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Episode 19: The fight for bodily autonomy
70 Plays8 days ago
Globally our bodily autonomy is under attack. The right to control your body and what happens to it is being eroded by the new far right movements, in alliance with religious reactionaries. At a recent ACR meeting Paris Wilder and Echo Fortune talked about bodily autonomy from reproductive rights through to gender transition and why we need to get organised around this issues in a serious way.
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Transcript
Pro-Natalist Agenda and Declining Birth Rates
00:00:00
Speaker
So I'm going to be speaking about the fight for reproductive justice and why pro-choice isn't enough. If you haven't completely given up on following the new news, you'll see a pro-natalist agenda being pushed in the UK and in the US.
00:00:15
Speaker
Pro-natalism is an ideology that promotes the reproduction of humans and also promotes women's primary role as giving birth to boost the population. Because of its dual definition, it's picked up by not just the conservative right, but also by liberal centrists. This includes British legacy media like The Guardian discussing what needs to be done about declining birth rates.
00:00:39
Speaker
As well as the talk of declining birth rates, you've got radicalised young men, incels and the like, ranting about male loneliness epidemic due to women's reluctance to do their duty and settle down with these men.
Illegal Abortion Pills and Reproductive Justice
00:00:51
Speaker
There's been a worrying increase in investigations of women in Britain suspected of illegally administering abortion pills after having unexpected miscarriages. Gender critical activists are being funded by groups like the Conservative Political Action Coalition to investigate ending Gillick's competence to women Children from the hateful trans agenda, meanwhile, slyly critiquing dangerous contraceptives at the same time. For those who don't know, Gillette's competence is the legal concept for assessing whether a minors are competent enough to receive medical care without their parents' consent. And it's used mainly by underage cis women to get contraceptives.
00:01:30
Speaker
Nigel Farage spoken openly about the dangers of late abortion terms. Donald Trump's administration continues to belittle women without children, promising to afford more boat voting power to those with families. And Elon Musk has said that the declining birth rate is a bigger risk to civilization than global warming. All of these things are a part of an attack on reproductive rights and women's liberation. For the last few decades, the fight for reproductive rights has been one of pro-choice. and focus mainly on abortion. However, only defending the rights we have now does not allow us to demand more.
00:02:03
Speaker
So today I want to speak about the reasons why just being pro-choice does not go far enough and how as socialist feminists we must move back to more radical demands for reproductive justice in light of these new pro-natalist conservative forces.
Reproductive Justice vs. Reproductive Rights
00:02:17
Speaker
So what is reproductive justice? The three pillars of reproductive justice are the right to an abortion, the right to carry children, and the right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment.
00:02:29
Speaker
They were coined by a group of 12 black women activists in the 1990s in the United States after the group experienced frustration at the lack of consideration for the experiences of racialized people around the topic of becoming a mother.
00:02:42
Speaker
Reproductive justice differs from reproductive rights in that it is based on liberation through the abolition of structures that prevent the safe and healthy continuation of human reproduction, rather than just the rights we have now under our current capitalist system. The issue with only focusing on rights is that it assumes equality and equity has been achieved for all, but as we'll explore, this is far from the case.
00:03:05
Speaker
Reproductive justice fights for abortion rights, but it couples it with other radical liberation and abolitionist ideas, as well as the basic pillars of socialism, the provisions of housing, health care, education, etc.
00:03:19
Speaker
Reproductive justice asks us to consider the reproductive labor and the power structures behind having children.
Reproductive Labor and Capitalism
00:03:24
Speaker
Without this, having children becomes something of an indulgence rather than something that is provided unpaid at great cost by members of society, women, um for the good of capitalism.
00:03:35
Speaker
When it is framed as only a choice, it seems reasonable that is that it is largely unpaid. For example, not paying mandatory maternity or paternity leave, free childcare, free healthcare and housing, etc.,
00:03:48
Speaker
Abortion often takes the centre stage in our current discussion of reproductive rights. It's always been linked to religion and morality, so this is the lens in which the majority of us view it. However, if you put that to one side, we can see that the religious angle is often used to hide a deeper agenda around the social division of labour, and white supremacy.
00:04:08
Speaker
The religious debate has the inherent flaw in that there is no explicit condemnation of abortion in the Bible, only a strong view on the sanctity of life. When we strip away the moral element of abortion, we can start to explore the idea that abortion restrictions serve the capitalist class by guaranteeing a new generation of workers to be exploited in order to serve the capitalist profit demands.
Reproductive Rights, Religion, and Political Agendas
00:04:30
Speaker
The control of reproductive rights has become a key right-wing organizing tool and wedge issue used to split the working class down the lines of religion and also excite an evangelical base with large amounts of money and organizing networks. Additionally, when we view the issue through the lens of white supremacy, we can see how reproductive control stands in for the previous iterations of segregation of people of color. White supremacist groups have always had ties to the anti-abortion sentiment.
00:04:57
Speaker
Dr. David Gunn and Dr. John Britton were two reproductive healthcare care doctors in the US who were murdered by anti-abortion extremists. with the express intention of stopping them from performing abortions. Guns Killer was allegedly being brainwashed by John Burr, a member of the Ku Klux
Reproductive Labor and Systemic Racism
00:05:13
Speaker
Klan. Today, large anti-abortion groups like the March for Life in the US, whose UK division marched on London last weekend, still have links to white supremacy groups like Patriot Front, who joined the US march in 2022.
00:05:29
Speaker
To examine further the declining birth rate narrative, we must look at reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is the mainly unpaid labor needed to reproduce and maintain human life. And under capitalism, this free labor is often extracted from women. This includes not only the process of gestation, but also the household labor looking after the child and their spouse.
00:05:49
Speaker
With unpaid labor at home, the capitalist is free to wait it pay its workers the minimum wage needed to cover the basic necessities, in turn, keeping production costs low and maximizing profit. Whilst the low birth rate narrative is framed as a right wing issue, neoliberal centralists also buy into it due to their investment in the capitalist system. Profits rely on a new generation of workers to exploit, naturally invoking fear of the state of economy if the birth rate drops.
00:06:15
Speaker
Due to this, they are unable to effectively critique and change the material conditions which make reproduction unappealing or impossible for many. When these material conditions under which we're expected to raise children become unattainable, abortion bans become a necessary means of forcing reproduction. Therefore, it is imperative that the capitalist class be in control of the means of reproduction as well as the means of production.
00:06:39
Speaker
In England and the US, we see mass incarceration and immigration restrictions as well as a hateful uprising of street violence against people of color.
Intersectionality in Reproductive Justice
00:06:47
Speaker
This is motivated by fears of being numerically and politically overwhelmed by people of color. This is a classic white soup this is classic white supremacist thinking, and it is the same one behind the declining birth rate fears. Fighting systemic racism must be practiced and cannot be separated from reproductive justice.
00:07:05
Speaker
When we speak only of pro-choice and abortions with regard to reproductive rights, we leave out the horrifying history of forced sterilizations and dangerous reproductive health care for people of color that's been used to restrict reproduction and ensure patriarchal white dominance.
00:07:20
Speaker
In the UK, the sinking is ingrained in the history of reproductive health care, with Marie Stokes, founder of the first UK family planning clinic, being a prominent eugenicist, believing that mixing races led to inferior stock. She proposed that mixed race people be sterilized at birth during the 1920s.
00:07:40
Speaker
In the US, in the 1970s, Puerto Rican women were the most likely to be sterilized in the world. in the nineteen Also, yeah, in the 1960s, US groups like the Indian Healthcare care Service started providing family planning to Native American communities with the express intent of lowering the birth rate. And over a third of women sterilized in the US were misled to believe that the procedure was not permanent.
00:08:05
Speaker
The current discussions around reproductive rights also admit the suffering of women in the penal system who have been subjected to large amounts of reproductive abuse at the hands of the justice system and male prison guards. Due to their status as prisoners, women in the US have experienced forced sterilizations, as well as being coerced into being test subjects for dangerous contraceptives in order to avoid jail time. There have been even been cases of women's sentences being reduced if they agree to be sterilised.
00:08:33
Speaker
Today in Britain, Level Up, a gender justice campaign group, have been fighting for five years to stop pregnant women being imprisoned after two infant mortalities occurred in yeah UK prisons. The group fights for the basic demand that prison is no place for a pregnant person due to unsafe conditions. Additionally, if the child survives prison, it is taken from its mother after birth, which is traumatic for both the mother and the child.
00:08:57
Speaker
When we relate these practices to the criminalisation of women via abortion laws, we can see how the reproductive restrictions... can be used to criminalise certain kinds of women and how and also how the penile system itself can contribute to the white supremacist project via the treatment of female criminals. Most crimes committed by women are below six months and for things like shoplifting or FESH. We've seen an increase in anti-FESH devices being put onto baby formula, showing the desperate positions that parents find themselves in today, yet when they are part of the penile system, they are dehumanised and their right to basic safety during and after pregnancy is
Bodily Autonomy and Marxist Perspectives
00:09:38
Speaker
denied. This is of course something we also see in the struggle for trans liberation regarding safety of trans women in prisons.
00:09:46
Speaker
Reproductive justice must also be a pillar in disability justice. It's our society, um in our society disabled people are constantly made to feel that they are worthless with assisted suicide bills being passed at the same time as disabled people having their benefits cut.
00:10:01
Speaker
Sterilisations and abortions are still touted as better alternatives than raising a disabled child. Reproductive justice must be included in the wider question around bodily autonomy and must fight for the abolition of these disgusting eugenicist practices.
00:10:15
Speaker
Under our capitalist system, if you are unable to work easily and without assistance in the workplace, You are considered disabled and cruelly tossed aside. If you cannot work, you're expected to find your own way through the world, but don't expect the state to offer any financial support. If you are no good to capitalism, you are no good for breeding.
00:10:33
Speaker
This another reason why this is another reason why we must ensure we talk about justice outside of just abortion restrictions. For some, abortions are encouraged and at worst forced.
00:10:45
Speaker
So in conclusion, we must ensure that our fight for reproductive freedom is diverse and intersectional. Thinking about our actions through the framework of reproductive justice allows us allows us to engage with this more than just reproductive rights. Being pro-choice has been co-opted by white liberal feminism, meaning the oppression felt by women of color is often overlooked. The fight for reproductive justice must be spoken about in a larger context of police and prison abolition. Criminalization is a process of dehumanization. Reproductive justice cannot be won without prison abolition, which sees prisoners and as a stain on society to be further exploited and prevented from reproducing.
00:11:24
Speaker
We must also find the courage to support those who break the law and stand up for what they believe is right. Previous fights for reproductive health care have been won on the basis that doctors practicing abortions didn't stop when they were told to.
00:11:36
Speaker
When we argue for reproductive justice, we have to look beyond just provision and delve deeper into what it really means to have access to something. It's not enough to just argue for contraceptives if they're not safe.
00:11:47
Speaker
It's not enough to argue for legal abortion if the clinics are hard to come by or not free. It's not enough to rely on those um just those who carry the baby. What is cis men doing for reproductive rights? Why is there still no male contraceptive pill available?
00:12:02
Speaker
We must fight for the full decriminalisation of abortion in Britain, but we also cannot neglect the importance of fighting for what we need to live comfortably out on the streets and in our community. And we must build solidarity with other liberation movements for marginalised groups who have suffered behind the scenes and have been forgotten by the pro-choice movement.
00:12:27
Speaker
Thank you, Paris. Our next speaker will be Echo, and Echo will speak for around 15 minutes. I'm going to look specifically at bodily autonomy rather than reproductive justice. I concur completely with Paris's assessment of reproductive justice as it fits within bodily autonomy as a framework.
00:12:47
Speaker
I think this is paramount to our politics. I think it's more fundamental than a lot of us often recognize on the revolutionary left. Bodily autonomy is an incredibly rich intersectional territory for us. It unites all of the oppressions, but it also unites oppression as a category with exploitation as a category. Fundamentally, the exploited are also denied their bodily autonomy in the way that they're exploited, in the way that they must sell, in the way that we all must sell our labor in order to reproduce our lives, in order to be able to
00:13:23
Speaker
gain housing and food and other basic life necessities. Our conception of freedom as Marxists is what many liberals would recall a positive vision of freedom.
00:13:37
Speaker
In fact, we might even say that the negative view of freedom is something of a myth. ah Freedom isn't really material, isn't really substantial unless it can be expressed in the world.
00:13:51
Speaker
And so this idea of freedom from, this idea of ah these kind of abstract freedoms that liberals brought out, is is kind of a way of obscuring the reality of many of our lives. If we don't have the time or the resources or the capacities to live our lives in the ways that we want and to exercise our control over our bodies in the way that we want, then we're no real sense free.
00:14:21
Speaker
Bodily autonomy unites not only various different types of reproductive justice, as outlined by Paris, and and the different ways that different oppressed groups experience those, um but also um different fundamental types of oppression. For example, disabled people are denied bodily autonomy when they aren't given a right to a means to live in a community without facing the oppressive social barriers of disablism.
00:14:53
Speaker
People who face racialized disadvantages because of racial oppressions are likewise denied their bodily autonomy when they're harassed by the police, when they have less access to to health care, and so on and so forth.
00:15:09
Speaker
Trans people are frequently denied access to our bodily autonomy. And in fact, it could even be said that the only time that we're able to access so-called gender affirming therapies is when we don't choose them. And this is true for both trans and intersex people quite quite across the board.
00:15:33
Speaker
Within this framework, if you understand bodily autonomy as intersectional, you understand intersectionality as a qualitative and not a quantitative issue. And by that, I mean, there's a liberal framing of intersectionality as a kind of tick boxing exercise where you list different oppressions and you make you sort of trying to find out who has the most oppressions or how oppressions are sort of accumulated in aggregate.
00:15:58
Speaker
The real tradition of intersectionality that we're interested in in Marxists, and I think that you can find beautifully illustrated in in many Marxist humanist texts, like the Compahee River Collective's original statement,
00:16:13
Speaker
is one that looks at the ways that different oppressions and different expressions in tandem with experience of exploitation in capitalist society create qualitatively unique experiences. So for example, trans misogyny is not just the accumulation of transphobia and misogyny, but a unique oppression experienced by trans women as trans women. And if it's experienced by somebody else, it's because they are treated as a trans woman in some sense, and this can in fact happen to some gay men and so on and so forth.
00:16:48
Speaker
Similarly with misogynoir, it isn't simply a experience of um racism and misogyny, but an experience of the mistreatment and hatred directed specifically at trans, sorry, at black women as a uniquely oppressed group within society.
00:17:08
Speaker
And the framework of bodily autonomy, because it links up to all of these oppressions and because you can see the qualitative dimensions as they're materially realized through the denial of real positive freedom in people's lives, opens up the possibility of seeing this on an individual by individual basis, but then broadening out the social basis that unites all of these things together.
00:17:37
Speaker
ah I believe that we need a perspective that tries to both listen to those unique experiences as encountered by people within those positionalities, within those qualitative positionalities, but then understands the social basis for all of those unique experiences as something fundamentally shared and attempts to link those experiences though that social basis up in order to create a broader mass movement that understands fully that everyone's access to positive liberty, to freedom in any genuine and real sense is dependent on everyone else's access to freedom in any genuine and real sense. And I think this is why Marxism is properly a humanist tradition.
00:18:21
Speaker
and properly a universalist tradition, but not in the liberal sense of universalism that sort of touts universalism as an abstract ideal that it never realizes and then always holds those who are excluded from humanism, from excluded from that universality as responsible for their own exclusion, but rather a universalism that holds those who are most embraced by liberal humanism, by the common conception of universality,
00:18:49
Speaker
people who are seen as in quote unquote normal within that framework because they are precisely privileged within these systems as the ones who have the task of undermining their positionality and of bringing in um the oppressed into a real universality and to do this in part by understanding that the social positionalities of the oppressed and of the exploited are actually epistemologically I mean in terms of like using big words, are actually better positioned to understand the situations in which they're in because of their positions within within these frameworks.
00:19:30
Speaker
it' So it is in that sense, um I think, incumbent on all of us to find ways as Marxists to realize a society that has just a greater aggregate of bodily autonomy. And I think this is a very radical vision. think bodily autonomy extends to forms and ways of living that would challenge a lot of our conceptions of what is normal, what is natural, what is right. At various points, transness as a category he has just done that. It's becoming more accepted broadly. But I think that we need to keep looking at the margins of our movements and keep understanding the various ways in which people are trying to self-realize
00:20:14
Speaker
and flourish according to their own criteria of of what they want and and who they are. yeah um I think there's a tendency even within Marxism to fall into the kind of ahistorical naturalization that cuts against bodily autonomy and has always worked to limit rights from reproductive rights to the rights to take hormone therapy, to the rights of disabled people to fully access society and so on and so forth.
00:20:48
Speaker
I'll leave it there.