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Hey, legal/policy twitter: anybody know of any good scholarship connecting reproductive oppression and voter suppression as linked anti-democratic policies? I’ve seen a few articles, but not much, and it’s all I’ve been thinking about lately.
Loretta Ross wrote a really great article about how white feminists fail to see disenfranchisement and the policing of pregnancy as two sides of the same misogynoir-istic coin: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2011/10/29/race-class-and-rights-in-mississippi-how-a-reproductive-justice-campaign-can-save-the-pill-and-save-the-vote/
When I saw the Freedom House rankings come out, all I could think about was how something linking the US, Poland, and Argentina was that all 3 of these countries have been locked in debates about reproductive autonomy
I think mainstream political science has started coming around to the idea that racism and classism, and the policies that support them, are profoundly anti-democratic. But we don’t see abortion bans get called anti-democratic (though they are racist and classist policies)
I had a wonderful constitutional law professor assign us a reading on “the authoritarian’s playbook.” I said, “Why isn’t chauvinism and reproductive control on the list?” He said he’d never heard anyone link that to authoritarianism.
I got a chance to question the author of the article on why he didn’t include misogyny as one of his calling-cards of “strong men” government (it’s right in the name, after all). He told me he didn’t have room for it in his 260 page paper, and that abortion is a “settled issue.”
Anyway, that's what an RJ lens gives us-- it lets us see the connections between policies like immigration restrictions and abortion bans and Medicaid cuts as policies that criminalize/underfund/restrict the reproduction of POC, which is seen as a threat to white supremacy
The journalist @transscribe sounded the alarm about how the Trump administration was trying to import Hungarian "family promotion" policies that were meant to encourage white women to have more babies. https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2019/03/25/trump-officials-attend-hungarian-conference-to-promote-women-having-more-babies/
The agenda is all about white women having white babies in a system where white men are in charge. You can trace so many right wing policies back to that core (+ it's why they're targeting trans people, feminists, and critical race theory-- they're ideological threats).
Anyway, Black feminists have been warning everyone about this for decades and it feels like no one has been listening, even during the 5-alarm fires of the Trump administration.
This is why I feel really passionately about equal protection arguments-- when done correctly, I think they can be a powerful legal tool to smash state-created barriers to full participation in society. If we're not afraid to think big, that's a game changer.
Yesterday, I went to a talk hosted by the NJ Courts on "RBG's Legacy-- Applying Equal Protection Arguments to Gender Equality." Justice Virginia Long, retired from the NJ SC, said the next big campaign is applying EP arguments to gender identity and sexual orientation.
I don't believe the law will save us, but at the end of the day, I really do believe that we can change the law in ways that are bold and beautiful and make our society better.
