Chaumtoli Huq
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone.”
While the United States Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion, was a tremendous legal setback, it correctly shattered the myth that the right to bodily autonomy exists under our legal, political, and capitalist systems. It does, however, provide an opportunity to advance an emancipatory vision of bodily autonomy long articulated by Black, Indigenous, and Global South feminists, which brings together a diverse coalition of grassroots social movements to articulate radical politics around life and livelihood.
In this piece, I briefly outline emancipatory concepts of bodily autonomy in contrast to the dominant liberal feminist ones underlying the reproductive rights movement. This broader framing, drawn by reproductive justice movements led by women of color, provides an opportunity to draw connections with other social movements, such as labor, immigration, LGBTQ rights, environmental justice, and racial justice. Such a framing allows those movements to advocate for demands through organizing that affirms life, ensures livelihoods, and secures a sustainable future.
Emancipatory Concepts of Bodily Autonomy
Bodily autonomy has been narrowly conceptualized in the U.S., which can be popularly understood in phrases like “right to choose” or “our bodies ourselves.” It presupposes an individual, atomized self, disconnected from any social identities or part of any communities. Individualism obscures more collectivist perspectives of the self and body as unbound to one form, person, or identity. Collectivist approaches, often emerging from Indigenous and non-European cultures, view the self as interdependent, connected to other life forms, and view family/kinship based on relational ties rather than biological ones. Thus, collectivist principles of rights, security, and safety of the body is all-embracing, not circumscribed by heteronormative biological reproduction.
A broader definition of bodily autonomy emerges from an understanding of what scholar bell hooks describes as white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, and imperialist structures of power. This individualized notion of bodily autonomy, solely about owning one’s own body, is rooted in Eurocentric values. Even though the right over one’s body is foregrounded in feminism, gender equity, and mainstream human rights, the rightsholder is envisioned as cis-gendered, white, property-owning, and from the Global North.
An understanding of interlocking systems of oppression gives specific political content and context to principles of choice, integrity, dignity, safety, and security. For marginalized communities, this means being free from different forms of state-sanctioned and economic violence. As such, under an emancipatory framework, communities resist a narrow framing of bodily autonomy, and offer alternative life-affirming values that are anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal. The Combahee River Collective statement of 1977, written by Black feminists who were part of the feminist and reproductive rights movement, found that the focus by liberal white feminists on abortion excluded the issues of Black women and other women of color. They articulated a feminist politic that included all oppressed peoples. They write: “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”
Decades after the Combahee River Collective statement, its ideas reverberate in Sister Song’s mission. Founded in 1997 by 16 organizations of women of color from Indigenous, African American, Latina, and Asian American communities, Sister Song seeks to to improve policies that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities. They write:
All oppressions impact our reproductive lives; [reproductive justice] is simply human rights seen through the lens of the nuanced ways oppression impacts self-determined family creation. The intersectionality of [reproductive justice] is both an opportunity and a call to come together as one movement with the power to win freedom for all oppressed people.
Sister Song defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” However, historically, hegemonic and colonial forms of feminism have sought to narrow our conception of feminist issues, particularly in the area of reproductive justice to the single issue of abortion. This limited vision excludes other ways in which our systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism cause violence and deny bodily security for many members of our communities. Even when the issue of abortion is narrowly conceived, transgender and non-binary persons who can become pregnant are excluded, revealing that it is not about protecting a particular form of reproductive right, but about protecting that right for certain individuals–white and cis-gendered.
One of the reasons the Supreme Court gave in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for why abortion is not a constitutionally protected right is that the text and history of the Constitution does not state so. Indeed, if we view the formation of the U.S. as a gendered settler-colonial and racial-capitalist project, as Black and Native American feminisms urge us to do, then we would expect the omission of any rights for Black and Native women in the text. In Killing The Black Body, scholar Dorothy Roberts discusses how “Black procreation helped to sustain slavery” and how through slavery and reproduction enslaved persons were subjugated. Native American feminists discuss how the formation of the U.S. sovereignty was predicated on the annihilation of Indigenous communities and conducted through various violent and legal reproductive policies.
Thus, control over reproduction to subjugate certain communities was very much central to the U.S. Constitution and formation of the American nationhood. Roberts aptly writes, “[t]he American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination.” The judicial authority of the U.S. settler-colonial state, and therefore the Constitution, was predicated on the genocide of Native Americans and the control of Black women’s reproduction for the maintenance of slavery.
As such, limiting our understanding of the text of the Constitution as giving or not giving individual rights distracts us from the larger legal and political project of denying life to a vast segment of the population. It limits our legal strategies to formalist ones, including reforms to the Supreme Court. Black, Indigenous, and Global South feminisms understood that a formalist framing of reproductive rights focused on the Constitution or, in the case of Dobbs, a narrow legal interpretation, would not lead to any reproductive rights or rights for marginalized communities. As Audre Lorde’s quote at the start of this piece, from her essay Learning from the 60s notes, we do not live single-issue lives, and so our struggles should be interconnected.
What is remarkable and prescient of the Combahee River Collective statement, and Sister Song’s mission, is that they are not limited to narrow biological reproductive issues such as abortion, contraceptives, and choices around family formations. They push us to transcend our issue areas to forge radical politics for all oppressed peoples to come together. It is this emancipatory vision of bodily autonomy that I spotlight here, which provides social movements the vision to explore strategies that are not limited to formal political and civil equality. Such broader concepts of bodily autonomy allow fractured social movements to come together to build a global grassroots multi-racial economic justice movement.
Reproductive Justice and the Fight Against Social Control
Reproductive justice is most attuned to the ways in which we biologically and socially reproduce ourselves, including social identities such as gender, race, and other structures of inequality. This is often referred to as social reproduction. Biological reproduction ensures a future workforce for capitalism, and the reproduction of social inequalities that regulate that workforce to extract labor and maintain the profits of a capitalist economy. Care and affective work by domestic workers, home-health aides, and unpaid caregivers enable other workers to be available for the capitalist economy. Gender and race become useful tools to create hierarchies between types of work to justify low wages in predominantly feminized workforces.
Because reproductive justice is not only concerned with biological reproduction or the decision not to reproduce, but concerns socio-economic conditions that limit the choice of reproduction or determines who constitutes a family, it becomes an important space through which to address multiple forms of inequalities. For example, a narrative around choice obscures how racism in maternal health impacts Black women’s access to reproductive health-care or the exclusion of transgender persons from reproductive healthcare.
Economic factors are not the sole determinants for reproduction. Nor does having a choice to reproduce mean that all persons are able to exercise that choice equally. As such, social reproduction is not a mechanical process, instrumentalized for capitalism, but rather a dynamic one, often reinforcing gender and other social inequalities such as racism and transphobia. An expansive framing of bodily autonomy also allows other issues, including economic justice, to be considered which seeks to disrupt the reproduction of various systems of oppression.
Roe, emerging out of the feminist movement of the 1970s, was followed by a period of neoliberal globalization that led to a wide wealth disparity, feminization of labor, and the abdication of the public health responsibilities. Now the denial of abortion as a federally protected right signals a profound crisis in our ability to live (literally) and work. All facets of human life are being constrained, denied, and made dead. The conservative appropriation of the right to life is ironic when social movements are fighting for precisely that–to live. Dobbs is part of a series of legal attacks on marginalized communities too numerous to list but includes the challenges of workers to organize, denial of universal health care and other safety nets as workers experience increased precarity, continuation of racial, xenophobic violence, and hate crimes.
In my own work on transnational labor, the slogan “No One Should Die for Fashion” by garment workers across the globe, many of whom are women who produce apparel for multinational companies, speaks to the linkages of exploited gendered labor and life. Garment workers in Bangladesh who experienced the horrific and tragic death of over 1,100 workers in the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse rallied that no one should die for fashion. Locally, New York City taxi drivers were committing suicides at alarming rates due to oppressive taxi medallion debt structures, exploitative independent contracting arrangements in the taxi industry, and predatory practices of rideshare companies like Uber. Some of the reasons given for these tragic deaths is that drivers worried they were unable to provide for their families. Reproductive justice, which seeks to create conditions that enable people to support their families, invariably involves issues related to economic justice.
Forging Links With Other Social Movements
To date, the calls to investigate the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women go unheeded. Militarism and U.S. imperial foreign policies around the globe have destabilized countries and their democracies. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (“BIJ”) documented U.S. strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen from 2002 to 2020 that killed between 10,000 and 17,000 people; 800 and 1,750 are thought to have been civilians. Narrow biological-based notions of reproductive rights limited to abortion ignores all these instances where life and livelihood have been inhumanely denied.
The denial of life-affirming values, and bodily autonomy, exists in other issue areas as well. The varied forms of regulations that determine who is afforded life, and how that life is valued, are the means by which social inequalities are reproduced. Incarcerated persons have always faced attacks on their life through internationally recognized inhumane practices such as solitary confinement. More than 2,700 people died in jails, prisons and detention centers of COVID-19. The Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, also began as a resistance to the continual disregard for Black life. In the field of immigration, there are numerous examples of families separated, removed, detained, and deported. National civil rights groups, including Detention Watch Network, have documented how inadequate medical standards at detention centers have led to deaths in immigration detention facilities.
In this regard, the current fight around abortion, which is taking national center stage, can shift us to a multi-issue movement for bodily autonomy and liberation. It also means that emancipatory concepts of bodily autonomy need to be brought into our respective social movements. In my field of labor rights, it means moving beyond narrow demands of “living” wages or passing legislation to protect the legal right to organize. It may involve demands for guaranteed income and homes, rights to enjoy safe workplaces, universal health care, free childcare, tuition-free higher education, protection from discrimination, and more.
It means not having rights conditioned on marital status, being a parent, or on other statuses such as citizenship which reproduces capitalist patriarchal social relations which view people as having value only as producers of commodities, or producers of labor for capitalism.
The legal attacks by the Supreme Court and local efforts to restrict abortion are devastating because it removes protections and respite from the violence of capitalism. But this moment can be an opportunity to forge radical politics that are life-affirming, address the inherent dignity of human life, and the right to ensure the livelihood needs of communities. Bodily autonomy can move us towards a safe and sustainable future.
Chaumtoli Huq, is an Associate Professor of Law, at CUNY School of Law, where her scholarship focuses on transnational labor law and social movements, with particular attention to racialized and gendered workforces. She thanks Professor Cynthia Soohoo for reading and commenting on this draft, as well as the staff of the CUNY Law Review for their editorial support. You can follow her on twitter @profhuq.