Reproductive Justice

Loretta Ross is one of the smartest people writing about and working in poltiical thought right now. She’s completely brilliant with so many insights and so few of the ridiculous canards that can distract even smart committed and quite famous leftists. Sarah Jones has a great interview with her in the latest issue of Dissent and I think you are going to want to read the whole thing. In it, they talk about Republicans criminalizing abortion and how, as a Black woman, Ross realizes this is a much greater attack on women’s rights than even a lot of white feminists realize.

Jones: One argument that you often hear from the anti-abortion side has to do with the history of eugenics, which they cite as a reason to end abortion. 

Ross: They still believe in eugenics for everybody who’s not white. These are the people who won’t lift a vote to support feeding children once they’re here. How are you supposed to believe that they care about the fate of children? They weaponize abortion as a way to secure political power. They don’t really care about these issues.

Jones: The fall of Roe opens the door to the criminalization of abortion. But what does the criminalization of abortion mean for the right to become and stay pregnant? 

Ross: Too many pregnancies end in miscarriage, yet every miscarriage is going to be read as a criminalized abortion. It is anti-science, anti-woman, anti-truth, and anti-evidence for people to assume that every pregnancy results in a wanted child. That simply is not true. They’re even putting women’s health at more risk by denying them life-saving medical procedures, because of “the health of the fetus.” It started with criminalizing women who were abusing substances like drugs or alcohol. Now, it’s criminalizing women who are seeking treatment for cancer, or lupus, or fetal development that’s not going well. We’re going to see more and more of that. 

Jones: How can we respond effectively to this war on our rights, given that the courts and the police are against us? 

Ross: As a Black woman, I never had the luxury of assuming the Supreme Court was going to be a source of my liberation, because it has disappointed me too many times. There was a brief period in the late 1950s and ’60s, when we thought we were marching toward freedom, and then we had the backlash of the ’70s, and we’ve been pushed back almost ever since with the Court’s decisions, on voting rights and many other issues. We have to work morally to make sure that people understand that they have a human right to control their bodies and be self-determining; we have to work politically to make sure that abortion remains a voting issue, so that people understand that women’s human rights are on the ballot and are important. At the same time, we also should help pass the Equal Rights Amendment; thirty-eight states have ratified it, and yet Republicans are pulling procedural blockages. And of course, we have to make sure that we elect people who are willing to affirm women’s human rights rather than violate them. We have to work on all these fronts at the same time.