Meehan: You are listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Meehan Crist, and welcome to the first episode in a special short series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice. Over the next four episodes going out every other week, my guests and I will be asking what it means to pursue reproductive justice in a rapidly warming world. What happens when environmental devastation gets linked to the size of human populations? How have population, procreation and women's bodies been thought of in the past? Where are we today, and where might we be headed for better or worse in the future? My guests will include evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramanian, historian Alison Bashford, and scholar of climate, feminism and activism, Jade Sasser. But I'm starting today with the activist and feminist scholar, Loretta Ross, one of the co-creators of the reproductive justice framework. She is a scholar and activist who has spent five decades deepening our understanding of the intersections of race, reproduction, and the politics of white nationalism. A rape and incest survivor, as well as a teen mother, she was sterilised without her consent as a young woman. She began her work as an activist in the 1970s, coining the term ‘women of colour’ with a group of black and minority activists in 1977, and working in leadership positions at US organisations such as the DC Rape Crisis Center, the National Organisation for Women, the National Black Women's Health Project, and the Center for Democratic Renewal, as well as founding the National Center for Human Rights Education. She was a co-founder and served as the national co-ordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, and in 2004 she was national co-director of the March for Women's Lives in Washington DC, at that time the largest protest march in US history with 1.15 million participants. She retired from her career as an organiser in 2012 to focus on teaching, and is now associate professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her most recent books include Reproductive Justice:An Introduction, co-written with Rickie Solinger, and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique, co-edited with four others, and she is currently at work on a book titled Calling In The Calling Out Culture. She is a mother, grandmother, and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship or Genius Grant. It's a pleasure and an honour to have her as our guest today. Loretta, welcome to the LRB podcast.
Loretta: Thanks for having me on your show.
Meehan: I’d love to start with a bit about your own story. So you say that you joined the women's movement in 1978 by working at the first rape crisis centre in the country, the DC Rape Crisis Center. You've also been adamant that reproductive justice requires centring the experiences of women of colour. So in that spirit, could you tell us what led you to work at the Rape Crisis Center?
Loretta: Well, I'm a survivor of sexual assault as a child. I was kidnapped from a girl scout outing when I was only eleven years old, and taken into the woods and raped. And because of other instances of sexual violence in my life, I had a mess going on in my head. I really was trying to go to college and majored in chemistry, but I didn't realise that you’ve got to take care of the mess in your head before you can take care of the plan for your life. And it was at the Rape Crisis Center where I'd been asked to volunteer that I found the words to attach to the experiences that had happened to me, because up until that time I was deeply self-harming, suicidal, trying to do political work, but at the same time thinking that the political work could occlude or help me heal from the sexual violence I'd experienced, and found out that wasn't true. As a matter of fact, I probably imposed my trauma on the people I was trying to work with, because I wasn't taking care of what was going on in my head. So I didn't come to feminism out of a class or out of a theory, I came to it because of my lived experiences, and I know it saved my life. And so I've spent the last fifty years helping people understand that what happens to you is not your fault. You don't always have control over what happens to you, but you do have control over whether or not you let it determine the future path of your life, whether you're going to self-indulge in the misery of what happened to you, or you’re going to seize joy out of life so that somebody else's dirty fingerprints don't determine who you are.
Meehan: And as a young woman in the 1970s, you were coming of age at a time of really intense social upheaval. Black communities were still metabolising the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The anti-apartheid movement was gaining momentum, and huge numbers of people were protesting the Vietnam War. And in this context, you were engaged in a broad range of activist activity, including with the black nationalist movement in DC, anti-gentrification and tenants rights organisations, and a DC study group using a Marxist analysis to study economics and history. How do you think that organising with these groups at this time influenced the development of your own radical feminism?
Loretta: Because we were working on so many issues that affected our lived experiences, I think we were practising intersectionality before the term was developed. I didn't see any contradiction between working to end violence against women with working to end state violence against South Africans. We were talking about the violences – economic violence, political violence, state violence, immigration violence, housing violence, it was all tied together based on the dehumanisation of people without power. And so when you take a power analysis to understanding oppression, you notice that people's lives intersect at a lot of nexus of oppression, whether it's about interpersonal violence or food or housing precarity, whether or not they're even seen as fully human by the government under which they live. And so with an anti-violence analysis, it leads you to connect the dots.
Meehan: And while you were working at the DC Rape Crisis Center, you got an unexpected letter from a man who was incarcerated for rape.
Loretta: Yes. In 1979, I'd become the director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, and this letter appeared on my desk from a man named William Fuller. And I can't quote him exactly, but basically he said, outside I raped women, inside I raped men, and I'd like not to be a rapist anymore. I later found out that William and another inmate at Lorton Reformatory, which was DC's prison, had formed a group in 1974 called Prisoners Against Rape, and it was comprised of men who had been convicted to life sentences for raping and often murdering women. And so when William's letter arrived on my desk I actually was angry, because I was like, how dare you? We don't even have enough resources for the victims of rape, and here's a perpetrator asking us for help. I don't think so! But tellingly, I never threw his letter away, because it sat there getting buried under my papers for about three months while I wanted to just tear it up, but I couldn't. And finally I decided that I was going to go down to that prison, Lorton, and tell him off, because I could never visit on my rapist the anger and the blame and the shame that I felt. So I thought I could tell him off and be through with it. But when I got there, I wasn't just meeting with William, there were six men, six big buff black men in that room, which surprised me. I didn't feel unsafe because the prison guard was right outside the door. But I was expecting to meet with one guy and had six, and they all looked like MMA wrestlers because they all had these big bodies. And what I later realised was that they were the prison predators, so they spent time in the gym buffing their bodies up so that they wouldn't become the prison's victims. But I didn't know that at the time. I was only 25 years old and wanted to tell them off. I didn't know how to begin the meeting, but that was OK because William took charge of the meeting, and in kind of euphemistic terms started talking about how they had all violated women. And one of them talked about how he had been raped as a child, and that he felt affected how he dehumanised other people because he'd been dehumanised. And I think that broke the ice, because once that guy spoke up then others started talking about things that had happened to them. And I had never actually seriously considered men as the victim of sexual violence. I'd always seen it through a lens of what happens to women. So once they told their story, then I started falling back on what we always did at the Rape Crisis Center, and that is tell our stories. So I told the story of what happened to me – or one of the stories, because I didn't tell them all of them – and next thing I knew I didn't see them as anything but human beings. I wasn't planning on having this rapport with them. As I said, I came down there angry, ready to curse them out. But it turns out that they were sincere in contacting the DC Rape Crisis Center because they wanted to learn about black feminist theory and how not to maintain their status as rapists. And this was intellectually intriguing to me, because at the Rape Crisis Center all we could do was put bandages on women and then send them back out to the world, often to get violated again. We had never quite figured out a process for preventing rape by talking to rapists. And so the fact that they were sincere in their request that they learn black feminist theory, I was very sincere that that was the only service I was going to provide to them. There wasn't going to be no dating, no romantic stuff. I ain't bringing any tennis shoes or cigarettes in jail for you. I will not be your mule, kind of thing. And they were OK with that. And so for three years I would go there almost every Friday and spend two to four hours sometimes, talking about black history books, black feminist books with them. What was interesting about most of them was that they had been convicted when they were teenagers, basically children themselves and often illiterate, and they had taught themselves how to read in prison, they had got their GEDs, and I think it was through that process of self-educating themselves that they first encountered their first black feminist books, and so that led them to form Prisoners Against Rape. A film was made about them before I met them, and so they wanted to continue their education, but this was the first time they had reached out to a rape crisis centre to help them, and so it was really transformative for me. I learned more than I expected to. I think I went there to change them, and ended up changing myself more. What I learned was that when people are incarcerated, society doesn't want to hear from them anymore. Nobody wants to know what happened to them that led them to a life of criminality. Nobody wants to know that, and so they were silenced. But they were coping and suffering, and at the same time figuring out a way to find their own joy under the most miserable of circumstances. And they had developed a passion for learning under those conditions, which I found rather surprising. Now, this wasn't universal throughout the prison population. Some people went into religion, some people went into whatever, but this was a group that decided that a political education is their salvation, is their way of processing what had happened to them and what they had done to others. I did not know that this was the first male-led anti-violence group in the country. We didn't have the benefit of the internet or something like it where we could share information back in the seventies. It was pretty historic what they did, and I certainly benefited from that, and now, almost fifty years later, I can process that that was probably my first calling-in moment. It was when I had to call myself in and let go of my anger and rage against them in order to hear them, and I lost the desire to call them out. It was so wonderful. It was a wonderful experience. Now, I took a lot of comfort in the fact that I knew they'd been sentenced to life sentences, so I never expected to have any consequences of doing this work with them for three years. And about a decade after I had left the Rape Crisis Center, I hear this big booming voice calling out my name while I'm walking down the streets of Washington DC, and it was William Fuller! And it scared me to death, because I'd never thought I'd see him outside of the confines of the prison. Turns out that he'd got paroled and got married and was working a job in construction, and simply wanted to thank me for helping him see another side of himself and become more than just a prison statistic.
Meehan: That's a very moving story, and I feel like the challenge of having that kind of generosity is something that seems almost harder today. You have written quite a bit recently about the difference between calling in and calling out, and it feels like there's a generational difference in the way that people who are doing activism around things like reproductive justice or economic or class or other kinds of issues, it feels like there's something at stake in the way that people are talking to each other and reacting to each other. And I wonder if you could talk a little about the difference between calling in and calling out, how you see that, and why you've been focusing your work more recently on this?
Loretta: Well, I think people have been calling each other out as long as there's been human history. After all, Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel, that was the original definition of calling somebody out! The fact that we want to shame, blame and use our anger against other people is not new. That's part of human behaviour. What is different today is the virality of it, that instead of one person calling you out, through the internet you can get 10,000 people to call you out, all simultaneously, and so that magnifies and increases the harm. The other thing that I'm concerned about, which is why I focus my work on the calling in/calling out culture, is that the young people I talk to are exhausted by walking around on verbal eggshells, feeling that something they may have tweeted in the past, or they're singing a rap song and they say the N word, and all of a sudden they're set up for all kinds of blame and shame and all kinds of stuff. They really don't like the effects of the call-out culture on them and they're passionate to do the right thing, but they're going about it the wrong way with the call-out culture. About seven years ago I observed this phenomenon, because that was when I first got on social media and saw how unbelievably nasty people were to each other. And then I was able to process my life experiences, starting with the Prisoners against Rape but also when I did anti-Klan work in the 1990s and I had to deprogramme white supremacists and stuff, that I had actually had a body of work that involved having difficult conversations with a whole lot of people I wouldn't bring home for coffee, I don't want them to be my friends, but I needed to have conversations with them as a community organiser. And so I thought that some of my experiences could offer useful lessons to a lot of young people who have a very radical analysis of what's wrong with the world, but they don't have the radical love practices to go along with that analysis, so they falsely believe that if someone politically disagrees with you you're obligated to call them out. That's the way to do the work. But the problem with that approach is that if you publicly shame, humiliate and blame people it's going to thwart your objectives, because it's only human to get defensive, to not want to listen to someone calling you names, to not want to change anything because they're attacking your humanity. They're attacking your morality, they're not just having a political disagreement with you. And so call-out culture produces frustration because people are not getting the change that they'd like to see with the call-out culture. I think a different accountability process is required, and that's calling in. Because after all calling in is a call out, but it's done with love and respect, and so you can call attention to problematic behaviour that you think needs to change. But because you keep the humanity of the person in the centre of your lens, you don't dehumanise them, you don't attack their morality. You make them feel heard and respected so that you can invite them into a conversation instead of a fight. There's no guarantee that they're going to change, because you don't have the magical words to make other people change, but it does increase the likelihood that they will consider what you've said because they also will consider how you made them feel. A lot of times people won't remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. So if you make them feel heard and respected and given grace, you really dramatically increase the likelihood that they will pay attention to the content of what you've got to say to them. And for me it goes beyond interpersonal conversations and relationships. It really goes back to this global fight against fascism that's facing all of us, and climate change and all the others, racism, misogyny and all the other -isms. I think the people who are opposed to us in the human rights movement think that they're fighting us, but I think they're wrong, actually. Because they're fighting forces way beyond their control, because they're fighting truths and they're fighting time and they're fighting evidence and history, and there's no group of fascists that can permanently fight truth, time, evidence, and history. So those of us who are the human rights movement, we are holding a winning hand. But I'm really concerned that we'll snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with our call-out culture, because we're turning on each other instead of to each other to figure out how to fight the forces of hatred and bigotry.
Meehan: It makes a lot of sense that this is where you have arrived after many decades of organising and all of the lessons that you've learned. It feels like you're working on almost a higher level in terms of what you can teach and impart and leave various movements. But I'd love to go back in time a little bit and talk about the concept of reproductive justice. This concept, as you and others have articulated it, is based on three interconnected human rights: the right not to have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent a child in a safe and healthy environment. It demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom, so it includes trans men, trans women, and gender nonconforming individuals. Could you talk a bit about how the reproductive justice came about in 1994 in response to strategies for healthcare reform being offered by the Clinton administration, and why the women involved thought a new framework was necessary?
Loretta: Well, we were hearing the Clinton administration talk to us about getting healthcare reform, because of course the United States does not have universal healthcare, unlike other industrialised countries that are smarter than us. And the Clinton administration, that's Bill Clinton's administration, thought that if they omitted reproductive healthcare from healthcare reform, that they could lessen the opposition. And that was such a strange strategy because the people who are opposed to universal healthcare are cruel, but they're not dumb! And so at this pro-choice conference in Illinois in June of 1994, when we heard this proposal we were stunned, because why would you come to a feminist conference with a healthcare plan that removes reproductive healthcare, and then expect women to endorse it? It ends up being a very male-centric plan, because our second on-becoming-a-woman moment after our periods is our feet up in those stirrups, a common experience for those of us who have the right plumbing! So anyway, after this presentation one of the 12 black women at the conference asked us to be in her hotel room, and we started problematising the pro-choice, pro-life binary and how inadequate it was, because both of those movements start with the pregnancy, and we felt that you need to pay attention to the human rights conditions in that person's life long before they're pregnant. Because if that person is suffering from violence in their relationship, or housing precarity, they don't have a bedroom to put a child in, or they're afraid they're going to lose their job if they continue a pregnancy, or don't have food to give that child, these are the kinds of human rights violations that really affect people's reproductive decision-making. So we think that neither the pro-choice or the pro-life people go far enough upstream to look at what's going on in a person's life before the unplanned pregnancy occurs. And if the person has good answers to those human rights concerns, then they may turn an unplanned pregnancy into a wanted child. But if they have bad answers to those human rights concerns, they're likely to turn that unplanned pregnancy into an abortion. And so instead of starting with the pregnancy, you have to start in a different place. And as we were considering all those other human rights concerns, we realised that they were social justice concerns – that's the language we used at the time – and so we spliced together the concept of reproductive rights with social justice, and that's how we coined the term ‘reproductive justice’. And then we went to further define it in the way that you since described. Now this was just 12 black women putting ourselves in the lens, asking ourselves what we wanted from healthcare reform, so much to our surprise it became a very popular framework. We did not initiate it, trying to challenge it as a pro-choice and a pro-life movement, because if that had been our intent, we would have had to centre white women in our frame. And we didn't, it was ourselves! And then three years later, the SisterSong Women of Color Collective was developed, and it started using reproductive justice as its organising framework, so it became very popular among women of colour. But because reproductive justice was created by black women, we are very careful to point out that it doesn't only apply to black women, because it's based on the universal human rights framework and everybody has the same human rights. But because of our intersectional identities, we may need something different to achieve them, the same way that every child has a human right to an education, but a blind child might need her books and braille. So you have to pay attention to people's special needs as a way to make sure that they can enjoy the same human rights as people without those disadvantages.
Meehan: You've written that ‘reproductive justice offers one strategy for building a coherent human rights movement based on an anti-fascist analysis that incorporates race, gender, and class because it is obvious that previous liberal frameworks are inadequate.’ And today, to some degree, reproductive justice has replaced reproductive rights as the dominant framework within the mainstream feminist movement. So I have a two-part question. One is, could you talk a little bit about how reproductive justice is specifically different from reproductive rights for folks who might not totally understand the distinction? And also, today do you see the justice and rights frameworks as operating in tandem, in tension, or in some other way?
Loretta: Well, as we continued our grassroots theorising, pointing out that theory comes from community as well as the academy, what we realised is that there are three different components of movements that do work in tandem. There's the reproductive health movement, which is the service provider movement. That's where people go to get their medical care with doctors, nurses, midwives, doulas, etc, and that's one part of our movement. Reproductive rights, at least in the United States, is the pro-choice movement. And we do not problematise the term ‘pro-choice’, because they are advocating for the securing of constitutional rights within the limits of the US Constitution, fighting for the right for keeping abortion, for example, safe, accessible, legal, and affordable. So then there's the reproductive justice framework as the third leg of the stool, which is a human rights-based organising framework that seeks to bring into the conversation both biological issues like sterilisation abuse and reproductive oppression, problematising assisted reproductive technologies and things like that, but also bringing into the conversation non-biological issues like the environment, the lack of affordable housing, student loan debt, gun violence, whether or not we have safe schools, those kinds of things. And so they work in tandem with each other, they're not oppositional at all. They're different layers of the onion that we call reproductive freedom.
Meehan: You've written quite a bit about how in the early 20th century the mainstream feminist movement veered away from its more radical anti-capitalist roots and embraced this liberal choice-focused agenda, which was more responsive to the needs of middle-class white women than those being articulated by women of colour and working-class women. And in that time there was a lot of momentum around building coalitions for a women's right not to have a child, specifically around this legalising contraception and abortion. And then after Roe became law in 1973, the grassroots momentum of pro-choice organising really fizzled, while far right and anti-abortion forces got organised with devastating effects at the state and local levels where access to reproductive healthcare was often denied to poor women and women of colour, and where pregnancy was increasingly criminalised. Now, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, do you think there's a danger of reproductive justice and the intersectional needs of women of colour once again being pushed aside by a more rights-based pro-choice agenda? Or are we really in a different place today, a place that might lead to different forms of organ
Loretta: Well, I believe that the women's rights movement has its left, centre, and right, just like any other social formation. Even the church has a left, centre, and right. Everybody has that. So the left wing of the women's rights movement had a much more robust intersectional analysis than its right wing or its centre wing. So when people talk about middle-class white women, they're really just talking about the centre wing of the women's rights movement, not the left wing and certainly not its conservative wing. So we need to be more nuanced and more precise in what we're describing and calling the women's movement, because I would never deny the more radical analyses offered by the left wing of the women's rights movement that fought with us against sterilisation abuse, fought with us for treaty rights, fought against racism, fought against the war, etc etc, fought for gay rights and all like that. So it is unfortunate that the media always focuses on that centre wing and not its left or right wing differences. So first of all, we need to honour that there are white women who have an analysis that's very similar to what we offer as women of colour. It’s also problematised women of colour, because women of colour who are drawn into the women's movement are ourselves very middle-class. Just because we are women of colour doesn't mean that we understand the realities of women on welfare or women who are incarcerated, etc etc, so we have to do our own work around strengthening our own intersectional analyses as well. And so it's great to imagine that this war is existing within the women's movement around these fissures that a lot of people make a lot of money writing about, but they write about it in very binary, un-nuanced ways. They don't understand it like a lifelong feminist like me does, because I see the differences among women of colour and I see the differences among white women, and I'm drawn to those with a sturdy political analysis that corresponds with my analysis. And I challenge – with love – those who are part of my movement who don't have that analysis. One of the things that I've been pushing a lot of my white allies to really work on is their class contradictions, because they don't understand that their failure to effectively work with poor white women is why they were left to be organised by the anti-abortion movement around the axes of religion and tradition and whiteness. The other thing that I offer a critique of is to see this entire anti-abortion, anti-sex education and anti-contraceptive movement as a way to impose forced breeding on white women, and it's being done because of their whiteness. There’s nothing that I've experienced that makes me think that the architects of this misogynist policy want more brown and black babies to be born. That's simply not true. They kill the ones we have. And so for those feminists who think it's only about gender, without incorporating a sturdy analysis about the racial politics of reproduction, they also have an underperforming analysis because they don't really understand how the anti-abortion movement was actually built from the remnants of the segregation movement married with the anti-immigrant movement, the anti-gay movement, the anti-abortion movement, and in many ways the anti-government movement, because they didn't like the fact that the government in the 1960s criminalised racism, segregation, and things like that. And so we're facing a hydra, and you just can't lop off one head and think that you’ve killed the beast. You have to have this robust intersection of analysis as a white woman in order to understand how to come up with the appropriate and effective counter to this movement.
Meehan: I'd be curious to talk a bit about the ways that the far right has tried to co-opt reproductive justice. You've talked about this a little bit just now, and you're an expert on white nationalism and fascism, having spent much of the early nineties as the National Program Director for the Center for Democratic Renewal, which was previously known as the National Anti-Klan Network, where you were directing projects on right-wing organisations in South Africa and documenting Klan and neo-Nazi involvement in anti-abortion violence. And if I'm correct, in Atlanta you worked on the National Black Women's Health Project to monitor hate groups and investigate the links between white nationalism and anti-abortion violence. I wonder, could you talk a bit about the anti-abortion billboards that went up around Atlanta, Georgia in 2010?
Loretta: Yes. I was on my way to work at SisterSong, because I was the national coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Collective back then, and I noticed a billboard that said ‘black children are an endangered species’, and of course this was similar to something that we've been saying for years about the neglect of black children, the health and safety and wellness of black children. So I didn't think much of it, I said, oh, somehow somebody's got some money to put up some great billboard. But when I got to my office, my phone was ringing off the hook from reporters asking what I thought about these billboards. Apparently the Radiance Foundation had got some money, from where I don't know, to erect these billboards throughout the black community starting in Atlanta, claiming that black women choosing to have abortions are committing self-genocide and imperilling the black race. Basically, we were accused of being our own Nazis, because they were comparing it to the Holocaust and all kinds of crazy stuff. At once I understood the political objective was to shame and blame black women for having abortions, but also to demonise abortion providers as being the architects of our genocide. And then there was more than a tinge of antisemitism in there, through claiming the majority of abortion doctors are Jewish, and so they're the ones trying to kill the white race by having white women have abortions, and all of this other stuff. And so within minutes I had to respond to all of these reporters calling me, asking my opinion about these billboards. So I had to come up with a quick three-part strategy. First of all, I had to challenge the authors of the billboards and say that there were many many black leaders, including Martin Luther King and Mary McLeod Bethune and Dorothy Height, who supported reproductive freedom for black women. So I would stake their reputation against this unknown architect of these billboards any day, because I didn't know who he was or anything like that, this mixed-race guy who had got some money to do this racially tinged anti-abortion campaign. So that was the first strategy, to cause a reputational comparison so that we could rely on the icons we trusted versus this unknown guy calling us Nazis. The second thing was to challenge his assumptions with the facts, talking about the unplanned pregnancies in the black community, the consequences to women who weren't able to control their reproductive destinies, how four out of five children in foster care are black, looking to be adopted. And so we had to fight his disinformation with real information as our second strategy. And then we had to pivot by saying, trust black women. And we created a whole trust black women campaign, around ‘trust black women to make the decisions that are necessary for our lives, our families, and our communities.’ We have endured enslavement, because of black women's care and love for our children in our communities, so certainly we're not going to let you demonise us. You probably came from a family who raised you, and all of that. We're not going to let you demonise us and blame us for the fault of neoliberal capitalism and white supremacy. We are not your Nazis! And we refuse to be slotted into that role just because you can make a lot of money calling us those names and serving as the puppet of the white anti-abortion movement. Now, the purpose of that campaign really wasn't even about black women. That's the the sad part about it, as we did the analysis. It was targeted towards convincing racially insecure white people who were pro-choice that if they supported abortion rights, they were practising racism against black people. So it really was a campaign targeting... it looked like they were using black women as a way to shame white people. So it tried to drive a wedge between the black and white population and the pro-choice movement. It also wanted to animate the not-so-latent misogyny in the black community so that they could animate black men into opposing the reproductive decisions of black women. But most of all, it wanted to lodge into legislation the obligation of doctors to question the motives of white people who were having abortions, and they created this whole set of legislation at the federal and the state level called PRENDA, the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, claiming that black and Asian women were being coerced against our better interests. And so they wanted to force doctors to ask patients, why are you choosing this abortion? If you're choosing it because of the race or the gender of the child, I have to deny you services. Now, normally in a medical procedure like an abortion, the only question of any relevance is, when was your last menstrual period. And so for doctors now to be obligated to ask for the motives of women seeking abortion was something that had not appeared in US law previously, and they were trying to get that into the law. Their whole argument fell apart for some obvious reasons because they, like I, could never find a black woman who was choosing an abortion because she was surprised that her child was going to be black! And Asian women stood up and said, wait a moment, we are not being deluded into choosing abortions because we're concerned about the gender of our foetuses. And so it was a whole campaign of lies and shaming and blaming that continues to this day.
Meehan: I wonder how you see this kind of co-optation from the right or by white nationalists using the ideas in reproductive justice and repurposing them for their own ends happening today?
Loretta: Well, when you talk about the right, again, you've got to nuance it. Because there are aspects of the far right white nationalist movement that are OK with abortion if they can restrict it to brown and black women, they're just not OK with white women accessing abortion. But then there's the other wing of the anti-abortion movement that defines themselves as pro-life that I actually have some agreement with, because their pro-life position says, I wouldn't personally choose an abortion, but I wouldn't stop somebody else from choosing one. And so you have to nuance the pro-life movement, even, with the fierce anti-abortionists versus the more feminist wing of the pro-life movement that talks about increasing childcare and social support for women who continue their pregnancies. And so they end up with a lot of common ground with those of us in reproductive justice. As a matter of fact, I included one of the essays from Mary Krane Derr in my radical reproductive justice anthology, because she used the reproductive justice movement to make an argument that despite her opposition to abortion, she supported the rest of the reproductive justice agenda. We don't have single-issue movements because we're not single-issue people, as Audre Lorde so famously said, and so strategically it's very important to not objectify and demonise people, but figure out how you can build power with people in order to challenge the human rights violations that need to be challenged. Some people think that that makes me a sellout because I will work with someone who's anti-abortion or at least pro-life, and I have no problems with that. I work with people who are racist all the time, it's called the women's movement! I work with a lot of people as a way of addressing the human rights violations that I think need to be addressed.
Meehan: There does seem to be, at least in an international sense, a co-optation by a certain part of the far right of the ideas around contraception and abortion being a form of eugenics from the global north being perpetrated on the global south.
Loretta: Well, part of that happens because of our own failure as a pro-choice movement to deal with our own contradictions, because there are people who support family planning and abortion and birth control, not because they centre the woman in their lens, but because they have another agenda. They're concerned about overpopulation or the rise of global unrest or terrorism or the environment, and so they see women as the means to their ends. So that's a very uneasy alliance with those of us who put women in the centre of our lens. So we may all support abortion, birth control, family planning, but we do it for very different reasons. And we needed to have cleaned up those contradictions in our own movement so that they wouldn't be available to be exploited by our opponents, because they should not have been able to seize the anti-population control language that they're the ones that initially promoted with their eugenical thinking because they are biological determinists, and so our weakness becomes our opponent's opportunities.
Meehan: I'm curious what you think of programmes that are led by organisations in the global north that are providing what are genuinely lifesaving services that local women in the global south say that they want, but do so with the goal – sometimes stated not always particularly clearly – of reducing women's fertility. And some of these programmes even have specific fertility targets that they maintain as a goal of their programmes. So given the history of eugenics and the failure of the broader women's rights movement to deal with these contradictions, what do you think about these programmes and what is a thoughtful response to such programmes?
Loretta: One way to think about analysing these programmes that are providing services, very much needed services to women in the global south and around the world, is to get them to move from just providing services to a human rights analysis that asks why those services don't already exist. In other words, you could do it from a humanitarian impulse where you give a person a fish, to use that old parable, or you could do it from a technical assistance where you teach people to fish. But when you use the human rights framework and the reproductive justice framework, you have to ask why there's no fish in the river in the first damn place, and who's responsible. And so it is part of the work not only to provide contraceptive and abortion access to women around the world, but you've got to ask the stringent questions of why the public health infrastructure doesn't exist so that people can be self-sufficient in providing these things for themselves, and why economic and geopolitical policies of the West keeps disabling these countries from being able to establish their own educational and economic infrastructures to take care of their people. And part of the problem is that our current geopolitical economic system actually does not want those countries to be truly developed, because then they would be competitors for the natural resources that the West considers theirs to own and appropriate. And so if you're going to use the reproductive justice framework, you've got to challenge what is called a structural adjustment policy, and things that keep other countries from developing the healthcare infrastructure necessary to serve their own people. How do we address the corruption in our government that feeds into and enables the corruption of other governments that end up hurting the people that our government and their government should be serving?
Meehan: Yes. You see this kind of argument emerging a bit in the arguments around climate justice, thinking about why nations are in the situation that they're in, and conversations around climate reparations. But at the same time you see environmentalists, particularly climate activists, linking women's fertility to both environmental breakdown and to what is called ‘climate solutions’. And in a sense the idea of raising children in a healthy environment is being linked with a resurgence of concern about population growth. I'm curious what you think of this tendency to link women's fertility, which of course often means the fertility of black and brown and indigenous women, to environmental problems and solutions?
Loretta: It's a false analysis that leads to a false solution. The greatest environmental damage is not done by women having babies. The greatest environmental damage is done by oil companies, by the military, by the real architects of environmental degradation and by corporations. And so why blame women in the global south, who are the true victims of environmental catastrophes, for causing those environmental catastrophes? You have seventy years of work that proves that a child born in the United States will have twenty times the environmental impact of a child born in the global south, because of the way that we overly consume natural resources in the global north and the underconsumption of natural resources in the global south. And so it's a false analysis that leads to a false solution, because the real fear is that we do not want economic competitors for limited natural resources rather than weaning ourselves off an oil economy and investing in a more sustainable way to provide energy to both our country and the countries around the world. I think there's more than a tinge of white supremacist thinking. It isn't that the world has a population problem, it's that certain parts of the world have problems with certain parts of the population. That would be, to my mind, a more accurate analysis of the scope of the problem.
Meehan: I agree with that analysis, I have to say. One reason that discussion of the ‘population problem’ is once again on the rise is the convergence of the climate crisis with evidence that strongly suggests that when women and girls have greater access to education birth rates drop, and this evidence cuts across all other demographic distinctions including race and religion and class. A host of deep-pocketed organisations, including private foundations and governments, are increasingly eager to support women and girls in nations across the global south who want to make their own choices around when and if to have children, and who are themselves advocating for the cultural health and educational infrastructure that's necessary to make those choices. With access to such infrastructure, women and girls generally choose to have fewer children. So this has led some mainstream and progressive organisations to promote increased access to both education and voluntary family planning, which will then result in lower birth rates and supposedly ease pressure on the environment as a win-win proposition. What do you think of this proposition?
Loretta: There's something remarkably similar about biology around the world. It all kind of works the same, you know what I mean? And so what caused women in the global north to reduce their birth rate was economic and educational opportunities. So why can’t someone who's probably a lot smarter than me figure out that women in the global south will operate pretty much the same? Economic and educational opportunities is the best way to reduce the global birth rate if you analyse that as a problem. I don't know why – well, I do know why they don't care to have that kind of concomitant development of the global south with the global north. I've already said that. But they're pretending that they don't know that, and that allows them to impose very anti-woman pressures without addressing the underlying structural inequities. And even they're using popular euphemisms. They don't call it ‘population control’ any more. They call it ‘population stabilisation’ and all kinds of feminist-sounding words, when in fact the same old eugenical thinking is underlying that, that there are some populations that are encouraged to reproduce, and in their population, usually based on race, colour, and caste, that are encouraged to not reproduce. Their thinking is by no means original. They've just sophisticated their language around it and recruited a lot of people into sharing their thinking. When Paul Ehrlich wrote the Population Bomb book back in the sixties, it has had a long- lasting legacy of convincing people that we're on a population explosion, when in fact if you look at what's happening in the global north, there's actually a lack of sustainable replacement of the population, and this of course has a lot of fascists in the global north concerned about that. Of course the easy solution to their dwindling population numbers would be to relax their immigration restrictions. Let in the people you need for your economy, your military, your labour forces and stuff like that. But of course they're too xenophobic and racist to do that. Instead, they want to put this inordinate amount of pressure on white women to have more babies, kind of like the Handmaid’s Tale story. But I actually am not sad that they're not as smart as the Nazis, the actual Nazis, the original Nazis, because the Nazis figured out that what the far right is trying to do here with coercion, they were able to achieve with incentives. Because under Nazi Germany they would offer women free childcare, free healthcare, down payments on mortgages for their homes, all kinds of incentives to encourage them to have more babies. And it worked. I'm not that concerned that the right wing here in the United States is going to replicate that plan, but at the same time, if they wanted an increase in white births in America, that would be the way to do it. Looking at student loan forgiveness, looking at the unaffordability of housing – most young people can't even afford the down payment to a home right now – looking at the miserable work conditions and things like that, the lack of healthcare, the lack of childcare. If they addressed those issues, I think more people generally would have children, and particularly white women. So that would be one of my fears – that if they got smart enough, though I don't think it's likely, for them to offer incentives instead of coercion, they may successfully convince a larger number of white women to have more children. Who wouldn't take that deal? For every baby you have, we're going to lop off twenty or thirty thousand dollars of your student loan debt. Or if you have X number of babies, we'll give you twenty or thirty thousand dollars as a down payment to a home, and free childcare and free healthcare. There are ways to achieve their goals, but these ways would actually be about attending to people's human rights, and they'll never be convinced to do that.
Meehan: So I wonder, on this subject of environment and ecology and more babies and less babies – there is today an increasing acceptance that there are ecological limits, that these limits are real. We may not know what they are, we may not know how fast they're approaching, but as historian Julia Adeney Thomas writes, ‘it would be glorious if our numbers and desires could grow forever, if all people on earth now and in the future could live lives of increasing heedless bounty equitably shared. Many modern histories and theories of human society promised as much, but the discovery of the Anthropocene has ruptured that hopeful human trajectory. Now, realistically, the sky is our limit: the thinning stratosphere, biosphere, pedosphere, and much else contain human possibilities.’ And so I think there's some rumbling on the left in particular about what this means in terms of limits of goals for the achievement of human rights. And I wonder if you see the goals of reproductive justice as being at all in tension with ecological limits, if the realities of climate change and environmental degradation more broadly somehow impact the material or theoretical promise of reproductive justice.
Loretta: Let's be clear – and I would really refer you to the works of Betsy Hartmann, because she calls this the ‘greening of hate’. I don't care how few people we have on the planet, if we don't stop the destruction of the planet! Through our fossil fuels engagement, with the wars that we are perpetrating around the world, we are damaging the environment in man-made ways. We're not damaging it by people, we're damaging it by the decisions that our corporate and military industrial complexes are making. So if you don't change those decisions, I don't care if there's eight million people on the planet or two billion people on the planet, you're still going to have the same outcome.
Meehan: There's a way of thinking about this where it feels like we're still really stuck in this biological determinism that a human has a certain impact on the planet, and not that a human exists within structures that are political and social and technological that amplify or reduce that impact. The fact is, we have never tried to live sustainably on this planet. We have no idea how many people might be able to live sustainably on this planet. And so the idea that the lever you should pull is population feels like ignoring all of the other levers that are the places where the destruction is actually occurring.
Loretta: We call it neo-Malthusianism. It's Malthus updated, a social Darwinism about it. Of course the billionaires of the planet aren't spending their billions trying to correct what is going on, they're trying to build spacecraft to avoid it, to escape it! We have the technology and the knowledge to solve almost every human-induced problem on this planet. It’s how we choose to direct that technology that's the problem, because we choose to direct it in ways that violate people's human rights rather than achieve people's human rights. I'm writing a lot now about a concept I'm calling ‘reproductive futurism’. It's about the very strong risk that all of our reproductive technologies are being sold to us as a techno-utopian dream, when in fact all it's going to do is upgrade our present day social inequalities, as people talk about becoming transhuman and modifying the human genome, inheritable genomic modifications and those kinds of things, without really considering not only the consequences to the vulnerable people, the surrogacy arrangements that exploit people's economic vulnerabilities and stuff like that, the whole commercialisation of people's bodies, not only at that level of destruction, but actually putting in peril the entire human race as we get stratified into the superior genetic stock versus the inferior genetic stock. How is that not the same old eugenics, just with better toys?
Meehan: In your darkest moments, what do you see as a worst-case scenario for the future?
Loretta: Well, actually, I don't have a lot of dark moments. I have a natural emotional buoyancy that has worked for me all of my life. I believe in the power of humanity to self-correct and to do better. I think we're at the dying gasp of a group of men who are demographically doomed. I don't think that they're going to be able to convince enough white women to have 18 kids in order to save themselves. So I actually believe that as our societies around the world become younger, queer, more female, more radical in their analyses, that in twenty, thirty, forty years these fascists are going to be pimples on the ass of time, they're going to be in our rear-view mirror, because they have a self-defeating nihilism about their ideology. Look at how many people who didn't believe in Covid have died off. They killed themselves because of their refusal to believe in science. They kill themselves with their refusal to support universal healthcare or an end to school shootings and gun violence. I don't have a scenario in which they win. I don't even have a scenario in which they're still going to be around in a hundred years.
Meehan: So what do you see as a best-case scenario for the future?
Loretta: A friend of mine, Dazon Dixon Diallo, talks about a rematriation society as opposed to a patriarchal society, that I think that those of us who care dearly about the life of children and the life of Mother Earth are going to eventually have sufficient power to put these nihilist forces in their place, to simply outnumber them politically, economically, and socially. Now, of course, a lot of us are going to get harmed and maybe even die on the way to doing that, because they're like rats on a sinking ship. They're ready to throw everybody overboard if they think it increases their chances of survival. But I actually think that's a losing strategy. As I said, they're demographically doomed.
Meehan: So two quick last questions. If listeners are interested in reproductive justice, what can they do to stay informed? What would you suggest that they read or listen to or follow or watch?
Loretta: My first recommendation to stay informed about reproductive justice would be to join SisterSong, www.sistersong.net, as the leading reproductive justice organisation in this country. Even though it was founded by women of colour, membership is open to everybody. That is the place where we do our organising, our conceptualisation, our theory, and we work on changing public policy and who represents us in electoral politics. So that would be my first recommendation. Rickie Solinger and I wrote a book called Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, and that's published by the University of California Press, so that's easily available as a way of introducing people to this thinking and to these concepts that I'm talking about.
Meehan: I would maybe add to that list the Radical Reproductive Justice book that you edited with Lynn Roberts and Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples and Pamela Bridgewater. It's an excellent collection of essays coming from various different perspectives that really give a sense of the multiplicity of voices that are involved and also the core values that really animate this project. Loretta, it's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much for joining us on the LRB podcast.
Loretta: Well, thank you for having me.
Meehan: In the next episode, going out two weeks from now, I'll be exploring the intersections of science and technology with culture and feminism, as well as the dangers of biological determinism with evolutionary biologist and feminist scholar Banu Subramanian. The idea for this series arose out of my own research and the questions I've been wrestling with while working on a non-fiction book based on a piece I wrote for the LRB titled ‘Is It OK to Have a Child?’, which you can read on the LRB website. You can find a link in the description. In a sense, this series is both a collection of interviews with four brilliant women and to peek into the book reporting process. The book, which has been generously supported by grants from the Sloane Foundation and the Robert B Silvers Foundation will be published by Random House in the US and Chatto and Windus in the UK in 2024.
