The Problem with "Choice"
Sometime in 2013, while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, I joined a group of counter protestors on my lunch break. We wanted to ensure students and staff walking through a busy area of campus would not feel isolated beneath the towering anti-choice signs with which a pro-life group was demonstrating. I picked up a sign and found a spot alongside the other counter protesters to hold it. It read: “How can you trust me with a child but not a choice?”
Such a sign certainly fits within the broader genre of “My Body, My Choice” language, which has been one of the most widely used slogans in the United States to demand access to reproductive healthcare. These protest slogans can be powerful. It’s a way of claiming bodily autonomy – a way of saying I am here. This is my body. With it, I will do what I want. The rhetorical question in the sign I held also works to call out the irony of state-sanctioned forced pregnancy in the U.S. through increasingly repressive legislation. At its core, though, demanding choice is a demand about individual agency – it assumes that agency is something we all have equally, that by simply being human we can make choices. But any “choice” we make is always constrained, always contingent upon the social and political infrastructures that absolutely determine who can and cannot exercise individual agency. Put simply, “choice” has only ever been available to some, and focusing on individual decision-making erases greater demands for societal, structural issues that are required to be addressed if we want to ensure that everybody can make choices for their own bodies, their own lives. That is the core problem with choice.
With the recent Supreme Court decision released on June 24, 2022, which means we no longer have federal protection for abortion access up to the point of viability, it’s more important than ever that we ensure our messaging is maximally powerful and maximally inclusive for everybody who will be differentially affected by this repressive legislation. As an activist and a PhD candidate studying rhetoric and communication, I am acutely aware of the power of social movement rhetorics - the messages, tactics, and strategies used by groups to champion issues of significance. For decades and decades, feminist social movement scholars before me have made compelling arguments about why messaging matters so much, especially in social movements for access to reproductive healthcare. Of course, this also entails thinking about the kinds of messaging that does not work; “choice” is one such example.
For instance, Katie Gibson, who has written extensively about feminist jurisprudence, closely analyzes the language of the original Roe v. Wade decision, and her findings are remarkable. Even as we remember the Roe decision as one that gave pregnant folks the privacy to make their own reproductive healthcare choices related to pregnancy, the language of Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion - the Justice who drafted the majority opinion of Roe v. Wade - is not actually about women or pregnant folks and their choices at all. As Gibson’s analysis demonstrates, the agency is, instead, given to medical physicians: “the attending physician, in consultation with his patient, is free to determine, without regulation by the state, that, in his medical judgment, the patient's pregnancy should be terminated.” So even in the original language of Roe itself, this decision has never been about individual choices or rights, so much as protection for doctors (gendered as men here) to make decisions on behalf of their (passive) patients. What Gibson and other feminist scholars and activists are calling for, then, are social movement messages that work to center the lives of those who would be impacted by this legislation and to think beyond individualism and “choice.”
New, anti-abortion legislation is a collective, systemic issue that affects folks of different racialized groups, genders, abilities, and classes differently. How we communicate our demands matters for being more inclusive but also because the law itself is informed by public communication about the issues that the law seeks to address.
To be clear, I am not in the business of telling anybody what to think or how to protest. However, in this newsletter, I do want to borrow some of your time to tell you why claiming choice may not be the best route to securing reproductive healthcare access for all. Even more importantly, I want to offer a new vocabulary that we can stand behind to bring us closer to the bodily autonomy that we all wish to claim. Beyond being “pro-choice,” we can also be “pro-life.” Reproductive justice is a feminist concept that can ensure our efforts to challenge threats to abortion access is connected to a constellation of issues that make it next to impossible for so many to ever make a choice in the first place. Reproductive justice includes demands for individual decision-making, to be sure. But it also makes demands on societal structures so that choice is available for all.
This concept bears more explanation, so we’ll detour for a moment to understand the roots of reproductive justice. In the early 1990s, a group of Black women inspired by the tradition of the Combahee River Collective sought to offer a counter narrative and set of demands that differed from the more dominant, white “pro-choice” movement. One of the founders of this group, Loretta Ross, has written extensively about what exactly reproductive justice means and what it seeks to do. In short, the phrase itself was a blending of reproductive rights and social justice, hence: reproductive justice. As Ross explains, “Reproductive justice is based on three interconnected sets of human rights:
the right to have a child under the conditions of one’s choosing;
the right not to have a child using birth control, abortion, or abstinence; and
the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments free from violence by individuals or the state.”
In short, reproductive justice alters our thinking about abortion as a single issue and expands the repercussions of anti-abortion legislation to think about collective care and access more broadly.
Many women of color, poor women, and disabled women in the U.S. have experienced forced sterilization, which is why it’s so important to think more deeply about the right to have a child “under the conditions of one’s choosing.” It’s also important to note that the entire history of gynecology was predicated on surgical experiments performed by white men on enslaved Black women who were not even given anesthetics to curtail the pain of these forced procedures. And even more recently, reports surfaced of immigrant women detained by ICE, who were subject to forced sterilization. Thus, the larger eugenics movement and medical racism in the U.S. have not gone away, making the right to have a child under livable conditions so important to address in this larger conversation.
It’s also important to think more deeply about societal structures that cause harm in terms of environmental and state-sanctioned violence that includes, of course, forced sterilization. This call recognizes that individual “choices” are never made in a vacuum; the decisions one is even able to make are already shaped by a host of factors. For instance, reproductive justice would call attention to how it’s not enough just to demand a right to have a child, but that environment should be conducive to a full, healthy life. For instance, low income communities are often dumping grounds for toxic wastes and poor water treatment, as well as air pollution, and this has transgenerational repercussions for families and communities. Reproductive justice recognizes that it isn’t enough to simply have children if one chooses, but that social structures should be in place to ensure that all children and families have access to clean water and air. If we say that we really do value life, then being “pro-life” should also ensure that we have measures in place to ensure that how much money you have or where you live or how you have been racialized is not a determinant of health outcomes.
The issues raised by reproductive justice activists are paramount in states like Georgia, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S. Rates are even higher in rural areas, where access to abortion care and prenatal or maternal care are already severely limited. Physicians in Georgia are especially worried about trigger laws like Georgia’s “heartbeat bill” that will not only impact abortion access, but will also put a strain on the already severe shortage of OB-GYNs in this state. Currently, half of Georgia counties do not have practicing OB-GYNS. All told, opposing legislation like Georgia’s “Living Infants, Fairness, and Equality” Act, or LIFE Act, is not simply about opposing what it means to value the life of a fetus or even opposing stricter guidelines for securing an abortion. As reproductive justice activists have long taught us, there’s much more to the “pro-choice”/“pro-life” binary. In fact, reproductive justice acknowledges that choice must necessarily come with a valuation of all life – in every sense of the word.
So as we gather with fellow feminist activists in Georgia and beyond to demand access to abortion care, especially now that the onus for access rests on state legislatures and we no longer have Roe as a foundation, it is my hope that we can consider adopting more cohesive slogans at protests and rallies or even in our own interpersonal conversations. Reproductive Justice is a demand that can do important, intersectional feminist work for all. And as we all know, we have lots and lots of work left to do.
Savannah Downing is a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia where she studies public memory, environmental and labor justice, and all things feminist. You can read more about what she’s been up to here.
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