Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (review)

Undivided Rights is a stunning book. It accomplishes nothing less than redefining "reproductive rights," drawing on the histories and the agendas of reproductive rights organizations founded and led by women of color in the past generation, offering crystal clear explanations of the differences between pro-choice work and working for reproductive justice.

This slim, valuable volume provides short, sharp histories of the reproductive struggles of four racial/ethnic groups of women in the United States—African American, Native American, Asian-Pacific Islander, and Latina—demonstrating the complex, changing meanings of reproductive justice across race, class, and time. Undivided Rights also offers extended, rich case studies of eight organizations (two for each of the demographic groups), each of which has grounded a definition of reproductive freedom in community experience and in the lives of women. As the authors construct histories of specific organizations, they define the particular challenges, strategies, and impacts associated with distinct communities. Undivided Rights succeeds in demonstrating interactions between theory and practice, history and analysis, policy and grassroots activism. This book will be read and prized alike by teachers and students, organizers and advocates, foundation officers and others.

The authors—academics and activists—show us what happened in the wake of the civil rights movement, when women of color organizations emerged focusing on the social and political and economic context in which women live out their reproductive lives. They clarify why activist women of color discredited the post-Roe v. Wade white-led, mainstream focus on individual choice as the special guarantee for all women.

While redefining reproductive freedom, women of color groups stressed the need to break the silence about reproductive capacity as a site of oppression, the need to create safe spaces, to articulate and meet the needs of women in their own communities, to reach out to and cultivate youth involvement. In the 1980s and 1990s, women of color organizations developed this watchword: that what constitutes reproductive justice for some women may well constitute reproductive tyranny for others. For example, legal contraception and accessible sterilization broadened the choices of middle-class women at the same time that public health officials drew coercively on these methods to constrain the childbearing of women of color.

Building on this insight, women of color turned away from mainstream white-led groups that aimed to achieve "diversity," and developed and led new organizations of their own such as the National Black Women's Health Project (1984) and the National Latina Health Organization (1986).

Most fundamentally, the new women of color organizations were clear about the dramatic limits of the prevailing pro-choice/pro-abortion-rights agenda. Women of color argued that "choice" masks the economic, political, environmental context in which women live their reproductive lives. Choice masks the ways that laws, policies, and public officials punish or reward the reproductive activity of different groups of women differently. Choice masks the equal importance of access and rights and obscures the link between all forms of oppression.

Silliman and her co-authors show how organizations that champion the reproductive rights of Native Americans define the mother's body as "the first environment" inextricably related to the robust or diseased external environment. Given the specific history of Native American women, reproductive rights has, for this group, profound environmental meanings and often includes, as well, the right to be safe from domestic violence, the right to HIV/AIDS education and treatment, the right to raise one's own children and to protect and pass on cultural legacies.

In contrast, groups working to secure the reproductive rights of Asian-Pacific Islander women have focused on cultural pressures to produce male children, pressures that lead to additional pregnancies. They have focused on language and cultural impediments to reproductive health care services and on poverty, among other issues.

All of the women of color groups studied in this volume have faced and fought reproductive indignities. They...