Reproductive Justice

Yesterday, this blog was about the rights of fathers, today it is about the Reproductive Justice Movement. Reproductive justice includes the right to abort a pregnancy but also the right to raise a child in a safe and supportive community.

Why Reproductive Justice ? The experiences of Black, brown and Indigenous women who have been sterilized, abused, or punished for bearing children. Welfare laws based on misleading impressions of so-called welfare queens – Black women who allegedly had babies to collect welfare checks but wasted the money. These stereotypes have led to welfare policies that discourage welfare recipients from having more children by reducing their benefits.

The white-dominated reproductive rights movement’s “choice” framework privileges the most socially advantaged people in society. Those who have the ability to make choices. It doesn’t take into account social structures, power arrangements of race, class, gender, heterosexism, immigration status, religion – all of which shape one’s ability to have reproductive autonomy.

High Black maternal mortality is a matter of reproductive justice. States that have passed or will soon pass abortion bans have the worst healthcare systems, the highest maternal mortality, especially Black maternal mortality, and the highest infant mortality. As a result of [the supreme court decision] Dobbs, we’ll see increases in maternal mortality – deaths of pregnant people who intended to carry to term – because their health will be compromised.

It includes ending police violence, abolishing prisons, and all the inhumane carceral approaches to meeting human needs that have a profound impact on one’s reproductive life. Prisons are a major impediment in the United States to reproductive freedom. People who have had their children taken away by a discriminatory child welfare system that targets Black neighborhoods for family separation do not have reproductive freedom. To me, reproductive justice is inextricably linked to the fight against the prison industrial complex and the family policing system.

The reproductive justice framework is more effective than the reproductive choice approach. the movement for reproductive justice must be aligned with movements for housing, abolishing the prison industrial complex, environmental justice, and economic justice, because all of those movements are essential to supporting freedom, including reproductive freedom.

Movements seeking to limit or abolish the power of the criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex are relevant to opposing Dobbs’ assault on reproductive freedom. People are already being arrested and imprisoned for stillbirths and miscarriages; that standard will be applied to abortions as well. Recognizing the interconnected nature of these challenges is essential.

Today’s blog leans heavily on an interview in LINK> The Guardian of Dorothy Roberts. She is an internationally renowned scholar of race, gender, and the law at the University of Pennsylvania, who has dedicated her career to exposing attacks on Black women’s reproductive rights dating back to slavery and persisting to the present.

You can learn more about Reproductive Justice at this LINK> SisterSong. Reproductive Justice combines reproductive rights and social justice.

Dumpster Baby – Not A Joke

Yesterday, I saw a meme my daughter posted. One older Asian sibling was teasing the younger one that she was found in a dumpster. My daughter who grew up in a yours, mine and ours family commented that she used to tell her sibling that her parents were monkeys. When I commented that the graphic made me sad because some adoptees were actually dumpster babies, she told me that she didn’t realize it happened, she just thought it was a joke and I see today that she did remove it.

Today, in my all things adoption, I see a comment that references dumpster babies in response to a story about those Safe Haven Baby Box Drop Offs that I have written about before in this blog. A former Labor and Delivery nurse said –

I am in favor of them….with the caveat that the child can be reclaimed by mom, without penalty within the first 6 mo. (I actually read a book not long ago, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, where was a baby left by a desperate mother at the fire station. She later wanted to reclaim the baby.)

The L&D nurse continues with – I wish this was spoken of in schools, as early as middle/ high school. This is designed to prevent dumpster babies, the majority of which are likely never found. (In fact, there is a Family Guy meme that is captioned, I am a prom night dumpster baby. Image at the top of this blog.)

I do agree with the nurse, whatever can prevent a panic infanticide, and these do happen. I also wrote a blog once about the remains of a baby who died of exposure and neglect who was found many many years later and in fact, the mom who dumped him was eventually revealed.

The ‘safe haven’ laws are not uniformly known…even among those who ‘work’ in the safe haven locations. A reform would be if those babies left in baby boxes or victims of hospital ‘abandonments’ (which also do happen) all had a 6 month, no questions asked (no effort at a termination of parental rights by Child Protective Services, if the mom comes forward within that time), so that she may retrieve her baby. No adoptions allowed before that grace period ends.

The article that caused that comment was about a 19 yr old Indiana teen, Hunter Wart, who worked for over a year to raise $10,000 as his senior project. The end goal was to purchase a baby drop-off box for the Seymour Fire Department. He mowed lawns and collected metal to sell as scrap. The article goes on to say his reward was when a healthy baby girl was left inside. The fire Chief Brad Lucas estimated that the child was only one hour old, when she was dropped off. An alarm rings when the box is opened by the person leaving a baby. The baby girl will be in custody of the Indiana state child services, once she is released from the hospital. A Safe Haven Baby Box is definitely better than abandoning a baby in unsafe conditions.

The Safe Haven Baby Boxes non-profit was founded by Monica Kelsey—who was abandoned as an infant herself—in an attempt to give distressed new moms a safe place to leave their child while remaining anonymous. Before the initiative was launched, two to three abandoned babies died every year in Indiana, said Kelsey. The state has had no abandoned babies die since the boxes were installed, she added. “These babies were left in trash cans and dumpsters. One was left at the door of a hospital. That baby had frozen to death before he was found.

While I am not a fan of adoption and I have made it abundantly clear that I think families need enough financial and other kinds of support in order for parents to be able to raise their children, I am a realist. I understand that options should not be removed from women because I believe babies are generally (but not always) better off if raised by their biological parents. The goal of Safe Haven Baby Boxes is to minimize harm and trauma. We should never limit the options available for mothers in crisis.

The Sad Story of Irish Unwed Mothers

Their children were often called the “devil’s spawn.” The Mother and Baby Homes were set up by the government and run by Catholic religious orders. They were part of a system to deal with the perceived shame of “illegitimate” children and the women who bore them.

The luckiest children managed to live through the neglect and abuse. There is widespread suspicion that the children were drugged to keep them docile and many believe that is the reason for the non-existent or at last non-conscious memories of their time in the home. Perhaps that is a blessing, as wrong as it may be ethically.

A mass grave of nearly 800 children tipped the scales from denial to investigation. The Irish government was forced to confirm that “significant remains” ranging in age from 35 fetal weeks to two to three years old, and dating back to the time the home was in operation, had been found in Tuam during a preliminary excavation. The horrendous truth was that it was not just an unmarked grave, the remains were found in an old underground waste-treatment system.

Tuam dates back to the Bronze Age, its name is derived from the Latin term tumulus, meaning burial ground. Chilling.