Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America

Notes

191 Notes In troduc tion This book owes a considerable intellectual debt to Lynn Paltrow’s and Dorothy Roberts ’s scholarship and advocacy, as well as that of Rickie Solinger and Rachel Roth. These women, among others, have been at the forefront of advancing our understanding of reproductive rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Some material presented in this book previously appeared in Jeanne Flavin (2007), “Slavery’s Legacy in Contemporary Attempts to Regulate Black Women’s Reproduction,” in Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). 1.No doubt realizing his gaffe, he added, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous , and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” 2.In this book, names appearing in quotation marks are pseudonyms that are used either when no public record (e.g., a news account or a court case) exists that links an event or situation to a specific person, when the identity of the person is not known, or when the person wishes to remain anonymous. Also, convention dictates that I routinely refer to scholars and public officials by their last name, as, for example, “Solinger” rather than “Rickie.” In referring to individuals whose stories illustrate some of the problems with the policies I describe, however, I use the person’s first name: for example, “Sharwline.” This is not to suggest disrespect to the latter group but out of a hope that using first names will remind the reader of these women’s humanity in a way that using their last name only does not. 3.This woman also channeled much of her energy into developing programs at a women’s correctional facility to help women maintain ties to their children, as well as address the needs of incarcerated women who were infected with HIV. 4.Dorothy E. Roberts (1998), Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage). 5.There are limits to thinking only in terms of rights, however, as sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman points out in both Recreating Motherhood and, more recently, Weaving a Family. This is particularly true in a consumer society that has reduced many discussions of rights to the idea that if you can pay for it, you have a right to have it. Rothman reminds her readers of the civil rights movement and the black students seated at a Woolworth’s counter with “a dollar in hand and a right to buy.” But, she goes on to say, “In truth, at that moment in American history, a bigger problem for the blacks of the American South was their poverty: how many of them didn’t have the 192 Notes to the Introduction dollar? Economic inequality is, for most Americans, just the way things are, not really fixable. . . . We have a focus on individual rights rather than social justice in America.” Rothman (2005), Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption (New York: Beacon ), 35. See also Rothman (1989), Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton). Bearing this in mind, I prefer the term “reproductive rights” or “reproductive justice.” The terms “reproductive choice” and “reproductive freedom” fail to adequately acknowledge that, for many women, their choices are so restricted or limited as to be nonexistent and fall far short of anything approximating freedom. 6.Gregg Barak, Jeanne Flavin, and Paul Leighton (2001), Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: Social Realities of Justice in America (Los Angeles: Roxbury). 7.Kenneth Neubeck and Noel Cazenave (2001), Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card against America’s Poor (New York: Routledge). 8.Adrienne Rich (1984 [1977]), Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (London: Virago), 13. 9.Later in this volume I use the terms “state actors” and “state agents” to encompass a broad range of people who work in official agencies and institutions. These include but are not limited to lawmakers, law enforcement officials, child protective service caseworkers and social workers, prosecutors and defense attorneys, criminal and family court judges, and correctional and community supervision administrators and staff. Their actions and decisions are not merely perceived as those of an individual but carry the weight of the institutions they represent. 10.Mary Bosworth (1999), Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women ’s Prisons (London: Ashgate). 11.In general, however, judges are more likely to restrict women’s reproduction than men’s and more likely to do so...