Abortion, Birth Control, Colonialism, and Feminism
I remember what it was like when abortion was illegal. The shadow of something terrifying and dangerous hung over heterosexual sex. It was an additional nightmare for women and girls who had sex forced on them.
Because of male domination and parents’ oppression, having a baby usually meant that a woman gave up all other dreams for herself, lost independence, and became poorer. The alternative was a procedure that might kill her.
The right and access to abortion in the United States have been under attack for a long time. In many places it’s already nearly impossible to get a safe, affordable abortion. Loss of Roe versus Wade means that many, many more women—mostly poor, working-class, Global Majority, and Indigenous women—will be forced back into that dreadful choice: to endure unwanted pregnancies or risk unsafe abortions.
REPRODUCTIVE ISSUES IN PUERTO RICO
I was born in 1954 in Puerto Rico. Abortion became legal in Puerto Rico in 1937, at the discretion of doctors. The doctors got to decide who could and could not have an abortion. Women (mostly white women with money) traveled to Puerto Rico for abortions throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Women continue to come here from other Caribbean countries.
Legal abortion in Puerto Rico was not a result of feminist organizing. It was part of an imperialist plan to control the reproduction of Puerto Rican women. (Today our reproductive rights are defended by a very vocal feminist movement.)
The birth control pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, two of whom died. The early pills had dangerously high levels of hormones that caused blood clots and other problems.
The pills were manufactured in Puerto Rico, where workers without protective masks or clothing went home covered with estrogen powder, causing six-year-old girls to get their menstrual periods and young boys to develop breasts.
During that same period, thirty-seven percent of all women of childbearing age were sterilized. They had usually been told there was no other form of birth control available. And they were sometimes sterilized without their knowledge during other surgeries. (U.S. colonizers wanted fewer Puerto Ricans.)
MY STORY
My great-grandmother came from Ukraine to the United States in 1906. She was a feminist. She and others (illegally) took birth control information to poor women living in the tenements of New York City (New York, USA). She also worked with the first Planned Parenthood clinic, in Brooklyn, New York. I am proud of her role in this work.
In 1967 when I was thirteen, we moved to Chicago (Illinois, USA). Abortion was illegal. I became sexually active a year and a half before Roe versus Wade. I was also fighting for reproductive rights in feminist organizations. One group included women who had started medical school; they would gather information about women’s bodies to share with the rest of us.
Doctors typically told women that “everything ‘down there’ is none of your business.” It’s hard to convey how liberating it was when we learned to do our own pelvic exams. I also remember the great excitement when the Boston Women’s Health Collective published the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was full of information about female bodies that we’d never had access to before.
As a young woman, I was terrified of getting pregnant. I had an irregular menstrual cycle with long intervals, so almost every month I was afraid I might be pregnant. Everyone knew stories about women who had tried to abort on their own or had gone to unsafe abortionists and died.
During my teens, a friend of my parents found a safe abortion for a friend and then started getting other requests. She and a small group of other women organized the “Jane Collective,” which made safe illegal abortions available. You would call a number and ask for “Jane.” Someone would call back and tell you where to go for the initial interview. You would be taken to a second location for the procedure and a third for recovery, and those locations would be constantly changing. During the few years before Roe versus Wade, “Jane” performed eleven thousand safe abortions.
In 1972 I went to college in northern New Hampshire (USA). The local doctors would not provide birth control—even for privileged, white, married women—without written permission from a husband. It was as if our reproductive abilities belonged to men. Birth control was considered stealing children from the men who owned us.
We started a center where we gave out birth control information and referred people to Planned Parenthood. After Roe, we also referred women there for abortions. There was huge relief in knowing that however upsetting the process might be, it would be safe.
MAKING THE CHOICE
Embryos are alive. We choose to kill them because we live in oppressive societies in which having an unwanted child can be a disaster for mother, child, and whole families. In a just society, we would rarely have to make that choice.
I believe we need to choose whatever gives us the greatest chance of making fundamental change. It is grown females, not embryos, who—with their allies—can make abortions unnecessary, make parenting fully supported, and make sure that children have the resources they need. Females who are targeted by multiple oppressions will think most clearly about all the different aspects of this fight. It is not separate from the fight for climate justice or all the other kinds of systemic change we long for. All our liberation movements are working to end the ways that our bodies are controlled, exploited, and killed for the wealth and power of the few.
INVOLVING EVERYONE IN THE FIGHT
As we take on [undertake] this new level of feminist resistance in the United States, we must be proudly “female first.” At the same time, we cannot repeat the mistake made by earlier reproductive rights movements of being “female only.” In earlier periods, reproductive-rights organizing that was white and middle-class dominated didn’t pay attention to the varied reproductive struggles of women from different backgrounds and experiences. For example, Global Majority and Indigenous women were also fighting for the right to have babies against sterilization abuse.
I am “female first” and have had to fight hard for control of my body against many forms of male domination. My reproductive rights and physical sovereignty have also been attacked for being Indigenous raised Latina in a colonized country, for being a Jew and an epileptic, for having been poor in my teens and young adulthood, and because of the poisoning of my environment by capitalism.
Let’s take on this fight with all our power and intelligence—everyone’s.
Maricao, Boriken (Puerto Rico)
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC Community members
(Present Time 208, July 2022)