There’s a sign on the wall of a local clinic which says, according to my paraphrasing memory:
You have the right to decide if you want to have children or not, and to determine their number, timing, and spacing.
The clinic provides reproductive health services to low income members of the community, and plays an important role in ensuring that people have access to everything from safer sex supplies to prenatal care. I’m a big fan of theirs, and I’m a big fan of that sign, which I think embodies the core of reproductive rights and justice. Everyone has the right to make decisions about their own bodies, and one of the core values of the reproductive rights movement should be supporting people in this. Supporting all people, leading all kinds of lives, making all kinds of decisions.
Educating people so they can make more informed choices. Helping people access services to allow them to carry out the choices they are making, whether that’s a decision to get an abortion or to have a child or to get some birth control. Fighting sexual assault and rape as violations to bodily autonomy.
Recognising that while a choice might not be one you would make personally, you can still support someone in making that choice, and you can still enable that person’s ability to make decisions freely. As soon as we start making decisions about the ‘right’ kind of families and the ‘right’ number of children and the ‘right’ number of abortions to have, the concept of reproductive justice starts to fall apart. Who decides these things? Who is the arbiter of whether someone is making the ‘right’ choices?
There’s one group that gets left out of a lot of reproductive justice discussions: People with disabilities.
I’ve seen the decision to have a child with disabilities compared to child abuse, whether we’re talking about a child with a prenatal diagnosis, or a child born to parents with an increased risk of having a child with disabilities. I’ve seen disabled parents treated as though they are committing child abuse simply by being disabled, and being parents. I’ve seen people act like people with disabilities don’t need access to sexual education, because obviously we don’t have sex. I very rarely see any of these actions labeled as what they are, which is ableism.
Denial of reproductive rights to people with disabilities is ableism. Denial of our needs in the reproductive justice discussion is also ableism. Telling us we don’t belong at the table is ableism. We deserve reproductive justice too, and we have needs that are not being addressed by the current reproductive rights movement.
One of the problems with attempting to bring disability into reproductive justice conversations is that people act like the issues we cite are things of the past; they aren’t important, because they don’t happen anymore. People with disabilities are never involuntarily sterilised to prevent them from having children. Children are never taken from disabled parents. People are never shamed for deciding to continue pregnancies when a prenatal diagnosis indicates that the baby will be born with disabilities.
Well, these things are not in the past. They are happening right now.
A few recent cases from here in the United States: A child was taken from blind parents, solely because her parents were blind. It took intervention on the part of the National Federation of the Blind to restore the child to her home. The children of a disabled woman were denied visitation rights on the grounds that it would upset them to see their mother. A quadriplegic woman was told she couldn’t be a good parent. These are just three recent, high profile cases where parents were told they couldn’t care for their children because of their disabilities. Believe me, there’s more where that came from.
As for forcible sterilisation, the Ashley X case attracted a great deal of attention in feminist communities, but it’s far from the only one. Last week, we linked to a story about drugs that suppress sexual desire being used in autism ‘treatment.’ In Central and South America, forcible sterilisation, particularly of Indigenous women, is widespread and the United States has a history of sterilising Indigenous women as well. Tessa Savicki, a Massachusetts mother of nine, is suing after a hospital sterilised her without her consent during an unrelated medical procedure in 2006.
If sterilisation of people with disabilities isn’t a problem anymore, how come someone wrote a bill in 2009 to bar forced sterilisation of people with disabilities?
In a conversation at dinner the other night, I had to physically restrain myself when one of the people at the table attempted to argue that a mutual acquaintance was being ‘irresponsible’ by having a child at her age, ‘because it might be born disabled.’ This is not the only conversation like that I’ve witnessed, on or offline.
For people with disabilities, the reproductive justice discussion is extremely personal. People debate whether we should be allowed to have children, people believe that compromising our bodily autonomy is acceptable for the ‘greater good,’ and people debate whether or not we should have been born. For people who were born with disabilities, hearing people claim that parents having disabled children is akin to child abuse is rather appalling.
The thing about reproductive justice is that it’s not just for the people you like and the people you agree with. It’s not just for young, nondisabled, cisgender women who want to use birth control right now and have access to abortions, with the possibility of having children later. It’s also for parents of large families. It’s also for disabled parents. It’s also for religious parents. It’s also for disabled children. It’s also for people who are not interested in having children. It’s for everyone living in a body, no matter what kind of body it is, no matter what kind of life that person leads. Reproductive justice, true justice, should be all-encompassing.
Excluding people with disabilities from the conversation by either being actively hostile or dismissing our concerns is not reproductive justice.
Thank you so much for this.
Thank you so much.
This quote, “a mutual acquaintance was being ‘irresponsible’ by having a child at her age, ‘because it might be born disabled.’” and similar things I’ve heard during vaccination debates all seem to point to one sentiment – better to die, or not be born at all, than to be disabled. It hurts a lot.
Great post. This hits home personally. Even though I don’t want children, my family have already decided they will take them from me if I do. Notice that my boyfriend is not mentioned in these conversations (he jokes that he should become a member of Fathers for Justice).
On another level, reproductive justice is for everyone, hits home because it is the reason I shifted to pro-choice from pro-life. I dwill personally never have an abortion, but other women can make this decision for themselves.
Thanks so much for a wonderful post. I’m going to share it with the co-chairs of my school’s chapter of Med Students For Choice and see if it inspires some ideas for events outside our usual focus.
OK, this post rules. Thanks.
I had a child before discovering that I’m autistic, and your post makes me reflect upon how I would have felt had I known beforehand. Instead of feeling joyful and passionate about bringing a child into the world, I would have hesitated…felt guilty…justified and explained myself to everyone…and otherwise felt that I wasn’t “good enough.” All this despite the fact that there was a child who was meant to be borne through me, and she’s wonderful, and she has no problem with who I am. It makes me sick to think that the culture would have taught me such shame that I might have missed out on the best experience of my life.
I don’t have anything to add besides: This is a fabulous post. Thank you. Very Much.