Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Women
Hey, Media: Don’t Lecture Black Women About Marriage
03 months ago
In 2008, Oprah dedicated a show to discuss why 70 percent of of black woman were single. It’s since been a topic that CNN, the New York Times and every black news magazine covers at least once a year. Some have even called the coverage a “media obsession with unmarried black women.” In an opinion piece for the The Guardian titled “Don’t lecture black women about marriage,” Racialicious’
Latoya Peterson says falling black marriage rates aren’t the result of
black women ‘being picky’, but of the complex politics of attraction.
Most recently, Stanford Law professor Ralph Richard Banks has been making the media round, from the Washington Post to The Economist, blaming black women for a supposed misfortune and chastising them on missing out on the wonders of marriage.
Peterson starts off by reminding us that in this day and age, it’s not just black woman re-evaluating marriage.
Here’s a snippet:
In times of slavery, black women did want to be married – but the main focus was on creating a stable family unit, official or otherwise. More contemporary battles over marriage revolve around the changing needs of citizens,
particularly those in same-sex relationships, or those with
non-traditional families. And who said marriage is still the ultimate
end goal?…
In their quest to sell books and make media appearances, they
bulldoze the individual nature of the mating game in the rush to
diagnose millions of people with the same problem. The truth is, there
are many reasons why people find themselves single. Sometimes, it’s
their own attitudes. But many other times, the timing just isn’t right,
their careers are too demanding, or they need to focus elsewhere. As a
black woman who has been in a committed relationship for five years,
nothing is more obvious to me than how random circumstance plays a major
role in many happy relationships. If I hadn’t missed a concert, I
wouldn’t know my boyfriend; if one of my friends hadn’t gone to Mali
with the Peace Corps, she would have never been on the same continent as
her now-husband; if another friend hadn’t missed her original train and
hadn’t been wearing a sweatshirt from her alma mater, she would have
never met the man she would marry.
Dating, love, and
marriage are far more complicated than self-proclaimed experts would
have us believe. Statistics can show all kinds of trends, but
ultimately, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (in a
relationship) is the province of each individual.
New Report Describes Peril Immigrant Women Face in U.S. Food Industry
01 year ago
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a new report called Injustice on our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry which looks at the conditions under which immigrant women work. It documents and personalizes the stories of women who have made the dangerous journey to the U.S. seeking a better life for themselves and their families, only to end up working long hours under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions.
Entering the U.S. surreptitiously is extremely difficult for anyone, but particularly for vulnerable women crossing alone or with small children. According to SPLC, some academics and humanitarian organizations estimate that as many as six out of 10 women and girls experience some sort of sexual violence during the journey. Some do not make it at all. In the five-year period from FY2000 to FY2004, border officers recovered the remains of an average of 61 migrant women a year along the 1,952-mile Southwestern border. In the latest five-year period — from FY2005 to FY2009 — that number jumped to 77.
Many of the women who make it to the U.S. safely are confronted with the horrendous working and living conditions made possible because of the existence of a group of vulnerable, desperate, and disposable workers. Many of the women interviewed complained about the difficulty supporting their families when they make minimum wage, or even less, and wage theft is common. To earn their meager wages, immigrant women perform hard physical labor and have few rights or protections.
Working in the fields can be backbreaking, and workers are exposed to dangerous pesticides. An interview with Isabel, who picked strawberries, revealed:
Working in these fields takes a physical toll. At times, Isabel must spend whole days hunched over. In addition, we “have a lot of hand movement and use big scissors to cut the little branches and cutters for the big branches.” At the end of the day, the pain can be numbing, Isabel says. “Sometimes I don’t feel my hands. I feel like an animal bit me. I have a pulsing in my arms, and I feel the pain when I sleep. It’s like biting me. It’s intolerable the pain, from using the scissors so much.” She also suffers from headaches from the pesticides. “It’s such a strong smell,” she says. “When I start to breathe that in, my head starts to hurt, and I feel nauseated.”
Work in meat processing plants is also extremely dangerous, and few workers have access to safety equipment. Workers become crippled by the strenuous and repetitive motions of the work. Many of the female workers reported being restricted from using the restroom, while others spoke of sexual abuse, and discrimination against pregnancy. According to SPLC:
The women are even more vulnerable in the workplace than their male counterparts. They are often the primary caregivers for children, making them less likely to assert their rights for fear of being fired or, worse, being deported and separated from their families. And because of their fear of being reported to immigration authorities, they are reluctant to report wage violations, sexual violence or gender discrimination, or to take legal action to stop it.
How are these conditions allowed to exist in the U.S.? SPLC notes that farmworkers are the least protected workers in America. They were specifically excluded from labor laws passed during the New Deal era, and today are not eligible for workers compensation in many states, and are not entitled to overtime pay or minimum wage under federal law. They are excluded from many state health and safety laws, and even child labor laws do not apply in some cases. Furthermore, farmworkers also are not covered by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Every day, Americans are benefitting from the hard work of these immigrant women who work to put inexpensive food on our tables. In one hour “Rosa” cleans and debones enough chicken breasts to sell for $900, but she earns $6.25 for that hour of work. Another immigrant woman makes $2.50 for every tray of grape tomatoes she picks. During a good 12-hour workday, she gathers a dozen trays, about 300 pounds. That’s $30 a day – far less than minimum wage. Yet her one-day tomato harvest retails for as much as $1,000.
Americans could spend a tiny bit more on food and increase workers’ earnings. However, there is much resistance, and ultimately large companies who do not want to pay more can buy imported food rather than pay higher prices for U.S. food.
Perhaps more importantly, measures could be taken to ensure that undocumented workers receive the same protections as other workers, leaving them far less vulnerable. The SPLC report ends with recommendations for the Department of Homeland Security, Congress, the Department of Labor and other federal agencies who could take actions to improve the lives of the immigrant workers who produce our food. Passage of comprehensive immigration reform legislation tops the list, of course. Ultimately, all workers need to be on a level playing field which starts with obtaining legal status, and the immigration system must provide a way for needed workers to work in the U.S. legally and be protected by employment and labor laws.
Photo by PNASH.
Despite VA Reforms, Military Women Struggle Silently With Sexual Trauma
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On Monday, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced reforms to the rules for claiming veterans’ benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder. The White House says the move will ease the burden of proof that veterans face when trying to prove the mental wounds of war. But the new regulations are silent on the suffering of women who have experienced sexual trauma in the military.
The new rules essentially give vets a greater benefit of the doubt by simplifying the process for proving a PTSD claim, as long as a VA-approved psychologist or psychiatrist affirms that it is “consistent with the places, types, and circumstances of the Veteran’s service.”
But the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN), an advocacy group for current and former military women, has warned that the new criteria do not apply equally to the process of proving sexual assault related to military service.
Despite study after study showing that military sexual trauma (MST) is both widespread and underreported in all branches of the military, the VA has been accused of ignoring many cases of sexual harassment, rape and other sexual crimes that fall outside the conventional categories of combat injuries. The new PTSD regulations thus offer little comfort to the traumatized victims of sexual abuse, who already struggle with stigma, shame and fear.
Anuradha K. Bhagwati, a former Marine captain and executive director of SWAN, recently testified before Congress:
Filing for disability compensation for MST is universally considered a traumatic, agonizing, and cruel experience. Many survivors describe the process of re-writing one’s personal narrative for a VA claim as just as traumatic as the original rape or harassment.
VBA claims officers nationwide have proven themselves entirely inept when dealing with MST claims. Claims are routinely rejected, even with sufficient evidence of a stressor and a corroborating diagnosis from a VA health provider. Many survivors’ claims are rejected because of VBA’s lack of knowledge about sexual violence…
Current VBA policy is forcing women and men with insufficient evidence of their assault and harassment to suffer in silence and shame, to numb their pain through use of substances, and to take or attempt to take their own lives.
Going forward, the service women who will be affected by the new VA policy are disproportionately women of color. As Colorlines reported back in 2008, women of color in the military may struggle against racial barriers within their own ranks; when sexual assault or abuse enters the picture, inequalities in access to VA services could be psychologically crippling.
Bhagwati argued in a New York Times roundtable last week, “The V.A.’s double standard when it comes to survivors of sexual trauma is shameful. We’ve got nothing to celebrate until all sources of P.T.S.D. are considered equal.”
The debate will likely continue as Congress weighs the COMBAT PTSD Act, which would further ease the claims process by enabling vets to rely on evidence provided by private mental health workers rather than just VA-approved clinicians, who may be biased in their diagnosis, or inaccessible to veterans living in underserved communities.
For now, it looks like survivors of military sexual trauma will continue to face discrimination when they come forward, whether to seek justice or just to receive basic mental health care. Their silent struggle for equity shows that for all the talk about soldiers being equal when they wear the uniform, race and gender still color the military experience in unspoken ways.
Photo: SWAN
Immigrant Women: The Silent Victims of a Broken Immigration System
01 year ago
Even though there are approximately 19 million foreign born women in the U.S.—accounting for 12.3% of the female population—we tend to hear very little about them. A closer look at the female immigrant population reveals many important facts—immigrant women are incredibly diverse in terms of country of origin, time in the U.S., citizenship rates, income, poverty, and labor market participation. This week, the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) released a report, Reforming America’s Immigration Laws: A Woman’s Struggle by Kavitha Sreeharsha, a senior staff attorney at Legal Momentum’s Immigrant Women Program and a fact sheet detailing the demographic makeup of immigrant women in the U.S.
Immigrant women also experience the U.S. immigration system in a way that is distinct to men, and often leaves them at a disadvantage.
In Miami in February 2009, Rita Cote’s sister called 911 to seek police protection after a domestic violence incident. Ms. Cote’s sister had lawful immigration status but had a limited capacity to speak English. Law enforcement agents asked for identification for everyone at the scene. Ms. Cote urged the agents to first address the domestic violence issue but they insisted that Ms. Cote’s sister could only press charges by going to the police station. After Ms. Cote showed her passport to the officers the officers arrested her, and took her away. The domestic violence crime went unaddressed.
Stories such as this are far too common. According to Sreeharsha, lawmakers and others often overlook the specific immigration reforms necessary to ensure that women are treated equally and fairly. If not done right, CIR may inadvertently create new barriers to women and establish eligibility criteria that are beyond the reach of some immigrant women. For example, a CIR package must include a path to legalization that values the contributions of immigrant women as part-time and informal workers. Without immigration reforms, many immigrant women will continue to lack economic access, experience separation from their families, and be subjected to exploitation and criminal activity.
The report makes the following recommendations:
- Legalization must equitably value women’s work: Avenues for legalization that value work must recognize and ‘count’ the range of immigrant women’s work in the informal economy such as domestic work, child care, and home health care. Part-time and contract work, as well as work for multiple employers, must count toward legalization. Because many recent legalization proposals have required full-time employment or schooling, they fail to take into account the unique barriers faced by many undocumented women.
- Legalization fee structures must ensure incentives for immigrant families to apply for legal immigration status for all eligible family members. High fees may limit the number of applications a family can afford, resulting in applications only being filed by and for male heads-of-household. Fees must be on a sliding scale so that they are not cost-prohibitive for low-wage women workers.
- CIR must reduce family visa backlogs: Because women disproportionately immigrate through family-based channels, they are especially vulnerable to long backlogs, which heightens women’s dependency on partners and increasing the likelihood of exploitation by family members and employers. Measures to promote family reunification and reduce backlogs will thus particularly benefit immigrant women.
- Improve personal security and autonomy by expanding access to independent immigration status: When women attain legal status based upon a family relationship, other family members gain control over whether she ever attains legal status. This dynamic can jeopardize women’s autonomy and safety. Immigrant women’s economic and physical security is enhanced when they can independently obtain legal immigration status.
- Eliminate local law-enforcement partnerships such as 287(g) and Secure Communities: These partnerships result in undocumented immigrant women being drawn into the immigration-enforcement system as victims and witnesses of domestic violence and other crimes. Crime perpetrators, abusive spouses, and abusive and exploitative employers call DHS to report undocumented immigrant victims for deportation. This very effective power-and-control tactic silences crime victims and keeps them from seeking help.
- Reform the immigration detention system in order to not re-victimize vulnerable immigrant women detainees. Such reforms must include meaningful access to health services. All detainees should be screened and undergo a risk assessment that evaluates vulnerable immigrants such as crime victims, pregnant women, sole caretakers, and those with health conditions so that they can be allowed to seek alternatives to detention, humanitarian release, or release on their own recognizance.
Ultimately, the author concludes, only through a comprehensive immigration reform package—meaningful reform that values the contributions immigrant women make as mothers, wives and workers—can we reconcile these disparities.
Slave Trade Still Part of U.S. Labor Market
01 year ago
“The bosses carried weapons. They scared me. I never knew where I was. We were transported every fifteen days to different cities. I knew if I tried to escape I would not get far because everything was unfamiliar. The bosses said that if we escaped they would get their money from our families.”
–Congressional testimony of Maria, trafficking survivor from Mexico
The legacy of slavery in America is inextricably bound with the history of the nation. And the State Department has finally acknowledged that, even today, people continue to be bought and sold as property.
The State Department’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons report, a global review of human trafficking and civic and legal responses to it, for the first time ranks the United States among the nations that harbor modern-day slavery.
Although the report, released last week, gives the United States relatively high marks for its law enforcement and civic efforts to combat trafficking, victims are scattered throughout the workforce: the captive migrant tomato picker, the prostitute bonded by a smuggling debt, the domestic servant working around the clock without pay.
The media have often focused on dramatic narratives of young girls lured into prostitution rings. But government data suggests that “more foreign victims are found in labor trafficking than sex trafficking,” particularly in “above ground” sectors like hotel work and home health care. Official estimates vary widely, but the number of victims could be more than 12 million children and adults worldwide.
Although citizens have also been trafficked, immigrant workers are uniquely at risk. The top countries of origin for foreign trafficking victims, according to the State Department, are Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, Haiti, India, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.
Today’s slave trade capitalizes on vast inequalities across national borders, wrought by migration and economic globalization. Many governments have instituted anti-trafficking policies, but with uneven success. The report states that 23 countries got an “upgrade” in the ranking of their anti-trafficking programs. But 19 countries were “downgraded” due to “sparse victim protections, desultory implementation, or inadequate legal structures.”
Despite the country’s relative wealth and sophisticated legal infrastructure, slavery trickles into the United States the same way it does everywhere else, through deep cracks in labor and immigration laws.
Victims often remain hidden because they fear the cost of attempting escape; they depend on their bosses not only for their livelihoods but also protection from immigration authorities if they are undocumented. Moreover, legal status is hardly a safeguard against exploitation, and temporary worker visas may even facilitate trafficking. Stephanie Richard, director of policy with the Los Angeles-based Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), told In These Times:
We’re actually seeing an increase in the number of cases of people coming in lawfully, on lawful visas, and then ending up in human trafficking… because people are using those visas as one of the forms of coercion for keeping people working for them against their will.
To its credit, the State Department’s report stresses that anti-trafficking measures should not just emphasize cracking down on trafficking crimes, and that a comprehensive “victim-centered” approach should “focus on all victims, offering them the opportunity to access shelter, comprehensive services, and in certain cases, immigration relief.”
But advocates fear that bureaucratic rules put basic humanitarian benefits out of reach for many victims. To qualify for special immigration relief for trafficking survivors known as the T-Visa, survivors essentially must cooperate with a law enforcement investigation—a process that advocates say can be humiliating and traumatic. That may be one reason why the number of T-visas granted annually is far smaller than the estimated scope of the problem. (And despite pressure to bring survivors into the criminal process, the Department of Justice’s Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit pulled through only 43 human trafficking prosecutions in fiscal 2009.)
Though the government has documented major strides since the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, this year’s report continues to gloss over the systemic failures that underwrite the bottomless thirst for cheap labor—or even better, free labor.
Sienna Baskin, an attorney with the advocacy initiative Sex Workers Project—which is currently campaigning for legislation to protect the rights of trafficked sex workers in New York—sees a continuum between the trafficking epidemic and immigration and law enforcement policies that criminalize victims:
A highly punitive and restrictive immigration system is a factor that leads people to take risks in migrating, sometimes ending up trafficked, although we must also look at poverty, persecution and gender inequities as factors. The growing problem of labor exploitation could be lessened by comprehensive immigration reform that provides visas and fair wages to all workers.
In California, Richard noted that CAST links its assistance programs for trafficking victims to a wider network of community groups fighting for worker justice:
We believe that there is a spectrum of labor exploitation and abuse that’s just unacceptable in this country. And actually, some of the work that we do is taking steps to address the whole spectrum, with the idea in mind that we don’t want people to end up in a trafficking situation.
The Florida-based Coalition of Imokalee Workers merges anti-trafficking and labor activism in their campaigns for farmworkers’ rights. The group was recently honored by the White House for its Campaign for Fair Food, which has successfully pressured corporations to adjust their labor policies across the supply chain, from the tomato farms all the way up to brand-name restaurants like Taco Bell.
At the event announcing the new report, Laura Germino, coordinator of the Coalition’s Anti-slavery Campaign, reflected on the work left to be done. Just twenty years ago, she said:
There was no admission yet by this great nation that the unbroken threat of slavery that has so tragically woven through our history, taking on different patterns, but always weaving the horrendous deprivation of liberty – that it was a constant.
But here’s the good part. There was nowhere to go but up.
Over three centuries into America’s path toward emancipation, the government’s recent, belated steps to combat modern slavery evoke both wary hope and historical shame. Now, at least, we may finally be reaching the right side of a long arc of tragedy.
Cross-posted from In These Times.
Pregnant Women Dying in New York
01 year ago
This year, maternal health advocates got the heartening news that the death rate of women in childbirth was declining worldwide, while the rate of child survival was improving ahead of earlier projections. But while the epidemic of maternal and child mortality in poor countries seems to have ebbed–in part thanks to Washington’s international assistance–there’s been no such progress in some communities closer to home. Recent data on women in New York reveals the vast racial and economic health gaps that still plague the “developed” world.
The mortality statistics don’t seem so alarming on their own–about 266 pregnancy-associated deaths from 2001 to 2005 across New York City. But an in-depth study of long-term trends exposes disturbing patterns of racial disparity that underscore other community health problems. Health officials found that of the 161 mothers who died of pregnancy-related causes between 2001 and 2005, Black women were seven times more likely to die than white women. The death rates for Asian and Latina women were twice as high compared to whites. While some affluent neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Chelsea were untouched by maternal mortality, the highest death rates were in enclaves associated with low-income communities of color, like Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, and Jamaica.
New York City’s average maternal mortality rate was nearly double the national rate during this period. Similarly, New York State ranked fourth worst in the nation based on recent federal data.
Aside from race, mortality patterns tracked various health factors that disproportionately impact women of color. About half the mothers were obese, which may partially explain why Black women are especially at risk of pregnancy-related death. Maternal mortality was four times higher for women lacking health insurance. And there are still more lingering questions on environmental factors like stress, pollution and deep poverty.
One of the more chilling findings relates to another category of deaths among pregnant women, reports the New York Times:
In addition to the 161 women whose deaths were directly related to pregnancy, the city looked at another 105 women whose deaths were indirectly related to their pregnancies. Homicide accounted for more than a fifth of these deaths, suggesting that the stress of pregnancy may be related to domestic violence. Black women were five times as likely to be murdered as white women, and Hispanic women were more than twice as likely to be killed as white women.
An earlier study on violence against women in New York City found that “Women in younger age groups, black and Hispanic women and those living in neighborhoods with very low median household income were at increased risk for fatal and non-fatal [intimate partner violence].” Poor women of color aren’t just more vulnerable to illness or injury; their bodies are in many cases targets of systematic brutality, which could lay hidden until their wombs end up as collateral damage in the emergency room.
According to the Times, the city’s new study shows that “while factors like obesity, poverty and race were strongly correlated with maternal mortality, it was not possible to say that those factors actually caused the deaths.”
True, it’s always difficult to separate correlation and causality in women besieged by multiple health crises. But whatever the exact cause, the statistical links speak to inequalities that we seldom discuss in our communities. One thing we can say for certain is that in the world’s greatest metropolis, pregnant women are dying needlessly–for reasons that seem like they should belong to another, less fortunate society. But instead, it’s happening right next door.
Image: Detail from Harlem Hospital WPA mural: Charles Alston, Modern Medicine, oil on canvas, 1940.
New York Moves to Keep Incarcerated Parents Connected to Kids
01 year ago
The prison system and the child welfare system both have the power to split families apart, and too often, they are tragically linked when the state imposes its judgment that a parent is no longer worthy of her child. For the majority of men and women in New York’s prisons, their fate as parents hinges on a legal timetable that pushes their children toward adoption. This week, Albany finally enacted reform legislation that gives incarcerated parents a greater chance to prove that they can hold their families together, even from behind bars.
The federal Adoption and Safe Families Act aims to keep children from languishing in foster care by obligating child welfare agencies to seek a “permanent” placement for children in the system. This means that in many cases (with some limited flexibility for special circumstances), if a child has been in the system for 15 of the past 22 months, the agency will seek to terminate mom or dad’s parental rights.
For parents who are serving time, no matter how caring or diligent, incarceration would make it virtually impossible to beat that clock, and the mere fact of a prison sentence rendered the child, in the eyes of the law, effectively abandoned. At the same time, the fact that many kids remain stuck in foster care even after legal separation from their parents shows that the law does not provide the permanence and stability it promised.
In poor communities of color, where both child welfare and criminal justice authorities are seen as constant threats, perpetuating the systematic removal of parents and children from their neighborhoods and family networks. Advocates for women in prison have for years pushed Albany to carve out an exception in the ASFA rules to protect incarcerated parents from having their children arbitrarily torn from them. They finally scored a victory with the passage of the Adoption and Safe Families Act Expanded Discretion bill. The law gives agencies more flexibility to maintain children’s ties to an incarcerated parent, with the hope of reunification after release. According to the Coalition for Women in Prison, to allow for an exception to the ASFA timetable:
agencies must document evidence that the parent plays a meaningful role in the child’s life and that maintaining the parent-child relationship is in the child’s best interest.
By amending New York’s child welfare laws to reflect the special circumstances of criminal justice-involved families, [the legislation] gives incarcerated parents and their children a more fair opportunity to work toward reunification and safe permanency options that do not involve severing family bonds forever.
Although statistics on parents in prison are sketchy, the Coalition estimates that between 7 and 14 percent of foster care children have a parent in prison or jail in New York, and nearly three in four incarcerated women are mothers–meaning that thousands of kids and parents could be impacted by the reform.
In the long struggle for equity for imprisoned parents, bending the ASFA rules to give families a break is a small milestone: it helps shift the paradigm through which the government and communities see people in prison. They’re no longer isolated convicts, but family members, caregivers and loving parents. Rather than doubly punishing them by taking away their children in addition to their freedom, New York may lead the country in recognizing their humanity. For families swept up in the prison system, the best “permanent placement” may be the one they’ve had all along, with the estranged parent who, in a child’s mind, never really left.
Image: Mothers of Bedford
Mailorder Wombs: Outsourcing Birth to India
01 year ago
So much of America’s economic activity takes place on faraway shores, from call centers in Mumbai to sweatshops in Shanghai. Still, you’d think that making a baby would be one job that’s hard to offshore. But today, for a fee, a woman in another country can serve as a “gestational surrogate,” carrying a fertilized egg to term and then delivering the baby straight to your door, halfway around the world. We’re not used to talking about that kind of labor as an outsourced job. But farmed-out childbirth has become a full-fledged industry in India, turning the rural poor into wombs for hire.
The practice has become increasingly common with new advancements in in-vitro fertilization. The efficiency of the technology raises ethical, legal and cultural questions about the meaning of parentage.
Like Autotune and drone warfare, the transaction might feel disturbingly mechanized: someone, an infertile couple, for example, creates an embryo in a lab, ships it abroad for gestation in a stranger’s body, then takes possession again after birth. But in a consensual financial arrangement, what’s the big deal, really? There’s less (but still some) stigma surrounding child care services, though that also involves contracting out the duties of motherhood.
But maybe what makes the global surrogacy market so different is that the service providers are women in poor countries who feel compelled to lease their bodies to care for their own families.
In a parallel to the international adoption controversy, the potential for coercion is pervasive: To what extent are impoverished surrogates really free to negotiate their labor, especially if they are controlled by a childbirth clinic that regularly processes “recruits” into a $445 million industry.
Nicole Bromfield at RH RealityCheck describes the dynamics of the “recruitment” of rural Indian women:
In some of the Indian clinics, the surrogates are recruited from rural villages, with most recruits being poor and illiterate. Surrogacy recruits are brought to the clinics where they are required to stay in the clinic’s living quarters in a guarded dormitory-like setting for the entire pregnancy. Supposedly this practice not only allows the clinics to monitor the surrogates’ activities and behaviors during the pregnancy, but also is seen as protecting the surrogate from ridicule by family members and neighbors; most Indian women acting as surrogates keep it a secret because it is seen as dirty or immoral. What is alarming about the recruiting process is that it is notably similar to the recruitment process used by human traffickers to coerce rural women into sex work in cities. Also similar to other trafficking situations, the women have to sign documents (often in English) that they cannot read and then are kept “under lock and key” until the obligations set forth in the contract are fulfilled. Most surrogacy contracts prohibit sexual contact between surrogates and their husbands and surrogates are generally allowed only minimal contact with their partners in any case.
This regulation of the bodies of surrogate women (typically young, impoverished, and of color) challenges common assumptions about individual rights in the global labor market. Even outside the ethical debate on surrogacy itself, there’s a clear need for government oversight to ensure that both the women, and the babies they are commissioned to bring into the world, are protected from abuse.
Noting that some families have faced legal disputes over the citizenship of global-surrogate babies, Bromfield writes, “it is imperative that global standards be developed and the USA, European, and other nations take an active role in setting requirements. This can be done under rights of citizenship and immigration.”
As with most global trades, it all comes down to price: Bromfield reports, “Surrogacy costs about $12,000 to $20,000 per birth in India, whereas in the U.S., it is upwards of $70,000 to $100,000.” A rural Indian woman may earn roughly $5,000 to $7,000 from the surrogate pregnancy, far more than a regular low-paying job. But the easy flow of money across borders underscores another ethical quagmire. The same pattern emerges in global migration: wealth crosses national boundaries and products flow back the other way, but the movement of workers and families is brutally restricted. For better or worse, transnational surrogacy challenges us to reconcile human relations with commercial transactions in the global marketplace.
Demographics of Abortion: Race, Poverty and Choice
01 year ago
What kind of a woman gets an abortion these days? The Guttmacher Institute has released a report that tracks abortion rates across different demographic groups. One of the most stunning findings, particularly in light of the newhealth care reform legislation, is how abortion has become increasingly entwined with poverty.
According to Guttmacher, “The proportion of abortion patients who were poor increased by almost 60%—from 27% in 2000 to 42% in 2008.” As you might expect, the profile of the abortion patient is disproportionately poor, as well as disproportionately Black or Latina.
In the study, poor women’s “relative abortion rate was more than twice that of all women in 2008… and more than five times that of women at 200% or more of the poverty level.” In addition, Black and Latina women were significantly overrepresented, though no one racial group made up the majority. Generally, these proportions remained stable between 2000 and 2008. The “abortion index” rate of Black women appears to have moved somewhat closer to the national average.
It’s not easy to put those statistics in perspective after seeing how race has played into the anti-abortion agendas of lawmakers who evidently don’t think women of color are exploited enough when it comes to reproductive health.
Recently, the Georgia legislature tried to inject a civil-rights meme into a bill that would criminalize an attempt to “coerce” a woman into obtaining an abortion on the basis of race. The legislation cleverly hijacks the rhetoric of the reproductive justice movement to promote interference with the right to choose for all women, especially for poor women of color. (h/t Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Jodi Jacobson)
Catherine Davis, director of minority outreach for Georgia Right to Life, explained her organization’s interest in mixing identity politics with a reactionary ideology: “The black community is being targeted by abortionists,” she told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The abortion industry wants us to believe that we have a greater need. Why should an abortion doctor be able to take a baby because it is black?”
The loaded conspiracy-theory language—in addition to totally ignoring the agency that Black women have struggled to assert over their bodies for generations—masks underlying failures of the health care system. In Black communities, economic disadvantage often overlaps with a lack of reproductive health and family-planning resources and a broken medical infrastructure, leaving many to face unintended pregnancy with few or no options.
In response to the media’s racialization of anti-abortion activism, Melissa Gilliam, a professor at the University of Chicago who chaired Guttmacher’s board of directors, explained in an op-ed that it’s not that Black women are being preyed upon by “abortionists,” but structural racism has eroded their choices and opportunities more globally–which in turn exacerbates historical tensions surrounding the suppression of black women’s reproductive freedom.
The root causes are manifold: a long history of discrimination; lack of access to high-quality, affordable health care; too few educational and professional opportunities; unequal access to safe, clean neighborhoods; and, for some African Americans, a lingering mistrust of the medical community.
There are no easy solutions to these complex challenges. Innovative strategies to reduce entrenched poverty, improve education, and broadly reform health care all will have to be part of the longer-term approach.
Compare that framework to the cruel argument that abortion rates can be “fixed” by restricting access to a basic component of reproductive health care, while punishing poor women of color in the process.
Now we know that the link between poverty and abortion is deepening, just as state lawmakers are pushing laws to limit access to abortion, and while some in Washington have worked to tighten abortion restrictions through health care reform. Maybe there’s a conspiracy at work here after all: a convergence of political agendas that quietly seek to maintain America’s medical apartheid.
Death by Birth: Race and Maternal Mortality
01 year ago
On December 14 2004, Tameka McFarquhar became a mother. On Christmas morning, the Jamaican-born 22-year-old was found dead in her apartment after bleeding to death. A later investigation found that part of the placenta had been lodged inside her body—a complication that might have been prevented if she had received adequate postpartum medical care.
On any given day in America, a number of births will result in tragedy. But misfortune doesn’t strike randomly. The chances that a mother will survive till tomorrow is tragically tied to the color of her skin.
Amnesty International has released a report maternal death in America showing appalling differences in maternal mortality rates of white and Black women. The prevalence of the disparities, which persist even across different socioeconomic levels, expose one of the deepest scars of a failed health system:
African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. These rates and disparities have not improved in more than 20 years.
From a human rights standpoint, that statistic places the United States behind many other industrialized countries despite the enormous amount the country spends on health care. The high rate of maternal deaths among Black women—along with the shockingly high Black infant mortality rates—are a haunting testament to stark inequalities in health insurance coverage and access to prenatal care and family planning services. Drawing on federal data in the context of international human rights mandates, Amnesty reports:
Despite representing only 32 percent of women, women of color make up 51 percent of women without insurance.
Women of color are also less likely to have access to adequate maternal health care services. Native American and Alaska Native women are 3.6 times, African-American women 2.6 times and Latina women 2.5 times as likely as white women to receive late or no prenatal care. Women of color are more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than white women. In high-risk pregnancies, African-American women are 5.6 times more likely to die than white women.
Women of color are more likely to experience discriminatory and inappropriate treatment and poorer quality of care.
Despite some Medicaid-based prenatal programs for poor women, the lack of comprehensive health coverage means that many women fall through the cracks. Moreover, the private insurance market is rigged to restrict women from purchasing affordable maternity coverage.
The Centers for Disease Control has suggested that obesity (another health problem linked to race and class) along with increased use of C-section operations, could be contributing to maternal deaths.
But the problems may begin long before a woman becomes pregnant. Women may live in an isolated rural area with no access to quality health care, they may be undocumented immigrants and therefore generally barred from Medicaid, or they may live in one of the vast majority of underserved communities lacking a Federally Qualified Health Clinic, a frontline health system for low-income households. Then there are the roughly 8 million women who should qualify for affordable public family-planning services but somehow never receive the aid they need.
Other barriers are harder to detect, quietly eroding women’s health in their everyday struggles:
Women interviewed by Amnesty International also cited lack of transport to clinics, inflexible appointment hours, difficulty in taking time off work, lack of child care for other children, and the absence of interpreters and information in languages other than English, as major barriers to health care.
Eleanor Hinton Hoytt, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, comments in the report on the untenable choices pregnant women face in an unforgiving economy:
We’ve had women tell us that they’re afraid to miss time from work when they have prenatal appointments. They are faced with the choice of coming to work or missing work and losing their jobs. that is their reality.
Health care reform could expand the range of prenatal and maternity care resources available to low-income women. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the plans under consideration would, despite severe limitations in the proposed subsidized insurance system, provide for basic “maternity and well-baby care” in the proposed insurance exchange plans, along with “support for nurse midwives and free-standing birth centers, as well as tobacco cessation programs for pregnant women on Medicaid.”
But Amnesty calls on Washington to go further to close racial disparities in maternal mortality: establishing a White House office of Maternal Health; engaging the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights to combat medical discrimination, and easing the Medicaid enrollment process for pregnant women.
Those measures could go a long way toward preventing avoidable maternal deaths. Yet until we push forward a real overhaul of the health system, so that all women have access to the resources they need for safe childbirth, many more mothers of color will die at the moment when life should begin.