2023 Age of Roe Harvard Radcliff Institute Comments
Retrofit, Reform, and Reimagine: Opportunities Presented By the Dobbs Decision
I am going to use my time here to reject the unnecessary binary of anti-abortion or pro-abortion and to push us to think differently about how we talk about abortion, the people who need and seek them, the people who provide them, and the social, clinical and political conditions that make them necessary. I will use retrofit, reform, and reimagination to activate curiosity cause as we heard this morning, some of y’all center suffering and can’t imagine a future without villains and that’s not how I exist in the world. I reject culture wars — cause participating in binaries is incongruent with both/and — A process which is a hallmark of Black Feminism and reproductive justice that there are multiple truths and not just one.
FIRST IS POSITIONALITY: I’m coming to this meeting from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where the US Medical Eligibility Criteria, the document, app, and tools we use to determine clinical risk for each contraceptive methods are being updated. It is not lost on me the importance of that work and its disconnection from essential discussions like Age of Roe.
· I am a person who has witnessed the births 57 different humans including my nieces who are current house sitting for me
· I have conscientiously provided abortions for my entire career
· I am a childless by choice person who has NO IDEA what I would do, decide, or choose if I ever I became pregnant and grateful to now be menopausal so I don’t have to.
RETROFIT: THE DECIDER.
Who gets to decide matters, especially since we trust pregnant people to determine AND DIAGNOSE THEMSELVES WITH PREGNANCY AND if their pregnancies are unwanted, mistimed, or unintended. We discuss outcomes of pregnancy like abortion, birth, miscarriage, stillbirth and factors that are associated with the process of pregnancy like assisted reproductive technology, infertility and surrogacy but not the condition in and of itself. In the first ever Black maternal health amicus brief in Dobbs, we (Black Women) made a simple human rights argument: Pregnancy is not without risk, regardless of outcomes, so who gets to decide if and when to take on that risk matters. Pregnant capable people have to be the primary arbiters of these decisions.
REFORM: Workforce
Ethically, challenging care for nurses is always buttressed by the perceived capacity to provide excellent nursing care. From my own work nurses wrestle with abortion care similarly as they do with treating victims and perpetuators of intimate partner violence, athletes who repeatedly expose themselves to physical harms, and mass shooters– which tells me that we as educators were not preparing future clinicians to meet people where they are; which is crucial in the health professions because nursing is shared work.
REIMAGINE: Reproductive Justice.
Last Weekend at the SisterSong Convening, we clearly defined Our Vision and What We Are Fighting For — [Which I will read a portion of]:
We are dreaming ourselves into the future, fighting like revolutionaries.
Our vision is a future rooted in human dignity and worth, bodily autonomy, joy, love, and rest. Reproductive justice is our framework, intersectionality is our lens, and liberation is the goal.
• Liberation is giving the land back to Indigenous people who stewarded and protected it for generations before colonization, and who live on it today.
• Liberation is having what you need to keep your kids, care for your kids, and keep your family safe and together.
• Liberation is being able to have healthy and supported pregnancy options, and prenatal, birth, and postpartum care. This is birth justice.
• Liberation is choosing your family, and being able to care for yourself and your community.
• Liberation is an end to police, prisons, and detention centers which are designed to harm Black and Brown bodies and break up our families.
· Liberation is building communities where we all feel safe, able to experience joy, and live together with our loved ones.
• Liberation is ending the war on drugs and providing physical and mental health care, help and support for everyone who needs it.
• Liberation is reparations.
• Liberation is abortion care for any person who needs it.
Reproductive justice leads to futures we do not yet know but dare to imagine. We will not be silenced. We will take up all the space we need. We will lead with love. We will reclaim our power for ourselves, our beautiful families, our children, and the generations to come.
Now that Roe is gone, Dobbs in the law of the land, what’s the plan? So what futures are we going to imagine and then construct? Join me on social media to continue this discussion because I reject this as an ending, it is a beginning.
