Transcript
On March 8, 2011, Governor Beverly Perdue established the five-member, Governor’s Task Force to Determine the Method of Compensation for Victims of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. The following is the testimony of Elaine Riddick who was sterilized at the tender age of 14 when she became pregnant after being raped by a much older neighbor. Not only was she sterilized but she was deemed promiscuous.Elaine Riddick: I had to have a child at the age of 14 and when I had my son, they went into me at the same time they gave me a cesarean birth and they took my child they sterilized me. What do you think I’m worth? What do you think I’m worth?
Reporter: Elaine Riddick was just 13 when a neighbor raped her, then she endured what she refers to as her second rape. State officials declared Riddick feebleminded and unfit to have children.
Elaine Riddick: The main reason, reasons is because I was poor and out and Black. I believe that with all of my heart.
Reporter: Based on the pseudo science of eugenics, over 30 states passed laws regarding the sterilization of so-called defectives. The goal was to rid society of certain undesirable traits.
Charmaine Fuller Cooper (victim advocate): Some of those traits that they listed were epilepsy, feeblemindedness, promiscuity, criminal mentalities.
Reporter: Researches believe that as many as one hundred thousand Americans were victimized. By the time that North Carolina ended its own eugenics program in 1974, it had taken away the reproductive rights of 7,600 people - most like Riddick were poor. Tony Riddick still lives close to his mother’s town in the coastal plane. He says she doesn’t come home often.
Tony Riddick: They used to call it little Korea, yeah little Korea. The reason why is cause it was very violent you know, coming up. She grew up in a very very abusive home. My mother’s life and my life by any measure would have been, should have been, could have been totally written off, but the fact of the matter is God still prevails and I’m grateful for that, very grateful.
Reporter: Riddick’s mother would be grateful for justice. She drove from her adopted home in Georgia to testify before a North Carolina task force considering compensation for sterilization victims.
Elaine Riddick: There’s nothing that the state of North Carolina can do to justify what they did to me, what they did to these other victims. You know, it’s not my grandmother’s fault that she uneducated. It’s not my mother’s fault that she was abused by her husband. It wasn’t my fault that my environment that I was raised in - that I was brought up in this kind of environment; I had nothing to do with that. I was a victim. God said, be fruitful, multiply, replenish the earth in his image you know. I always told everybody, “how can you ever get to see the image of God when you are killing it off”?
Reporter: Riddick is tired of feeling like the victim but she’ll have to wait until next February to see if the tar heel state will give her and 2, 000 other eugenics survivors justice.
The early 90s were packed with events that riveted and shocked young people, like the Rodney King trial and decision, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court’s decision on Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which upheld mandatory 24-hour waiting periods and other restrictions to abortion. What did all of these events have in common? They were about pressing issues that affect young women: sexual harassment, rape, race in America, reproductive health, economics, and class.
And yet, when you turned on the television, read the news, or listened to the radio, no one was talking or listening to young women. The pundits and experts were almost always white men discussing the ramifications of various legal arguments, not the reality of these issues, not the impact they would have on young women’s lives.
Roe is not in imminent danger of being overruled, but the slow creep towards the de facto pre-Roe status quo (safe abortions for affluent women, limited-to-no access to safe abortion for poor women) is continuing.
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Very Good Reasons To Worry : Lawyers, Guns & Money Quoted because important. (via mfstrong) |
Jessica Yee, 24, is the founder and Executive Director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network and a member of Canadians for Choice. Yee has spent more then half her life mobilizing individuals, families and communities, and has worked nationwide on establishing sexual health initiatives for Aboriginal youth. She took some time to talk with us about the upcoming G20 Summit and what it means for Aboriginal communities in Canada and around the world.
Jesse Mintz: I was hoping you could comment on the unique and precarious situation that Aboriginal women find themselves in, in terms of the convergence of indigenous rights and sexual rights.
Jessica Yee: They are not polarized separate issues. I think we’ve been making a conscious effort to ensure that women’s issues and Aboriginal issues are perceived as intersectional. It’s important to understand that Canada is a colonial state. Women for many Aboriginal communities have traditionally been the central life givers, so when colonization initially happened, women represented the power sources. When you’re disbanding or conquering a people, you go to where the power is, and that—in Aboriginal communities—is with women and two-spirit people. That remains very much applicable today. The policies that have directly impacted Aboriginal communities were specifically to disempower women in a lot of senses. They disempowered men as well, but they were specific, gender based policies.
So, for example, if you look at the Indian Act—which is the most oppressive piece of legislation in the world and has been used in other countries like South Africa to initiate apartheid—it has several inclusions that are gender-oriented, one being status laws. Up until 1985, it said that if a First Nations woman married outside of her community she would lose her status. This was specific only to women. It purposefully makes the bloodline diminish through the women, because many Aboriginal communities are matrilineal. In 1985, Bill C-31 was supposed to give back status to First Nations women who had lost it; it gave a number of women back their status, but it didn’t for all. Now we’re fighting Bill C-3, the government’s second attempt (after Bill C-8) to try and rectify status. People have been following Sharon McIvor, who took the B.C. provincial government to court to get her children and grandchildren status, because the government only reinstated her status. The government keeps initiating these pieces of legislation that say women should have status, but that the communities aren’t capable of being in charge of it. That’s something we’re fighting–communities should be in charge and should decide who has membership, and who has status.
One question I ask myself is why the media is suddenly paying attention to this. There seems to be, in the last two years, this resurgence of interest in the Aboriginal women going missing and being murdered. This has been going on for 500 years—specifically to women, on purpose. I’m not sure why in the last two years it’s all of a sudden making news in the media, and I have to critically question why that is. I also critically question this need to be shell-shocked by these atrocities in Aboriginal communities to get people mobilized. We shouldn’t have to be confronted with such horrific conditions to get people motivated—it’s been going on for a very, very long time. Poverty and oppression among indigenous people has pretty much stayed the same for all of this time, but now were starting to get media exposure saying “wow, look at what’s going on,” and “wow, Aboriginal women are suffering.” That’s not news.
Jesse Mintz: Why do you think that is?
Jessica Yee: I don’t know. I think it’s a complexity of things. I think it’s great that some people are starting to have more awareness. But it bothers me on a few levels: number one, I don’t like how the media is reporting it, insofar as they depict everyone as a victim without any context of colonialism or racism.
Jesse Mintz: It’s a shallow awareness, then? It’s an awareness of the victimization of people, without an awareness of the context that has placed them, or kept them, as victims?
Jessica Yee: Exactly.
Jesse Mintz: You’ve talked in the past about shedding the rhetoric of colonialism and the importance of Canadian women viewing their domestic struggle as one and the same as the struggle of women in the global south. Why is it so important to understand it as a shared struggle, and how does that transform the diologue?
Jessica Yee: It’s about getting away from the rescue mentality. People seem to need numbers and statistics and to be horrified or get motivated. That mentality is part of the colonial project. If you’re working from that source, then your entire project is framed by the reasoning of “look at these poor people, let’s create these policies that will help them, because we know better then they do.” People have to be really careful, in their organizing against the G20, that they’re not doing the same thing. And I haven’t heard this discussion as much as I would have liked in a lot of the organizing against the summit.
Its not enough to throw money at countries, or say Canada should fund this or that project, without understanding the practical realities of the project in terms of funding and service delivery. It has to move beyond the colonial rhetoric of “we’re here to defend your rights.”
I think, for Canadian women, it has to start here. People have to understand it is a struggle here. We have tons of privilege and tons of power, but it’s also about subverting it and understanding that if we can’t even get our own act together here at home, we’ll have little to offer the struggle in other countries. We don’t have to look to other countries for motivation. Without that understanding, the whole dialogue is extremely problematic.
Jesse Mintz: What does a maternal health initiative without abortion amount to?
Jessica Yee: It amounts to death, I would argue, in a lot of senses and circumstances. It’s not even only about choice. Even before choice, it’s about life. Childbirth in many countries can equal a death sentence because it is a very dangerous process. Without hospitals, without services, without midwives, without resources in the community to deliver babies safely, and resources in the community to help you care for those babies once they’re born, it often means death for mother and child. Meaning women dying in childbirth, and women raising children on their own that they cannot support and that they don’t have resources for. So maternal health without abortion, to me, means death.
Jesse Mintz: Do you think that the prime minister’s reticence to include abortion on the agenda will translate in some manner to domestic policy?
Jessica Yee: I think it’s purposeful. He’s trying to chip away here and there at women’s rights internationally and here in Canada. But I don’t think we’ll see an attack on abortion rights here. What it has done, though, is it’s brought people fighting for sexual rights together.
Jesse Mintz: What events can we expect to see you at in the lead-up to the summit this weekend?
Jessica Yee: We had a huge rally on Saturday, we had the Abortion Monologues on Sunday night, Monday night’s event hosted by the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, Tuesday was the Gender Justice Day of Action, so there are events all around the city. There are two marches on Friday and Saturday and there will be gender justice contingents leading both.
Women who have abortions come from all walks of life. This is not a phenomenon of only the inner city. Many are educated, and most of them are just plain middle class people.
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Thoughts from an Abortion Doctor I wanted to post this thought separately from this awesome article… Reading this section, I am reminded of that ep of Mad Men, where Betty Draper (briefly) considers an abortion. It hit me like a ton of bricks: choice, or lack thereof, was not a major issue for the majority until the Betty Drapers of the world started needing options. No one cares about poor women or women of color dying from botched procedures, no one give a crap about sexism in rap videos, no one give a second thought to domestic violence in the inner cities… until it reached the “educated, plain middle class people.” Feminism must stop doing this. (via cijimcb) (via novazembla) Most of them are middle class since they aren’t covered by insurance or medicaid. Poor women can’t afford them, can’t afford to make the out of state trips, especially if there is a waiting period and they have to make the trip twice, etc. There are serious access problems, and middle class white women didn’t give a damn until law after law after law adding more restrictions started affecting them. Then they wonder why their poor white sisters and WOC sisters aren’t all fired up about the abortion issue the way that they are. For many of us we have had to live with the consequences of not having abortion as an option for years, decades even. And now that middle class white women are worried they might be in the same position, they want us in their corner? (via soofriends) (via guerrillamamamedicine) (via amandaw) |
Historically, black women’s childbearing has been portrayed as irresponsible and in need of government regulation, Roberts says. Practices reflecting these stereotypes have included such things as family caps for welfare recipients, forced sterilization, and the distribution of risky birth-control medicines such as Norplant and Depo-Provera to poor black women. “It’s no wonder black people would think there’s an effort to stop us from having children, and that affects how we think about abortion,” Roberts says.
Another reason for the silence may be a lingering belief that grew out of the 1960s black nationalist movements: that abortion and birth control are tools of whites in power to limit the black population. “Even if people aren’t nationalistic,” says Roberts, “there’s a sense that childbearing is a positive thing that contributes to your whole community, and therefore having an abortion violates that.”
Because of this complicated history, Roberts says, black women frequently feel a tension between asking for government support for access to family planning and opposing efforts by policymakers and others to use birth control to limit their fertility. It has also created schisms between black and white reproductive rights activists.
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Shell Fischer, The Hush on Abortion It confuses me that I still visit feminist blogs with white authors who are insensitive or even ignorant of this. As another white feminist who prizes my oft-threatened right to do whatever I want with my cunt, it’s personally painful for me that the contraceptive advances that protect my life, autonomy, and health have the sickening eugenic history that they do. I’ve seen a lot of white feminists respond to that set of facts, and anti-choicers’ racial conspiracy theories, with hand-wringing over whether black women will turn out to be superstitious or naive enough to erode their rights over their own bodies. But all too often white women have had precious little interest in threats to women of color unless they have those threats, and their responses in common. White women have also benefited for generations from medical experimentation on women of color, notably eugenic experimentation with the very birth control methods we consider so central to our personal rights. It’s infantilizing, racist, and factually incorrect to suppose that black women might not appreciate rights over their own bodies that white feminists have supposedly won for them. Lots of white feminists do suggest this, though, when confronted with the racialized effects of, and access to, reproductive healthcare. I can’t stress enough that this response from white feminists is morally and intellectually unacceptable. |
White women not only allow themselves to talk about this issue, but willingly own it and take it on as the bellwether of politics, of why they vote. But as black women, we feel if we acknowledge we have abortions, or even considered having an abortion, we’re going to be looked down upon not only as women, but as a race.
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| — | Faith Pennick, in The Hush on Abortion — In These Times |
Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, explained her organization’s interest in mixing identity politics with a reactionary ideology: “The black community is being targeted by abortionists,” she told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The abortion industry wants us to believe that we have a greater need. Why should an abortion doctor be able to take a baby because it is black?”
The loaded conspiracy-theory language—in addition to totally ignoring the agency that Black women have struggled to assert over their bodies for generations—masks underlying failures of the health care system. In Black communities, economic disadvantage often overlaps with a lack of reproductive health and family-planning resources and a broken medical infrastructure, leaving many to face unintended pregnancy with few or no options.
In response to the media’s racialization of anti-abortion activism, Melissa Gilliam, a professor at the University of Chicago who chairs Guttmacher’s board of directors, explained in an op-ed that it’s not that Black women are being preyed upon by “abortionists,” but structural racism has eroded their choices and opportunities more globally—which in turn exacerbates historical tensions surrounding the suppression of black women’s reproductive freedom.
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| — | Michelle Chen, Demographics of Abortion: Race, Poverty and Choice |
