F 'em!

by Jennifer Baumgardner

  J: This was before abortion was legal?

  L: This was 1968, years before Roe. We lived in Texas and heard rumors of girls going to Mexico for abortions; very few of them came back, so we didn’t consider abortion a viable option. So the plan was conceived by my parents for me to be placed in a home for unwed mothers. I would have the baby and give him up for adoption, which actually suited me fine, because I had no intention of becoming a parent that way—through incest.

  J: What do you remember about being at the home for unwed mothers?

  L: It was a horrible experience. It was in San Antonio, near Trinity University. We were locked behind huge, high gates, never allowed to leave the compound. We were the servants; we did all the cooking, cleaning, and maintenance of the facility. Of thirty girls, I was the only black girl. I was there for three months. It was a time of deep isolation. My parents never visited. We got up every morning about six o’clock and prayed for our sins and then went to breakfast; we did work and then we prayed some more. In the afternoon, tutors would show up, because we were all in high school or junior high school. Then dinner and lights out by about seven or eight o’clock at night. No television, no music, nothing to liven the place. It was pretty dreary.

  J: What happened after you gave birth?

  L: My sister was with me; my mother wouldn’t come. In the hospital, they brought my son out to me and I saw something I didn’t expect: He had my face. I kept panting over and over again, “He’s got my face, he’s got my face.” I couldn’t go through with the adoption. So that’s how I became a parent.

  I had a scholarship to Radcliffe. The Ivy League schools headhunted the brightest black kids at the time to satisfy their quotas. My high school counselor had nominated me for the scholarship, but when she learned that I had a baby, she wrote Radcliffe and they rescinded the scholarship.

  J: You just spoke in a very emotional way about seeing your son, but what do you think gave you the strength to defy what everyone was telling you to do, and even what you thought was the best thing to do?

  L: I don’t want to sugarcoat my motivations. I wonder how much of that strength was formed by the mother love, the child-mother bonding, and how much it was plain old, very common adolescent rebellion. My mother really couldn’t handle my pregnancy. I didn’t learn until many, many years later that my mother had been a victim of child sexual abuse from age eight to sixteen. The fact that she went ballistic over my pregnancy made sense once I knew her history, but at the time, I didn’t know.

  J: Had she also had a pregnancy as a result of incest?

  L: No, not that I know of. I don’t think so. She got married at sixteen to escape from an uncle. My mother didn’t tell me about her own sexual abuse history until I started working at the rape crisis center a few years later.

  J: I want to leap forward to the “conscious” part of your growth as an activist.

  L: The conscious part of my political life happened in 1970, at college. I read The Diary of Malcolm X and The Black Woman, by Toni Cade, that year. I also became pregnant because my mother would not sign the parental consent form for me to access birth control; she thought that I would not engage in sexual activity even though I was thousands of miles away from home. There wasn’t any sex education at my school and she still had not figured out how to talk to me about sex. I think she just hoped for abstinence, which was difficult for a child already sexualized by an adult. Fortunately for me, Washington, D.C., legalized abortion in 1970 before Roe v. Wade. I went to a hospital for a very late-term abortion, because it was so complicated getting the parental consent form from my mother—my sister eventually forged her name—and for my boyfriend to raise the money. Separate from that, I was the freshman class vice president and an activist kind of soul already.

  J: You were already a leader.

  L: I was always mouthy. I was captain of the debate team in junior high. I started the girls’ drill team when I was in high school because the boys had a team and the girls didn’t. I can’t really describe that as feminist consciousness, but more like feminist unconsciousness.

  J: Was your son with you while you were in college?

  L: My parents raised him until I dropped out after three years, when the rules about out-of-state tuition changed because of President Nixon. My mother and I had a very turbulent relationship at that time. I was coming into adulthood and she was having difficulty recognizing that. I represented her very problematic past, with the incest and the sexual abuse story, which was very painful and she hadn’t ever talked to anyone about. Looking back on it, I can be more sympathetic than I could at the time I was living through it.

  J: How did you become part of DC Rape Crisis, the first rape crisis center in the country?

  L: My son and I had a studio apartment in Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C. I got a notice one day that we had sixty days to move, because they were converting the apartments to condominiums. Some tenants and I decided to meet in the laundry room to fight the eviction. I volunteered to take notes, and the next thing I knew, I was the president of my tenants’ association. At a Citywide Housing Coalition meeting, I met this woman Nkenge Toure, who had been in the Black Panther Party. She invited me to come volunteer at the DC Rape Crisis Center. I remember snapping, “I don’t want to go work with those white women.” Nkenge looked at me and said, “Sister, would I lead you wrong?” I was too intimidated to protest—who’s going to say no to a Black Panther? Nkenge was the second executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center and was responsible for my formal introduction to the women’s movement.

  J: What was the movement like in the late ’70s?

  L: At the time, Washington was a hotbed of feminist—and especially black feminist—activism. Off Our Backs and Aegis—which was a feminist activist magazine—were founded during that time. The D.C. Area Feminist Alliance, the National Organization for Women, black health feminists came up from Gainesville, Florida . . . All of this was just bubbling around me at the time. I was in the right place at the right time. I just went along for the ride because it was the most exciting thing that had happened to me.

  J: Did feminism shed new light on your own experiences? It did for me.

  L: That involvement in feminism explained to me all the things that had happened to me in my life. My story was at the intersection of reproductive violence and sexual violence.

  J: And how did making sense of those early experiences help you?

  L: I credit the feminist movement for bringing me back from the brink of suicide. That’s what many people in my situation end up doing—that or self-medication or drug abuse. That’s what the women’s movement brought me back from: the brink of all those things.

  J: You were literally suicidal?

  L: That was not a metaphor. I eventually took the advice I gave others and got some therapy. I was politically conscious and self-destructive at the same time. I’m still dealing with it. I’m overweight, and that’s part of it.

  J: Let’s talk about the movement’s transformation from reproductive rights to reproductive justice, your role, and the role of other women of color in that, and its implications.

  L: Reproductive justice represents a convergence of events. In 1994 there was an international conference on population and development in Cairo. At the same time, Hillary Clinton was engaged in healthcare reform, but made the same mistake Obama has by excluding abortion. Black women activists observed that, internationally, women were using the human rights framework to claim the same rights that we were arguing for under the constitutional framework, using the anti-government frame, which is the right to privacy. Internationally, women were arguing they had the human right to food, clothing, shelter, and family planning, among other things. In Cairo, feminists won acknowledgment that one cannot talk about population without talking about development; that the ability of any woman to control what happens to her body is directly related to the community in which she’s embedded. You cannot push family planning on a community
that lacks basic access to healthcare.

  J: Right, abortion and birth control are part of healthcare, but they aren’t healthcare.

  L: As women of color, we were used to just caucusing at the white women’s conferences; we didn’t have our own independent space to talk in. After Cairo, at the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance, someone said, “The basic problem is that abortion is isolated from other social justice issues, but it’s those other social justice issues that determine whether the woman has the baby or not.” We organized a group of black women to purchase an ad in The Washington Post about healthcare reform in 1994. We called ourselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. We said we did not want healthcare reform that did not include reproductive healthcare services and abortion. About four hundred women signed the ad.

  J: That was the moment this crucial term was coined, with that group of women?

  L: Yes. We spliced “reproductive rights” together with “social justice” and came up with the term “reproductive justice,” signifying the embedding of abortion rights within a social justice framework. We had our first national conference in 2003. Our plenary session asked, what does looking at abortion rights through a social justice lens look like? We had Byllye Avery, Asian women, and women of all different races coming to talk about reproductive justice. In 2004, Asians and Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health became Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. It was the first organization to use the term in its name. SisterSong began using it in 2005. And then we pushed it down the throats of the organizers of the last big abortion march.

  J: In 2004, leading up to the march, we were at a Glamour meeting together, and I remember the original name of the march was the March for Choice, or something like that.

  L: It was called the March for Freedom of Choice.

  J: Right, and then organizations like SisterSong said, “We can’t organize under that banner.”

  L: Silvia Henriquez [head of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health], a SisterSong member at the time, called me and said, “Loretta, we have to decide what to do about this March for Freedom of Choice.” I told Silvia, “I’m not working with those white women.” It wasn’t because I dislike white women; it was because I had been on the NOW staff for five years—I had organized women of color for the march in ’86 and ’89—and I was convinced that we needed to build SisterSong to pay attention to the needs of women of color. This ain’t the time to drop our agenda to go run to their agenda again, you know? They didn’t ask our permission to march. I thought, Let them march; let us stay focused on what we’re doing, which is building this movement for women of color, please.

  But Silvia was insistent, and, not wanting to upset her, I said, “Okay. Why don’t we invite them to come to SisterSong and tell us why we should endorse the march? I have only one stipulation: They have to send a woman of color to address us.” Two of the four lead organizations could not.

  J: The four were the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood, NOW, and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

  L: And two of those organizations didn’t have any women of color on staff above office manager, which, in my mind, kind of indicated that they weren’t ready to have this talk anyway. After thirty years of women of color constantly complaining about their lack of diversity, they still weren’t ready.

  We had six hundred women of color at this, our first, conference. The representatives from the big four made their pitch for why we needed to march against the Bush Administration, march for abortion rights, blah blah blah. Then we opened the mic. People reacted to the fact that here’s these mainstream organizations asking us to work on their march, but what had they done for us lately? We’ve self-organized without your help—now you want our help, right? I became the point person to negotiate with them. I actually thought that if I raised our demands so high, they would go away.

  I demanded three things: a name change, money to buy out our time from our organizations while we organized on behalf of theirs, and women of color on the steering committee.

  J: And they met the demands, right? I know the name was changed from March for Freedom of Choice to March for Women’s Lives.

  L: All demands were met. After that, Alice Cohan [at the Feminist Majority Foundation] asked me if I would be codirector. I felt she’d called my bluff. That’s how I ended up being march codirector and working around the country to convince women to come to the march. The event itself was wildly successful. We had 1.15 million people, the largest protest march in American history.

  J: Younger women appear to me to be much more conversant with the vocabulary of reproductive justice, whereas a couple of years I felt there was more of a resistance among big organizations to using that terminology. Now I think there’s much more adoption, because a whole new generation is coming-of-age to whom that language speaks.

  L: Well, part of it is co-option, to be honest. The mainstream groups are taking that phrase without taking what is packed in it. I mean, “reproductive justice” is just the U.S.’s way of saying “human rights that are intersectional, universal, and unalienable.” If you aren’t using the human rights framework as your legal strategy, using the phrase “reproductive justice” is empty. It’s meaningless.

  J: It’s an attempt for organizations to indicate that they are inclusive of women of color.

  L: That’s the other thing: There is racism in how the term is used—as if it is just for women of color. The theory was created by women of color, but that doesn’t mean it only applies to women of color. White women need human rights too! Reproductive justice is the application of the human rights framework to reproductive politics in the US.

  J: One of the core things about reproductive justice is that it has an affirmative role for government, whereas reproductive rights says, “Government, get out of my life.” Can you talk a little about this?

  L: When you call on the human rights framework, there are things that the government shouldn’t do, but there are other things that the government must do. The government can’t tell you whether or not to have a baby, but it has to ensure that you have the means to have or not have a baby in an environment that is safe, that is affordable and accessible. I compare it to an airplane ride: The government can’t tell me to fly. It can’t tell me where to go. But when I do choose to fly, it has an obligation to make sure that plane is safe and doesn’t come plummeting out of the sky. It has regulations to make sure the airfare is affordable so these airlines can’t charge anything they want for a ticket. It has to make sure the airports are accessible so that these smaller markets aren’t just shut down because the airlines only want to service D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Safe, affordable, accessible is the role of government in enabling its citizens to enact private decisions.

  J: I can already hear people saying, “But that’s pro-choice, that’s the existing model.” Why not use the term “pro-choice”?

  L: This framework is not interchangeable with pro-choice. We think “pro-choice” is a great phrase. We wish all women had choices. But not all women do because of healthcare disparities, immigration policies, racism, homophobia, etc. Moreover, the pro-choice framework does not demand an affirmative role for government, just a negative one—“Keep your laws off my body”—that is understandably necessary given how conservatives want to regulate everything that occurs in our bedrooms. I read the other day about a Florida politician astutely analyzing the current conservative approach: Small government for the regulation of businesses and big government for the regulation of women.

  J: So, reproductive justice is a precursor to choice. What’s going to happen with the reproductive justice framework? Will it become something the big organizations eventually manifest?

  L: I think reproductive justice is going to supplant the pro-choice frame eventually. It’s more viable and brings more diverse people into the conversation and it works across movements—bringing new activists and new leadership. Young people in particular reso
nate with the reproductive justice framework because they live in a much more intersectional and interconnected way and better understand the importance of building a human rights movement in the United States that holds our own country accountable to its people.

  —Interviewed on December 16, 2010

  WHEN MOM AND DAD DON’T KNOW WHAT’S BEST

  Twenty-nine years ago, I helped my teenage sister get an abortion, without telling our parents. Today her story is still proof to me that parental consent laws don’t work.

  I grew up the second of three daughters in a pro-choice household in Fargo, North Dakota. Our family talked about politics, read Our Bodies, Ourselves and voted Democrat, but when it came to actually discussing sex, my parents’ mantra was “high school is too young.”

  In 1985, the summer after my freshman year in high school, my 16-year-old sister told me she was pregnant. Andrea, a National Merit Scholar, knew two things: She wanted an abortion and she didn’t want to tell mom and dad.

  “I’ll help you,” I said, honored that she’d turned to me.