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- [00:00]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello everyone, and welcome to academic life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am honored to be joined by Dr. Marlene Freed and Dr. Loretta Ross, who are the co authors of Abortion and Reproductive An Essential Guide for Resistance. Welcome to the show, professors.
- [01:32]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Thanks for having me.
- [01:33]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Thank you.
- [01:34]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you are both here and that we get to learn about your book from you both. Before we do that, I'd like to invite you both to introduce yourselves. Loretta, maybe we start with you.
- [01:45]
Dr. Loretta Ross
My name is Loretta Ross. I'm an associate professor at Smith College. I've been a human rights and social justice activist for over 50 years. And I'm one of the 12 black women who co created the theory of reproductive justice. And a glad and happy partner with Marlene Gerber Fried that I'll turn it over to.
- [02:06]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Hi everyone. Thank you for having us, Christina. And for all of you who are listening, but we can't see you, it's a pleasure to be talking to you. I am an emeritus professor at Hampshire College, which is a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. I was a professor there for almost 40 years and have been a professor for even longer than that. I'm a single child. I'm a First generation college student, actually a first generation of education past the eighth grade in my family, and I was raised in Philadelphia and have lived in the Boston area for many years now. My academic degree is in philosophy, although I'm not sure that any group of philosophers would claim me at this point. When I taught a course in women in philosophy at Dartmouth College many years ago, the philosophy department convened a meeting to discuss whether women in philosophy was philosophy. So there we go. I came to abortion rights and reproductive justice through the, like many people of my generation, through the social and human rights movements of the late 1960s and 70s, against the war in Vietnam, civil rights movement, and the women's liberation movement. And those movements have really shaped my subsequent academic and political career. And I guess one thing to say is that Lorena and I both often were described as scholar activists. For us, the activism is the prominent flashing red thing that we are.
- [04:11]
Dr. Loretta Ross
I often say that activism is the art of making your life matter, and I like to think that Marlene and I embody that.
- [04:21]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I'm curious about your own path through higher ed, Loretta. Marlene gave us a blueprint of hers. How did you find your way from college years to where you are now? Does it surprise you where you ended up?
- [04:38]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Well, my college career was a stuttering one. I first went to college at 16, to Howard University on a scholarship, but I dropped out at 19, and I did not reenter college until I was 48, and I graduated with a bachelor's degree at 55. And then I did some graduate work at Emory University. But before I completed that, I was asked to teach, and I've gotten to an academic career since then. So no one is more surprised than me that I've ended up spending the last years of my life in academia, because when you're a college dropout at 19, that dream never feels real to you. But I was invited to offer within the academy the lived experiences I had as a community and feminist activist. And so it's been very rewarding. And I love teaching and touching the young minds and preparing them for the struggle against fascism today.
- [05:44]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I appreciate all of these stories across all of these episodes because they offer so many windows into how people navigated higher ed, how they figured out their pathway forward. We're here today because of your book, Abortion and Reproductive An Essential Guide for Resistance. In the preface, you both share how you came to decide to write this book, the political climate at the time, and quite a few things about your own personal life for listeners who haven't yet seen a copy of the book. Can you share with them what you'd like about what inspired you to write the book?
- [06:22]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
We started the book in the first Trump administration, and we were bothered, struck upset by what was going on at that point, which was only the tip of a very deep iceberg, as we now know. But we were particularly struck by the fact that so many white women had voted for Trump and while at the same time purporting to care about the very rights that and his administration was hell bent on getting rid of. And that's been true both elections. I think the other thing is reproductive justice is a relatively new concept, and many people in our own movement, as well as people outside our movement, don't really understand it. And again, for us, understanding the centrality of race, white supremacy, and the breadth of reproductive issues is essential. You can't really understand what's going on with abortion unless you really see it in this broader frame. And so the push for us was to present that so that you didn't need to have a PhD in reproductive justice or reproductive anything. What you needed is to have a lens for understanding and looking at the world. I kick it to you, Loretta.
- [08:00]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Well, I just echo everything Marlene said. As a black woman, I know that if you don't understand racial politics, you don't understand gender politics anywhere in the world because the two are so intersectional. And then you layer on their issues of class, issues of citizenship, issues of religion, et cetera, et cetera. You really have to use an intersectional lens in order to understand how people are denied the right to control their bodies and for what reasons, who manipulating the policies, the access to services, who are. Who actually is encouraged to procreate and who is discouraged from procreating and why. And so reproductive justice addresses those. And we do have a concern because a lot of people are using the term reproductive justice without an intersectional analysis. And so we wanted to make sure that we could offer the criteria, the history, the understanding that everything you care about when it comes to bodily autonomy and controlling your right to have children, et cetera, is related to race, class, gender, neoliberal capitalism, et cetera.
- [09:28]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
If we may add something, especially because I know you have a global audience, the tendency, for a very long time in the United States politics around abortion was to see it as a single issue. It was not connected to this broader frame. And that is actually not the case in much of the rest of the world, where people have histories of fighting for human rights and against dictatorships and against colonialism. So in some ways, reproductive justice is. Is a global concept, but it was especially important to bring it to the United States and to be pushing for it here, where people's lens was just so narrow. So I think that that's important. And also, just in a nutshell, reproductive justice, in a quick little way, is the right to have children when you want to, and the right not to have children if you don't want to, the right to raise children in safety and in caring and loving environments on your own terms, and the right to bodily autonomy. So four principles, essentially. You could say the last one is embedded in the first three.
- [10:53]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I appreciate that. The fourth one is separate also, because I think sometimes we don't say the quiet part out loud, and then that's the part we lose control of.
- [11:02]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Right. And it's also, for us, that's the bridge to LBGTQ rights and to so many other things, and to immigration rights. It's that last thing that Loretta said of why are Childbearing is a privilege for many, not a right that is guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. It is a human right, but it's not a basic right in the US So it's really important to shout that one.
- [11:34]
Dr. Loretta Ross
And it's also important to say that reproductive justice rests upon the global human rights framework. And the United States not only manages to commit reproductive injustice on its own population, but we have disproportionate control over countries around the world, particularly those that are dependent on aid from the United States, which is, of course, why we're looking at the unnecessary deaths that the Trump administration is causing right now with the shutting down of usaid. And so we need to really build and strengthen this global movement for reproductive justice, not only because of what happens domestically in the United States, but the fact that we can cause such misery and death around the world because of our disproportionate economic and military power.
- [12:32]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book offers a different framework from the one that many people are familiar with. You mentioned human rights. There's a framing often in the US of what are legal rights. And you point out in several places in the book that by focusing on what is a human right, we are getting closer to reproductive justice and to humane treatment of people. Because focusing on legal rights in many ways moves the conversation where it doesn't need to go.
- [13:06]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Well, one of the peculiarities of how people approach human rights is that they tend to see it in a way that it underperforms. When you have lawyers leaning around trying to achieve and protect human rights, they have a tendency to only see its legal dimension. But as a human rights activist, I believe the strongest use of human rights, and the first should be its moral dimensions, the defining of what human beings deserve and are entitled to. Because people won't fight for rights they don't know that they have. And so we have to talk about human rights through a moral lens, human rights through a political lens. And only then, once we get the laws and the policies and the standards that human beings deserve, can then we adjudicate it, take it to the courts, take it to legal rights. But when we lead with the legal dimension, the legal framework, we always lose, because human rights by definitions are limits on the power of governments and corporations and individuals to abuse people. And most of those powerful entities don't want limits to be placed on their power.
- [14:26]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
So, which is why the choice framework, I realize we haven't named that yet, which has been the way of seeing abortion rights for many years, is just totally inadequate. It's choices for whom? Choices within what constraints? Choices relying on. What else do you need in order to be able to make choices? It's not like we're against people having choices. We're in favor of everyone being able to make the most profound decisions about their bodies and their lives.
- [15:02]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And the book talks about how problematic the pro life versus pro choice framework debate is, that it unnecessarily pits a duality rather than bringing everyone into a community of care and affirming everyone's rights.
- [15:19]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And you need to be able to talk past those blinders. I remember years ago, our abortion rights group was participating in a women's health fair, and there was a group of women whose religion taught them that abortion was wrong. And so they how was it, how was this fair going to be able to hold both of us? And we had to actually get to the underlying issues of controlling your own body and your entitlement to health care, your entitlement to what you need to do in order to make the best decisions for yourself and your family. And in the end, we were both there. We didn't persuade the other, we didn't change their minds, but we were able to coexist in a community of care and well being.
- [16:19]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You also give a example in the book Marlene, of a mother who called you and she was Catholic and her daughter needed an abortion. And because of the kind of framing that you explained that she was trained in, she didn't even know where to turn or where to go. But with reproductive justice, people can reach out to you because it's an inclusive conversation. And she did. But what you point out in the book is that she believed that to save her daughter, she would go to hell.
- [16:50]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Yes, that's how she began the conversation. And I tried to address that specifically in terms of speaking into what she was speaking into, which is, you are a wonderful mother and you care about what happens to your daughter. That sort of didn't get a lot of traction. But because she had a problem, the problem needed to be solved. And that's happened many times where people see, how does an unplanned pregnancy show up in your life? And that's what reproductive justice is about. It's not just about, oh, I'm pregnant and I don't want to be. It's where do you live and do you have an education and do you have a job, and do you have other children, and are you in a situation of violence? And on and on and on. And part of what the focus on the legal aspect alone is, where does the story start? Roe v. Wade is not the beginning of any story, and nor will it be overturning it. It's also not the end of that story. It's whose story. And Roe v. Wade was never a way for every person to be able to get the reproductive care that they needed. So we actually have a moment now to do it differently and better. I hope we will.
- [18:24]
Dr. Christina Gessler
We've been talking about reproductive justice in Chapter one, which is called Telling Different Abortion Stories. We go to 1994, Chicago. Loretta, would you like to take us there, please?
- [18:39]
Dr. Loretta Ross
In July of 1994, about 200 what we would call pro choice activists gathered together in Chicago to discuss the future of the movement. At that gathering, we heard a presentation by the administration of Bill Clinton where they were trying to do healthcare reform, and they had assigned Hillary Clinton to lead the effort. And their strategy was to omit reproductive health care from health care reform as a way of recruiting opponents to abortion to support health care reform. But when we heard that presentation, it puzzled us. Why would you come to a feminist conference pitching a health care plan that omitted reproductive health care and then expect us to support you? Because most women, their major need for health care has to do with their reproduction. And so it sounded like a very fragile and suspicious strategy to us. So later that night, Abel Mabel Thomas, who was a Georgia state legislator, called us together in her room. And us was 12 black women who were at that conference and asked, what do we want to do about this proposal from the Clinton administration? We started problematizing all that we'd heard that day. First of all, the isolation of Abortion from all the other reproductive health services that women need, like, well, woman care, cancer screenings, STDs, all of that. So if you admit reproductive health care, you're taking all of that other stuff off of the table. But we also problematize both the pro choice and the pro life movement for having such a singular focus on the pregnancy. They didn't pay attention to what was going on in the woman's life before she got pregnant. Because if she has human rights violations in her life, like inadequate housing, job insecurity, no healthcare, violence from her partner, a number of other issues, then she's not just making a decision whether or not to keep a pregnancy. She's making a decision about the future of her entire life. And so we said that you gotta go beyond the pregnancy and look at those human rights issues that existed in the woman's life before she got pregnant. So we spliced together the concept of reproductive justice and reproductive rights and social justice to coin the term reproductive justice. And we then, within a few months, started articulating the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise your children in safe and healthy environments. About 10 years after that, the LGBTQ wing of our movement started questioning whether why we didn't include the right to bodily autonomy, sexual pleasure, and gender identity. But every population who uses reproductive justice as a framework particularizes it for its own material conditions. So when indigenous women use reproductive justice, they always talk about sovereignty rights and treaty rights, which is not applicable to non indigenous women. When immigrant women use it, they talk about citizenship rights and the right to claim inclusion in the body. Politicians and the queer community uses it, as I said, to talk about gender identity, LGBTQ rights, et cetera. So I like the fact that reproductive justice is like an open code, an open source code that people can maintain integrity with the original code, but also adapt it to their own particular circumstances. But that's where it came from, and that's where we are now with this framework that has moved from the margins of black women's discussions into the center, so that it now dominates in many ways, many discussions on reproductive politics.
- [23:24]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
We should also add that it was a struggle in the human rights movement to get recognition for women's rights and reproductive justice. I think for many people, the human rights movement was about people wrongly incarcerated or denied citizenship. But to actually stretch the concept of human rights in this way has been an important development.
- [23:55]
Dr. Loretta Ross
I totally echo that because the human rights framework, under its only liberal interpretations, also very male centric. So women had to fight to get rape as a weapon of war recognized as a war crime. The right to bodily autonomy, the right to determine if and when you'd marry or if and when you have children. Those were not traditionally recognized by the Western led human rights movement as necessary to be included in the framework.
- [24:27]
Dr. Christina Gessler
New Year New Me. Cute, but how about New Year New Money? With Experian you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals you know you're going to crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app Based on FICO Score 8 model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian Marlene pointed out for us that Roe v. Wade is not the start of this conversation, that the history of this goes far back in the United States and as we pointed out globally. One of the pieces of legislation that you, you bring us into in the book that had already muddied the waters of Roe v. Wade was the Hyde Amendment, which was passed in 1976. And you dive into that in chapter two. And I think it's an important thing to give air time to because I feel like it's an under discussed effect. And that's something that Chapter two is really emphasizing. We have personal case studies that, that bring us into it a deeper understanding. Would you like to take us into Chapter two and help us understand how the Hyde Amendment was already dismantling Roe v. Wade?
- [25:47]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
So the Hyde Amendment was for people, low income people, people of color, anybody whose rights were already in danger through other systems of oppression. The Hyde Amendment just punctuated that. What the Hyde Amendment said is that no federal funding for abortion before the Hyde Amendment. In that very brief period between when abortion was legal and when it was and when the Hyde Amendment was passed, about a third of all abortions were paid for through the Hyde Amendment. After that, minimal, maybe 200 a year at most. And so for many people, this was that moment of this is the watershed moment. Is Roe v. Wade going to cover everybody or not? And the answer was pretty clear, not. And that's why it's important to us to tell different stories, the stories of people who may have a legal right, although now in half the country you don't, but don't have a meaningful right. That is to say a way of getting what you need. What I was going to do is also make the connection to population control and eugenics. Because as we move through the historical eras in chapter two into the history of the overlap between abortion and eugenics or the completely racist component of this, again, I'm not saying that abortion is, is intrinsically eugenic. What I'm saying is that the early doctors who wanted to criminalize abortion were really, they were nativists and they were eugenicists and they really wanted to criminalize abortion for white people. And you could say that that's what we're seeing again now. And to understand that at the same time, a feminist movement here was fighting for the right to abortion, and women of color were very clear that the fight was about having children. You know, it's the same frame, having children, not having children. It's who gets to decide and whose rights those are or whose experiences you're going to put in the center of the lens.
- [28:29]
Dr. Loretta Ross
And when you add a reproductive justice lens to the Hyde amendment, you have to situate it in a broader tax revolt movement that was launched in the United States where people were encouraged to claim that they had the right to not have their taxes used to take care of other people's problems and needs. And of course, this started in California, where a tax revolt basically said that we no longer want to pay for the college education of children who are not ours. And so it led a whole movement away from public funding of college education into individualized responsibility for college education. And it really legitimated a public lack of empathy for people whose situations were not yours. If I didn't have children in college, then I shouldn't have to pay for a college education system. If I don't believe in abortion, I shouldn't have to pay for the abortion for people I don't care about if I don't have food. I mean, if they don't have food, that's their problem. And so we see the culmination of 50 years of attack on the concept of public empathy and compassion that takes place in the form of a Hyde amendment or the withholding of USAID funds. But we really have to address that fundamental problem at the basis of the philosophy that I should just be for myself and everybody else should take care of their own problems.
- [30:12]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And in this context, I want to lift up, as we do in the book, the woman, Rosie Jimenez, was a 27 year old single mother in Texas who was pregnant and knew that she could not have another child and raise the child that she wanted. And so Rosie then she took what she thought was her best choice, which is that she went to Mexico and had an illegal abortion and she died. And Rosie Jimenez story, and the reason I tell the story and say her name is because often this debate goes on as if it doesn't have anything to do with real people. It's like about life in the abstract or rights in the abstract, but it doesn't. I mean this is people whose lives are profoundly altered. And Rosie's daughter is an activist today in Texas where they just passed something called Rosie's Law to try and address the gap between legal and access. Well, in Texas, not even legal anymore. So I think as Loretta said when she named Mabel Abel, we name all the founders of reproductive justice in the book because these are people, especially in this moment when everybody is looking for a reason to hope to make things better. Real people did these things. Real people were victims of oppression and real people had everything to do with changing the world to make it better.
- [31:58]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And Rosie's story is detailed in chapter two, Racializing Reproduction. And I think her story is particularly poignant for this audience. She was a student and at the time she died she had a scholarship check on her and she didn't feel she could use that scholarship check even though it was for her own personal use to be, to continue to be a student on the private cost of abortion. Her Medicaid wouldn't cover it because of the Hyde Amendment. She had the money on her, but she believed she needed that for were housing, food, continuing to stay a student, getting to graduation and it would have covered the cost of that abortion. But it's an example of how she felt her life would have collapsed and instead her life ended.
- [32:43]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And because for her education was essential, it was going to be her way out of poverty, out of dead end jobs. It was going to be the way her daughter could have a certain kind of life. So it wasn't as if someone told her you can't use this money. She made that decision that she would not use her education money to have an abortion. What a terrible choice, right to choose between your life and your education and your future.
- [33:16]
Dr. Christina Gessler
That part of the book just stopped me because I felt that that's what she was doing. And she saw no, no clear way to, to do all of it unless she, she went for this illegal abortion where the provider didn't have sterile conditions and she got a septic infection which she couldn't have seen coming. That's a undertold outcome of when we make abortion inaccessible is how many women die of infection and other complications. From trying to take care of themselves in the only way that feels accessible to them. The book points out that 75% of people who have abortions live at or below the poverty line. They are a population with high maternal mortality rates. We often see these women living in what we refer to as maternity care deserts, meaning they don't have a local provider, they don't have an easy access to the nearest provider who does provide care. That provider may not take their insurance. The desert is far reaching for so many women and you point out that they have higher infant death rates when we compare that to their wealthy white counterparts. So while it may seem a legislative matter to say whether or not Medicaid will cover abortions, it's a massive women's issue.
- [34:44]
Dr. Loretta Ross
But it's also an economic issue because we need an educated workforce. We need people who have adequate childcare so that they can participate in the productivity of our society. We need people who are not choosing between unpalatable choices like whether to feed their children or to afford their birth control or abortions or risk sterilization. We have a large number of people who are submitting themselves to sterilization because they don't have the choices about maintaining their fertility while they're trying to navigate all these other very pressing human rights issues in their lives. I also want to tell a little bit more about chapter two, and that is the conditions under which people sought abortions. Even before Roe v. Wade, we put a lot of emphasis in the book on how enslaved women were trying to control their fertility and using abortifacient techniques and contraceptives. Knowledge that the midwives had that had been brought over from Africa, so much so that entire plantations were, were not producing enslaved children. And the reason we know about this is because white doctors were called in to investigate why the slave owners weren't receiving a return on their investment in the rape of these women. And so whenever women, all through history, from ancient times to the present, have sex with men, they are always preoccupied with controlling their fertility. And it doesn't matter what the laws say, what the church say, what the men say in their lives, what society says, they are going to want to have bodily self determination because only they can calculate what's going on in their lives and what risks they're willing to take in order to produce the best lives for themselves and their children.
- [37:09]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And we see this as an ongoing dynamic between the people who at any particular time control countries, governments, religious institutions, and the people who are they're trying to control. I mean, after all Breeding or who has children is a need of the state of the government and said, but for their ends, not for my end. As an individual, you ask us to.
- [37:41]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Move our lens from looking at the individual to seeing how these things are systemic and how the systems are put in place to reinforce things that are beyond the individual's right to move them. As Loretta was talking about the midwives and the board of patients and their tremendous skill, I was remembering when I did some early research on the founding of the ama, and if you look at the American Medical association when it was forming, they were taking out ads and newspapers discrediting midwives. Midwives were making more money than doctors, and it was called taking the trade. And they wanted to take it from them. And they were. It was. When we're looking at systems and we look at the Comstock Laws, we look at eugenics. We can also look at everywhere. Sort of the system was working together, and one of them was the work to undermine midwives and to remove the passing of knowledge from. From midwife to midwife. We get more into that in chapter three, which is called Reprocide, and it's about eugenics and sterilization abuse. Would you like to say more?
- [38:57]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
In that chapter we talk about the history of sterilization, abuse and profile three more recent attempts at that. One was an organization called Crack Children, requiring a caring community which paid people to be sterilized rather than sterilize or take long acting contraception. Another was the situation in California prisons where long after it was illegal, sterilization was done among incarcerated women. And here too, that little nasty idea of choice was often the prison officials would describe this as they were giving the incarcerated women the same choices that people had on the outside, which of course was not true. So these are important stories of the manipulation of populations for other ends.
- [40:11]
Dr. Loretta Ross
But the term reposide was one that I had coined because throughout history we'd seen empires that wanted to manipulate their populations by encouraging some people to reproduce and discouraging others. And the term genocide, which was coined in 1943 by a Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, actually pointed out in the Treaty Against Genocide that when you forcibly remove children or prevent border births within a population, those are acts of genocide. But many scholars of genocide had not really paid sufficient attention to how genocide was being committed through reproductive control. And we wanted to lift up and point out how that happened. And interestingly enough, here in the United States, one of the few cases that the Supreme Court has ruled on that included their support for human rights was in the 1940s when a white man was accused of stealing chickens and the government wanted to impose sterilization on him because he had a lot of children. He already wasn't taken care of. The Supreme Court ruled that it would be a violation of this white man's human rights to prevent him from having children. And yet the same Supreme Court would rule that it was permitted to sterilize black, Mexican American, Native American children, people who are disabled, people who are queer, on and on because they wanted to prevent them from having children.
- [41:57]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And that has never been overturned. And I just wanted to. The third example that we use is in that chapter is of denial of ICE detention, sterilizations in ICE detentions, and indeed not just sterilization, but the denial of any kind of maternity care. And obviously the conditions under which people are detained are not conducive to healthy pregnancies or ending pregnancies.
- [42:31]
Dr. Christina Gessler
This chapter goes deep into this history. It provides us various court cases. One is Madrigal versus Quilligan. And I believe that was the one where it was a Latino family. And the judge ruled the opposite of the case that Loretta was mentioning, that he felt that anyone would agree that this family was too big and shouldn't. That big families were not something that he was supporting and it was specifically because they weren't white. Another case in this, in this chapter is Buck versus Bell, which is from 1927. This goes into the forced sterilization of certain populations and ruling that it was constitutional and permissible. And that's the case of Carrie Buck. Would you like to share with listeners what this is? I think it'll help explain more about what forced sterilization looked like.
- [43:34]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
So Carrie Buck was a child, I think, 14 in the south. It's important to note that Carrie Brook's mother was also sterilized and considered to be feeble minded. Feeble minded was a category of a mental health condition that was assigned to people who were considered not good reproducers. These are the people we do not want to reproduce. So, Ed, Carrie Buck was a child. She was in foster care. At one point, she accused someone in the house where she was a foster care child of sexual assault. And prior to that she'd done fine as a student. The foster family had said she'd done fine. And everything changed at that point. And her family was on assistance, federal assistance. And as a condition was she was. She was sterilized without any parental knowledge or consent. And again, the way sterilization abuse sometimes happens is in this case, her mother just Checked a form which she couldn't read. And often that is the case in the Madrigal case. And at that time in the United States, a lot of the forms were in languages people did not speak. So that somebody with the nurse or the doctor would say, oh, just sign here. So the case of Carrie Bell was Carrie Buck, sorry, was sort of notorious in the sense that the court ruled that three generations of imbeciles are enough. Essentially someone whose mental capacity was being questioned, who wasn't considered fit to reproduce. Because of that, it was a good thing that the state took that capacity away. So as you can see in this, there's so many different things going on in terms of violence and poverty and cultural assumptions and race, and it's never really just one thing. But that case has never been. It still stands. It's never been overturned.
- [46:21]
Dr. Loretta Ross
And we should point out that Carrie Buck was white. So she was the wrong kind of white.
- [46:26]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
She was exactly. Poor white person. Exactly.
- [46:29]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Who was sterilized. Because eugenics, which we haven't discussed yet, really was a philosophy coming from England in the late 1800s that then got widely embraced in the United States, really said that we only want a certain race and a certain class of people to reproduce and everybody else should be discouraged. And they were subjected to what we call negative eugenics versus the positive eugenics that encouraged reproduction. But the Buck versus Bell case then wrote into law permission for states to sterilize people who they did not want to reproduce with allegations that they were mentally defective or physically defective or of the wrong race, the wrong immigration status and all those things. So that more than 20 states had laws permitting the unpermitted sterilization of whether they wanted it or not, even to a case of a 10 and a 12 year old child. I believe the Ralph sisters were 12 and 14. I'm sorry, I remember.
- [47:47]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
I think that's right, yeah.
- [47:50]
Dr. Loretta Ross
When their mother did not understand the X that she put on their medical permission slip. And they ended up sterilizing two girls, 12 and 14, simply because they wanted to, not because the girls were sexually active at the time. They had actually gone to the doctor for a totally different reason altogether.
- [48:13]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And this chapter points out how vulnerable women were when they came in contact with a doctor. Because so many of these sterilizations happened, as you say, for a completely unrelated reason. They happened in the aftermath of childbirth. They happened because forms were given to people that they either didn't understand, didn't have time to read, or couldn't read. And there are many court cases of People who then endured these either without proper pain relief or any pain relief or proper anesthesia, which was part of the early development of the steroid realization. There's horrific stories about that. When we go through this book, we realize how ubiquitous the messaging of eugenics was. On page 99, you say professors taught eugenics at over 300 colleges and universities, including elite schools like Harvard and Stanford. You go on to say it was taught in high schools, it was threaded through film plots, it was used in church sermons. There were exhibits about it at state farms, and it was common to find articles about it in popular magazines. That almost sounds like an indoctrination campaign.
- [49:29]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Well, it was what it was. The prevailing set of beliefs about what was appropriate, and again, who were desirable reproducers. I mean, there was a sort of a narrative that it was actually good. You're improving the stock of the country.
- [49:48]
Dr. Loretta Ross
We would be remiss if we didn't pull this analysis from the beginning of the 20th century into the 21st century, when we look at these pronatalist campaigns by people who support ideological white supremacy, who are now talking about the dangers of a population decline, when they really are talking about the fact that white people simply are not reproducing at a rate they desire. And so they're doing a population panic. But this time, they're saying that we've got to get rid of all of these immigrants that are having too many babies and then restrict abortion, birth control, and sex education for white women so that they can be encouraged to have more children. And this thread of eugenics, which we now call neo eugenics, is informing policies at the Trump administration now as we speak.
- [50:53]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And what you're sharing is an echo of the Comstock Laws, of the public and private discourse about why they wanted the Comstock Laws. It was that in the 19th century, white women reduced their average birth rate from eight babies to four babies. And at the same time that there were several immigration waves coming in. And by the 1870s, there was an almost identical conversation to the one that you outlined for us, Loretta, because part.
- [51:29]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Of what women knew, childbirth was dangerous. I think we get a quote in the book that for many women, getting pregnant, could it be a death sentence? And so if women had choices that they did not want to have go through childbirth, wasn't surprising. Again, it just didn't serve the needs of the larger power elites in seeing.
- [52:00]
Dr. Christina Gessler
That these techniques get repackaged. But they. The ideology behind them doesn't really change. The vocabulary maybe changes. But from all throughout history, we see the Same backwards and forwards of women's rights and autonomy and bodily rights. In chapter four, it's called Reproductive justice in Action. Voices from the Front Line. And chapter five is called Reproduction Reproductive Justice Globally. We only have a few minutes left. That's a lot to unpack in the remaining minutes. But what would you like to share with listeners about where reproductive justice is now and where with the activism it could go?
- [52:44]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
So in chapter four, we have lots of examples of what it means to put reproductive justice in action. And we asked a dozen people to write short accounts of how reproductive justice has an impact on the work that they do. So we have an example of an African American doctor who opened a clinic in Arizona and talking about why did she do that in a time that was so difficult for African American women to be accessing care? There's a researcher who talks about how reproductive justice makes her look differently even at what statistics she wanted to gather about abortion. It's not just how far did people have to travel, but who had to travel and under what circumstances. There are many different examples, which pretty much I think, tells the story that there are many different ways to implement abortion, reproductive justice. There are many different avenues for people to change the world and get what they need. So for me, these are totally inspirational stories. Chapter and similarly for the examples in the fifth chapter, I mean, the global. I think a lot of what we're talking about will be much more familiar to people who are in a global context, who are outside of the United States, for whom it was never a stretch to say that reproductive abortion and reproductive rights implicate a much larger interconnected set of needs and rights. But again, in the US Context, it was always a push.
- [54:41]
Dr. Loretta Ross
What has surprised me most about the global adoption of reproductive justice is that I actually didn't think people in other parts of the world needed the reproductive justice framework because they were much better versed in using the human rights framework. For the claims that we made under reproductive justice in the United States. I almost fell out of bed one day when I was listening to a radio show and the Minister of health for South Africa reported that she was going to use the reproductive justice framework to rewrite public and reproductive health policies for the country of South Africa. And up until that time, I hadn't even known that our reproductive justice framework had traveled so transnationally that it was having impacts in other countries beyond the United States. But we're really glad that reproductive justice has created political space and reframing in other countries like Ireland, through Latin America, on the continent, of Africa and in Asia in ways that we did not anticipate that in 1994. We thought we were creating something simply to describe the lived reality of us 12 black women. We had no idea that we were gonna be changing the world and how the world sees reproductive politics with something that we just thought of and looked for the moment.
- [56:19]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
And some of the most radical strategies come from outside the US I mean self managed abortion with pills, doing it yourself because you need this is something that came to the US from Brazil. But again, the movement in the US has been rather insular. And I think it's really important for us to understand everything was not invented here. And we have a lot of now cross border networks and self help networks in the US and outside this country to put the tools in the hands of the people who need their care.
- [57:03]
Dr. Christina Gessler
My final question is what do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [57:08]
Dr. Marlene Gerber Fried
Resistance or not just resistance. You know, we're not just keeping things at bay, but the determination to make something better, to create that world that we need and to always be on the lookout for new ways in which eugenics is showing up to be suspicious about that and to just spread the knowledge. I mean that's one of the most important tools that people have, is telling people, for example, about self managed abortion with pills. Playing offense, don't play by the rules. The rules weren't meant for us.
- [57:54]
Dr. Loretta Ross
For me it's hope because when we were in that room In Chicago in 1994, things were pretty grim and we had no idea that just by telling the truth of what we'd been through that we could change the world. And so that example gives me hope. As long as people live their authentic lives, tell the truth and of what they're going through, and offer a vision for what the world should be, we will accomplish so many wonderful things that will awe us. And so it's kind of hard to keep up hope in the midst of all the terrible news around the world. But there's an urgency to it, a necessity to it, and a strong power in it. And that's what we want people to remember.
- [58:45]
Dr. Christina Gessler
I've been talking with Professors Marlene Freed and Loretta J. Ross, who are the co authors of Abortion and Reproductive Justice, An Essential Guide for Resistance, a book dedicated for all who struggle daily to make their own reproductive decisions and for activists who commit themselves to that fight for justice. This is the academic life. Please join us again.
- [59:14]
Dr. Loretta Ross
Sam.