking criminal.
Blac(k)ademic takes this a step further and asks, How much am I worth? While women’s bodies are all negotiated in this system, there is still a heirarchy of whose bodies matter more. Guess who’s at the bottom.
Historical context is important here. First, the womb-patrol strategy has been employed before to disasterous results. Tens of thousands of women died because of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s extreme anti-choice policies, where reproduction was considered a patriotic duty.
From 1966 onward, procreation became a civic duty for all fertile Romanian women. As encouragement, Ceausescu bestowed extraordinary titles upon “dutiful,” childbearing women — “Heroine Mother” for having 10 or more children, “Maternal Glory” for having seven to nine children, and the “Maternity Medal” for having five or six children. Between 1967 and 1972, more than two million “children of the decree” were born.
Women’s menstrual cycles were thoroughly tracked, and women could be taken in for surprise gynecological exams — just to make sure that they weren’t using birth control or terminating pregnancies. Childless couples and unmarried men and women over the age of 25 were subject to a special tax. Every miscarriage was investigated. Birth control was impossible to obtain.
Naturally, many women turned to illegal abortions, and tens of thousands of them died. Deaths from these illegal procedures accounted for 80% of the Romanian maternal mortality rate. State-run institutions were over-run with children. Romania is still seeing the fall-out from this regime, as abortion remains a primary method of birth control and few women use contraceptives.
So this has all been done before, and we’ve seen what it looks like.
The Duke case, too, draws on the same patterns of violence against black women perpetuated by white men and a society that sees black women’s bodies as pathological. Slavery is perhaps the most obvious example, as black women were routinely raped and sexually terrorized by white slaveowners. But in discussing sexual violence and the interplay between that violence and reproductive control, we’d be missing a big part of the story if we ignored the fact that the history of reproductive “rights” has been quite different for women of color than for white women.
The concept of voluntary motherhood, upon which the reproductive rights movement is premised, has simply not been a reality for women of color, as their right to be mothers has been systematically and thoroughly compromised. Angela Davis (all typos and mistakes are mine):
As for the abortion rights campaign itself, how could women of color fail to grasp its urgency? They were far more familiar than their white sisters with the murderously clumsy scalpels of inept abortionists seeking profit in illegality. In New York, of instance, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions in that state, some 80 percent of the deaths caused by illegal abortions involved Black and Puerto Rican women. Immediately afterward, women of color received close to half of all the legal abortions. If the abortion rights campaign of the early 1970s needed to be remined that women of color wanted desperately to escape the back-room quack abortionists, they should have also realized that these same women were not about to express pro-abortion sentiments. They were in favor of abortion rights, which did not mean that they were proponents of abortion. When Black and Latina women resort to abortions in such large numbers, the stories they tell are not so much about their desire to be free of their pregnancy, but rather about the miserable social conditions which dissuade them from bringing new lives into the world.
She goes on to discuss Black women’s abortions during slavery, and the story of one fugitive slave who killed her daughter and then attempted suicide.
She rejoiced that the girl was dead — “now she would never know what a woman suffers as a slave” — and pleaded to be tried for murder. “I will go singing to the gallows rather than be returned to slavery!”
Davis:
Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrences during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom.
During the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty. As if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wagers, better schools, etc., etc. This assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. The campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.
These conditions were exacerbated by anti-abortion measures like the 1977 Hyde Amendment which targeted poor women and women of color.
Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana and Native American Indian women, together with their impoverished white sisters, were thus effecitvely divested of the right to legal abortions. SInce surgical sterilizations, funded by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, remained free on demand, more and more poor women have been forced to opt for permanent infertility.
And there is the second issue too often ignored by mainstream pro-choice voices: The history of forced sterilizations and the heirarchies of whose bodies are good enough to reproduce, along with differing understandings of what birth control means for the rich and the poor.
More and more, it was assumed within birth control circles that poor women, Black and immigrant alike, had a “moral obligation to restrict the size of their families.” What was demanded as a “right” for the privileged came to be interpreted as a “duty” for the poor.”
Forced sterilizations and ripping children away from their families amounted to cultural genocide for some segments of the population. Poor women, particularly women of color, continue to be coerced into sterilization.
At first the Department of Health, Education and Welfare claimed that approximately 16,000 women and 8,000 men had been sterilized in 1972 under the auspices of federal programs. Later, hwoever, these figures underwent a drastic revision. Carl Shultz, director of HEW’s Population Affairs Office, estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 sterilizations had actually been funded that year by the federal government. During Hitler’s Germany, incidentally, 250,000 sterilizations were carried out under the Nazis’ Hereditary Health Law. Is it possible that the record of the Nazies, throughout the years of their reign, may have been almost equaled by the U.S. government-funded sterilizations in the space of a single year?
Given the historical genocide inflicted on the native population of the United States, one would assume that Native American Indians would be exempted from the government’s sterilization campaign. But according to Dr. Connie Uri’s testimony in a Senate committee hearing, by 1976 some 24 percent of all Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized.
…
According to a National Fertility Study conducted in 1970 by Princeton University’s Office of Population Control, 20 percent of all married Black women have been permanently sterilized. Approximately the same percentage of Chicana women had been rendered surgically infertile. Moreover, 43 percent of the women sterilized through federally subsidized programs were Black.
Before this gets taken completely out of context by anti-choicers, it’s important to emphasize that Davis is not arguing that the pro-choice movement is grounded in eugenics, or that pro-choice white people want to wipe people of color off the face of the earth. She is pointing out the fact that, because our histories differ, many women of color view the reproductive rights movement in a very different light than do white women. Those histories are colored by racism and privilege, and the modern movements continue to be reflective of that.
I bring this all up because evaluating the anti-abortion movement or the Duke rape case on their own misses the bigger picture. Women’s bodies have had systematic violence done to them for centuries, but how that violence is carried out is often a projection of how much, or in which ways, that woman is valued (or de-valued). Forced sterilizations and compulsory pregnancy/illegalization of abortion are not opposites; they’re two sides of the same coin. Forced pregnancy, coercive sterilization and rape are not separate issues; they’re deeply intertwined, and wrapped up in our ideas of female sexuality, ownership of the body, and rights to personal autonomy. But forced pregnancy, coercive/forced sterilization, reproductive rights and rape mean varying things in varying contexts and with different women. The common factor is that in all these cases, a more privileged class uses its power to negotiate, control, and harm the female body, reminding women that we lack even the rights to the one thing which should belong fully to us.
Apparently the cover story of the New York Times magazine this Sunday will be a look at a country that fully criminalizes abortion. I’m preparing myself now.