Goodwin, an expert in constitutional law and health policy, uncovers the reproductive health rights stories embedded in American history—and what they tell us about the future of our fight for reproductive freedom—in the second episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward.
Michele Goodwin is an expert in constitutional law, health policy and the history of their intersections. The Ms. Studios executive producer and host of the Ms. podcast On the Issues is also the author of Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, professor of constitutional law and global health policy at Georgetown Law, and co-faculty director of its O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law.
For the second episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward—a Ms. podcast exploring the intertwined histories of the magazine and the feminist movement—I talked to Goodwin about the historical roots of the contemporary decimation of women’s reproductive freedom, what she warns could be on the horizon as attacks on abortion rights intensify, and what this moment requires of us.
Goodwin is joined in this episode by WeTestify founder Renee Bracey Sherman, Plan C co-directors Angie Jean-Marie and Amy Merrill, Women’s Law Project executive director Susan Frietsche, and Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey. Together, we explore the long history of women’s fight for reproductive rights in the United States—and articulate strategies for defending and expanding abortion access across the country.
You can listen to the episode in full now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts, and on msmagazine.com.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: Let’s start with the baseline. What is the state of abortion rights right now?
Michele Goodwin: We are even beyond the question of abortion rights. There has been a decimation. It’s not to ignore the states where there have been ballot initiatives, where citizens have petitioned successfully for rights, reproductive healthcare rights, justice, et cetera, within their state’s laws or constitutions, but we have to understand that we are beyond a period of even being able to talk about reproductive rights as something that is meaningful.
Not to say, slow down on the efforts of ballot initiatives, or slow down on the efforts of legislatures looking to pay close attention to and recognize the reproductive health concerns of all members of their state, but the truth of it is, if we’re in a society where there are some who are protected under law, while others are not, then we can’t cling to the hope or aspiration of what a right actually is and what it’s intended to produce. We are truly in a two-tiered—and one might say it’s even beyond two-tiered, maybe it’s a three-tiered, four-tiered society—in terms of our recognition of people’s values, their dignity, their integrity when it comes to their bodies, and these issues have to be stitched together beyond thinking about it as abortion.
When I think about reproductive healthcare justice and rights, I’m also thinking about maternal mortality, maternal morbidity. I’m thinking about contraceptive access. I’m thinking about the ability to be healthy in one’s sexual and reproductive organs, which means that sexually transmitted infections are important to be able to talk about and get remedied. Also removing the stigmas that are associated with these matters. One can use the terminology of ‘boobs and tubes.’ Let’s move beyond boobs and tubes, but the reality is that, when we think about the reproductive health space, it’s quite capacious, and that’s taken for granted.
One could think about something even like breast cancer and how it needs to be part of every reproductive health rights justice discourse. While it is true that breasts can and do stand on their own, because of their mammary glands and what they can do post-pregnancy in terms of feeding, the offspring born during a pregnancy, it has its reproductive connections, too. When we see this kind of decimation that has taken place at the federal level and at states’ levels, I see it as very broad.
And I see it as a broad stroke then against our constitutionalism, against our democracy, because what it implicates is really us all, even though the direct target first starts as women and girls and then people with the capacity for pregnancy, but the reality is, that when we talk about reproductive freedom and reproductive health, then, truly, that’s any person born.
That’s the important message to understand within these times: that if one slice of our society sees themselves as being okay, we need all 10 slices to be okay, and it is a telling sign of a democracy in crisis when we cling to the one slice, when the nine others have been decimated and destroyed or otherwise deeply undermined.
Roe and whatever were its limitations, were rooted in a soil where the seeds were planted centuries before.
Michele Goodwin
Rios: How did we get here? The last 50 years, the last 250 years—what has led us to this point that we’re in where nine of the slices aren’t okay, and we have a patchwork of laws that are hard to understand, hard to navigate, and don’t provide the full sexual and reproductive health rights that we deserve and we need?
Goodwin: It’s a long story. If we tell the story of these lands, which were first occupied by indigenous peoples who were marched off of their lands—and honest about that—marched off, exploited, abused, violence put upon them, and coercion, there is a reproductive health rights justice story there, too. This is really important in thinking about how we translate to people.
If we were to think about a Trail of Tears, for example, that includes girls and women and pregnant women, et cetera, being marched tens, hundreds, thousands of miles off of where is home for them, there is a lot to be said in having a comfort and a knowing in terms of what is yours, where you belong in a space of thinking about reproduction. More could be said about that, a whole lot. Then we get to this space that really helps to concentrate our understanding of origin stories in the United States with regard to reproductive failings and then also hope.
On the failings front: When we tell the story of American slavery, most of it is told through the lens of forced labor and not forced sexual labor. We ignore terminologies that are really important. We’ve gotten away with, in the United States, of tossing out the term “slavery.” People feel a little bit badly about it, and then we move on, without really understanding, what is that? What is contained within that? The same as with regard to “Jim Crow.”
If we were, in fact, more studious in terms of understanding slavery, then we would understand that it is a story, a movement, a time, decades that folded into half centuries, that folded into centuries, where there were individuals who were kidnapped from the places that they lived, and again, having a more sophisticated understanding and having patience with understanding this would cause us to think about, well, if you’re kidnapped, what were you doing on that day?
Who were these women? We don’t bother to think about that. We don’t bother to think about the scores upon scores upon scores of girls and women who were on their way to learning, on their way to meeting with friends, on their ways to meeting with family, on their way to cook, on their way to clean, on their way to do whatever it was within their humanity, because we grant no humanity to them. Many people would not hear that explicitly as: ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound like abortion.’
Well, no, it doesn’t, but it is a part of a story that involves dehumanization of girls and women, the failure to pay attention to the fact that they had lives, that they had purpose, that they had agency, that there were things that they were thinking about, at which time they were kidnapped and forcibly removed from their homes, from their schools, from the things that they cared about, and were put in fortresses and then had to endure a horrific voyage over to these lands, which were already being occupied, taken away, bartered and exploited.
And within that space then becomes this introduction, in the 1600s, of reproductive capital, of maximizing capital and wealth off of the reproductive—what’s seen as the reproductive gold mine—for people who are enslavers that, ultimately, builds the nation. That creates, in the United States, a level of wealth that is astounding, and for anyone who questions that, they only need to take a page from the book of Thomas Jefferson, who, if the websites are still up at Monticello where we can see the records, where Thomas Jefferson writes that, for him, his strategy with growing wealth and building wealth on his plantations is to stock it more forcefully with women and girls. And he writes: because they turn a profit every year or two.
Now, Thomas Jefferson is not speaking about how these girls and women are simply more sturdy, sufficient at picking cotton and tobacco. He’s talking about a different kind of profit that he’s able to benefit off of with these women and girls every year or two, and that’s reproductive exploitation, which then takes a while for us to unpack and to understand that, to your point, Roe and whatever were its limitations, were rooted in a soil where the seeds were planted centuries before. If one were to look at the disregard for a question of reproductive freedom, privacy, reproductive human rights—we should be talking about that soil planted centuries before.
I will say, also, there’s a story, a narrative that is of hope that is built into that, as well, because, in 1865 with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Given the research that I’ve been involved in, the archival research, it has significantly been involved in researching: What were the narratives that were put forward by the abolitionists? What were the arguments that they made in order to bring about this transformed Constitution, an end to the period of slavery?
Largely, it is telling the story of this reproductive exploitation. The rapes, the sexual assaults, and so, this, legally, socially, culturally has been within our system, if you will, within our digestive tract for some time. I also want to shine light on the post-slavery story, which is then Reconstruction, which is a hopeful vision of the United States. It does slip into Jim Crow, and there’s a period of time that’s worth our paying attention to, because it shows why we should be concerned about what happens globally, why we should avoid being isolationist, and that is the story of eugenics.
Post-slavery, post-Reconstruction, we’re in a period of Jim Crow, and there comes yet another iteration that is within the space of reproduction, that challenges notions of citizenship, reproductive freedom, autonomy, reproductive human rights. That is when the Supreme Court agrees to take up a case from Virginia, Buck v. Bell, and it’s a case that involves a poor white girl. How do we know that she’s poor and white? Because Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us in the decision, and it’s a stunning decision.
This decision is, basically, Virginia has enacted what it calls a model eugenics law. This law allows for the coercive sterilization of people who are considered to be unfit.
Now, what does “unfit” mean? It’s broad and amorphous, and in this case, the state has identified people like Carrie Buck, who’s poor and white and was raped at 16 as being unfit. A poor white girl who’s 16 and has had a baby out of wedlock is considered to be unfit. Virginia has this proposal before the legislature, a law that’s been, actually, signed into law, that allows the state to coercively, against their will, sterilize people like Carrie, such that they can have no reproductive future.
Now, one can understand the sophistry and the limitations, the intellectual limitations behind such a law, but also, it’s a dangerous reach—that, somehow, if one eradicates future offspring, potential future offspring of people who are poor and white, that, in the future, there won’t be poor white people, right? That’s sophistry. That’s ridiculous. It makes no sense. In this decision, Justice Holmes says that better than to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind, and so, then you’d have to question, well, what qualifies a person to be manifestly unfit?
Well, in this case, clearly, if you are poor and you’re white, that makes you manifestly unfit, and the Court says that the power that the state has to impose inoculation is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. It is a really egregious case. The Court says, ”Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and the only thing that you can tie imbecility to, right, this derogatory term, is the fact that Carrie is poor and white. She has no mental limitations. Neither does her offspring.
The reason why I say it’s an important case along this arc that you’ve asked about, is because that Virginia law is picked up by the Third Reich in Germany. They see it as being consistent with their ideological leanings and consistent with the vision that they have for society, as well. For them, it’s racialized in other ways. They see Jewish people as being that socially unfit, that should not reproduce into the future, along with other categories of people—and there becomes this race that is taking shape in the 1920s and ‘30s about who can sterilize more people, prevent the future offspring of people who are deemed to be unwanted in society.
All of those narratives have to stitch together the past and the present to tell us something about how, in this nation, we have viewed reproductive freedom.
There isn’t a principle within the Constitution that Justice Thomas refers to or acknowledges that actually does the work of recognizing the citizenship, the freedom, the substantive rights of women, of Black women. [Dobbs and Bruen], held up side by side, say a lot about constitutionalism.
Michele Goodwin
Rios: And what about the impact that Dobbs has had—not just on abortion access or abortion rights, as futile a word as that may be, but also women’s 14th Amendment rights?
Goodwin: Dobbs is that 2022 decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, as well as a lengthy list of cases that had affirmed Roe v. Wade and abortion rights, which most people don’t know. They tend to think, well, there was Roe in ’73, which was a 7-2 opinion. Five of those seven justices were Republican appointed where they decriminalized abortion. It’s a case that is really worth reading, and then, 20 years later, there’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
But there are cases that are in between and that are also after, where the Court is, time and again, reaffirming the importance of reproductive autonomy, freedom, justice, alerting states that they may not impose undue burdens in the path of a person who’s seeking an abortion.
Then there’s Dobbs. The Dobbs decision wipes all of that away, where the Supreme Court doesn’t even bother to reflect on maternal mortality. Doesn’t bother to reflect on reliance interest, which the Court will do. How have people relied on this federal protection if the Court doesn’t do that?
The day before Dobbs, in a case called Bruen, which dealt with gun control, a centuries-old gun control law of New York, here is a court that claims itself to be originalists. We like things old. We like states’ rights.
It doesn’t matter when it comes to gun control, though, right? So, the Court gets rid of New York’s gun control law. What is interesting about that case is that Justice Thomas offers the decision, and in it, Justice Thomas spends five paragraphs talking about bodily autonomy and how it must be protected. That the Second Amendment is key to protecting Black men’s bodily autonomy.
He shows incredible concern about how, as a history in the United States, there’s not been sufficient deference to the autonomy of Black men and their bodies, and that this is something that should be remedied, and Bruen is an opportunity to further remedy it. Ironically, the next day, at the Dobbs decision, you have Justice Thomas not issuing one word about the protection of Black women’s bodily autonomy, women’s bodily autonomy. It’s not mentioned.
There isn’t a principle within the Constitution that Justice Thomas refers to or acknowledges that actually does the work of recognizing the citizenship, the freedom, the substantive rights of women, of Black women. Those two decisions, held up side by side, say a lot about constitutionalism.
Your question is what other spaces, within the Constitution, can we find a capacious reading for questions of equality—this brings us back to the Reconstruction. The three Reconstruction Amendments were the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. These constituted the reformed, reconstructed Constitution.
How do we know it’s a reconstructed Constitution? It’s after the Civil War, after tremendous national strife. We know that, before the 13th Amendment, it had been over six decades since there had been any amendment. So, it comes more than 60 years after the Twelfth Amendment. It responds, specifically, to the period of time that the nation had endured, that Civil War. It ends something that had been a major economic and political vehicle, meaning American slavery.
Congress doesn’t end there with this 13th Amendment that abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude. It goes on to a 14th Amendment a couple years later, and this 14th Amendment, in its very first sentence, instantiates that citizens are people that are born in the United States.
Now, why does it read that way? It’s resolving this question that states have put to it that Black people are never meant to be citizens, and if you’re not a citizen, this means that you don’t have rights that anybody is bound to respect: the legislature, the courts, or people in society in states. By the federal government issuing the 14th Amendment and instantiating in it, equal protection, substantive due process under law, birthright citizenship. The Congress, the Senate, is recognizing the importance of equality for all, citizenship for all.
It doesn’t say citizenship is only going to be for boys and men. It’s “all persons,” which is actually quite radical for its time, that you see this inclusion that didn’t exist before. There are so many things that are explicitly male and using the terminology of men. You don’t find that in the 14th Amendment.
But there’s something even more, which Professor Peggy Cooper Davis at NYU has spoken about, and I’ve written about this, too, which is that this reconstructed Constitution, the 14th Amendment, is very much responding also to family reproductive narratives. Between the 13th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, there had been women who had been posting ads, writing ads, writing commentaries, trying to be reassociated with their children—because they had been separated from their children during the period of slavery, where, commonly, people were bought, sold, traded, mortgaged, leased, all of those different things. It becomes so significant that we have this really important congressional intervention in this way.
I will say, as a historical sidenote, I’m really concerned about the ways in which we fail to understand that and read that into the Constitution, and we don’t even have to read it into, because, explicitly, that was it. So that you have corporations clinging to a 14th Amendment, claiming that they are citizens, too. The Supreme Court has bought into that. The Court has bought into its claim that corporations should have religious rights, as well. All these things.
But you think about the origin story of the 14th Amendment and of the originalists on the Court, who seem to really forget what the actual origin story happens to be of the Reconstruction Amendments, and specifically, the 14th Amendment.
How closely will the Supreme Court pay attention to the indignity of what has been wrought in the post-Dobbs era?
Michele Goodwin
Rios: We’ve seen attacks on mifepristone and women’s access to emergency abortion care, lifesaving abortion care, before the Court. Can you talk about these cases, and what they could mean for women’s lives?
Goodwin: There are two significant areas where there are cases that are associated with these areas that have come before the Court.
In the last term, there was one that involved this Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, this group that claimed itself to be doctors, even though, amongst them, was a person who was not a doctor, but had a master’s degree in theology; another who was a dentist. But their broad claim was that each of them stood the possibility of having to treat a person who had a danger, a medical danger associated with an abortion.
They argued that the drug mifepristone, which is widely used with the two-drug regimen to achieve a pregnancy termination, was rushed to the market, and that it was unsafe, and because it was, they would be in a vulnerable position having to treat individuals who had medical dangers, emergencies after this. They lost before the Supreme Court on procedural grounds, and it’s important to unpack that, because there’s so much that is inaccurate within the space of abortion that’s taken as normal.
For clarification: A person is 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. The Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby acknowledges this. When this challenge came about, mifepristone had been on the market for more than 20 years in the United States, and had been proven to be safe and efficacious, more efficacious and safe than taking Tylenol or Ibuprofen. Even before it was approved for medical use in the United States, it had been on the market in Europe. The data that could be derived to tell a story—is mifepristone dangerous, does it pose a danger—was readily available.
The claims were broadly inaccurate. You’re more likely to die, by a significant degree, carrying a pregnancy to term than by using mifepristone or having a surgical abortion. It actually hadn’t been rushed to the market. Empirically, there were many faults in the arguments that were made. In fact, in the year that mifepristone had come into the marketplace, it had been under review three times the length of other drugs that had been approved in that same year.
On procedural grounds, and without unpacking all of that, the Court says these individuals just simply lack standing. Only two of the five individuals actually were OB-GYNs. They, because of state laws and federal laws that protect people and their religious interests from being able to be forced into doing something that they don’t want, they actually have protections. It was not realistic that these individuals would actually be put in what they felt was a coercive religious situation of having to tend to a person who was having a medical danger.
But what was also interesting and being teased out in another state, which also undermines their argument, is the fact that, in the United States, dating back to the Reagan administration, there is a law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which protects everybody in cases of a medical emergency, that they can be stabilized. Underlying all of this, any person who’s having a medical emergency, including an abortion, which was interpreted during the Bush administration, should be able to have them in order to preserve and protect their health.
A case that came out of Idaho, where the Biden administration had articulated, in the onslaught of the trigger laws that went into effect after the Dobbs decision, where states’ laws that had not gone into effect because Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. When Roe fell, then these states that had conservative legislatures with judges who had signed bills and where there had been a pause on those bills by federal courts, suddenly, fell away because of the Dobbs decision. President Biden issued an executive order and also issued various statements that EMTALA would still apply in situations where there were medical emergencies, where an abortion would help to preserve the health and life of the person who is pregnant.
Idaho said, not on our terrain, which raised various questions with regard to federalism and preemption. Federal law preempts state laws, and basically, what that means, in layperson’s terms, is that federal law trumps state law. Idaho said we don’t really have to pay attention to federal law, because we have our own state laws. Clinics began closing in Idaho. Maternity wards in Idaho began closing, and doctors began helicoptering their patients to other states. That case made its way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court punted again, rather than issuing a decision on substantive grounds. On procedural grounds, they basically, one could argue, affirmed EMTALA as still being the law of the land.
And of course, to do anything otherwise would have exposed something very dangerous in our Supreme Court, because there is no way that the Supreme Court would have said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act no longer applies. What that would’ve meant is that a person having a heart attack in, let’s say, Boulder, Colorado, after skiing and whose doctor happens to be in New York, doesn’t have to be stabilized when he goes to the hospital that’s in Colorado. It would mean that the man who has broken his leg while hiking in, let’s say, Kentucky, doesn’t have to be stabilized when someone tries to bring him to a hospital. They can be like, ‘Sorry, we’re not responsible.’
Would the Court have done something to say, all other emergency treatment is okay, except for that that involves a pregnant girl, a pregnant woman, pregnant person? That would have really smoked out some things with the Court, and at a time in which there was an election that was impending for the presidency, it’s really doubtful that a court would’ve wanted to issue that: you’re on your own, those of you with uteri, right? Don’t trip and fall down the steps. That would have teed up something else.
[Editor’s note: The Trump administration later issued their own guidance rescinding the Biden-era EMTALA rule, allowing states with extreme abortion bans to refuse pregnant people life-saving care.]
None of it really makes sense if you care about humanity. If you care about humanity, you then would not want for women to be suffering, as they have been over the last three years in the United States. You would not want women bleeding out in their cars. You would not want women dying. You would not want women having to flee one state to get to another state. You would not want people sort of fearing that they might die in transit to another state in order to manage their miscarriage.
The Court knows, as Americans know, that there are people who need abortions for medical care. There are names that’ve become very familiar to people now.
Amanda Zurawski, out of Texas, a person who was in a medical crisis during pregnancy and needed to be able to terminate her pregnancy.
Kate Cox is another name.
Brittany Watts in Ohio, who was criminally charged, although the case did not go forward, for the desecration of a corpse. But the reality was that she was a person who went to a hospital three times trying to get her miscarriage to be managed, and doctors refused. She went home and had a miscarriage in her toilet, and later on, had to suffer the abuse of the state with police charging into her home, breaking open her toilet, and searching through fetal and fecal remains.
That’s part of the backdrop in which we’re in. The question is: How closely will the Supreme Court pay attention to the indignity of what has been wrought in the post-Dobbs era?
Rios: Is there anything else coming up? Are there threats simmering at the state level that might be building into something that we eventually see reaching that national level?
Goodwin: We have to pay attention. We can’t ignore what’s taking place at the state level that may seem to be innocuous, may seem to be sort of strange, may seem to be as if it’s so far out of reach, that it could never happen. There are so many lessons that we have in front of us, both historic as well as present, that tell us that we should not discount the things that seem strange, wild and ludicrous.
For example, Louisiana and South Carolina, amongst some others, proposing the death penalty in association with abortion. The state of Louisiana prosecuting a mom for providing abortion pills to her daughter, a state wherein there have been several state hearings where doctors have come forward to testify about having patients that are 8 years old and 9 years old and pregnant and the very high risk of potential death or morbidity that they might experience. Not to even mention the social costs of what it means for an 8-year-old to be pregnant.
From matters of the death penalty to the criminal punishment of moms and family members, to the fact that doctors have been placed in a horrible situation, where they fear losing their medical licenses to practice, the possibility of criminal punishment. In Texas, up to 99 years incarceration, and also fines and fees; up to 100,000 dollars with a case that a doctor has found liable for having violated the state’s anti-abortion law. Whether it’s medical providers, family members, others, what we see is a path that is cruel and that leans towards unusual.
One would not have found laws of this kind a century ago in the United States.
It’s worth noting that abortion was not always criminalized in the United States. Abortion only becomes a matter of criminal curiosity at the time in which the drumbeat towards the Civil War is happening and the drumbeat towards abolitionists taking place, where you have politicians as well as newly-minted OB-GYNs who are explicitly stating that they need to influence white women’s reproductive capacities. That they need to call upon white women at that time to “spread their loins north, east, west, and south.” This idea, which has been this lingering concern, this lingering anti-immigration, anti-brown and Black concern of replacement theory.
My goodness, what will happen when there are more Black people who are here released from slavery? No problem with more Black people, so long as they are in an apartheid condition, but the question of more Black people in a space of freedom and equality. That just seemed absolutely threatening, and we see the repeat of that. We see that playbook back in action today, where even that language, almost explicitly, almost verbatim the same—this fear of replacement and this fear of immigration.
When you wipe away women—literally the words “women,” “woman,” “gender”—from federal office buildings and tell people to scrub it from their grants, it is doing that work of rendering women invisible again and perhaps even worse than from before.
There are so many lessons that we have in front of us, both historic as well as present, that tell us that we should not discount the things that seem strange, wild, and ludicrous.
Michele Goodwin
Rios: Knowing what you know about the legal landscape and the political landscape and what’s happening with the fight for reproductive freedom, how do you think people can be mobilizing, fighting back, expanding, or at the least, protecting, this precarious right?
Goodwin: There is a spectrum of ways in which people can be involved and should be involved.
The first thing that I want to say is to acknowledge that there are some communities that have been intergenerationally at the front lines, exhaustively working, and sometimes it’s important that there is a break. You think about how the voting interests, for example, of Black women have been. Ninety-six percent in 2016 rejected Donald Trump. It’s the clearest by any margin then and in 2024, as well. Ninety-two percent Black women: not him, not this guy. Don’t do it.
It is important that when there is a need for a break, that a break happens so that people don’t become broken. How do you avoid being broken? Connected to that question of how do you avoid being broken is in exercising, as well, during this time, the practice of joy. I know that that’s counterintuitive to people who are thinking about the first action is that you vote, the second action is you’re in the street, the third action is that you’re being arrested.
Notice I started with if you need rest, take rest. Joy should be a practice that we’re all engaged in. I’m going to get to some of those other things then, and vote, be in the streets, and whatnot—but I want to start there.
The reason why I start with rest and joy is because a question isn’t asked often enough: What story does the mother ask her child or tell her child the night before the slave auction? I’m really serious about that question, because they’re going to be separated, and it’s not then just a separation.
It’s within a society where state and federal law have designated this child to be no higher than the status of chattel in the field, literally. You’re no more than a pig, a goat, a cat. That’s how the law treats you. You have no right to petition a court. If you’re brought before a court, you have no right to even open your mouth and speak, given the Fugitive Slave Law, which specifically states exactly that. Corporal punishment is permissible under law. There are state laws that say: On your first offense, your ear gets chopped off; second offense, you get to chop off part of their tongue. Law says you may not learn how to read. You may not learn how to write. You may not learn how to speak in numbers, with the exception when you’re doing a certain kind of work for the plantation owner.
All of that in light of a system that seems unyielding, unwieldy. What in the world? This is some really powerful work going on when you convey a story to a child who’s going off into the wilderness of all of this, and somehow, they’ve got to hold onto these nuggets, these intellectual beads, hard beads that you’ve given them to sustain, and that’s a lot of work over generations sustaining, and through the various ways in which there is the retrofitting of that kind of ideology.
The law may fall aside, but then you get a Jim Crow and a Jane Crow, and that might fall aside, and then you get a Trump Crow. So, what to do during Trump Crow? Taking good care of people’s selves, practicing joy, because joy was a practice that got people through, but then there’s such an important need for people to be well informed. If you don’t know, you can’t grow. You can’t grow the next movement if you don’t know. You can’t grow the next legislation if you don’t know. You can’t grow civil society if you don’t know. You can’t grow healthy, sustaining communities if you don’t know. You can’t grow an environmental movement if you don’t know. You cannot grow educational opportunities if you don’t know.
The knowledge seeking and paying attention to it and not getting exhausted in, oh, why haven’t I heard this before? No, you need to hear it over and over again. Clearly, these times show that people really need to hear over and over again. That knowledge seeking is really important. Being involved in thought leadership is really important. Reshaping and sharing narrative is really important, which is really what we’ve talked about. It’s been so much of a narration of our histories. It is making sure that grievance is not a part of your voting pattern.
If there’s a community that could be aggrieved, think about the intergenerational experiences of Black women in this country, Indigenous folks in this country. These are communities that could be aggrieved, and folks are not showing up aggrieved in that way, because they understand the importance of constitutionalism and the importance of shaping aspirational laws. Vote and don’t be aggrieved when you’re voting. But it does mean making sure that lawmakers are held to account, as well. Bug them, pester them, show up at the Town Hall meetings, show up at the offices that are going to be closed, where they’re looking to have them closed.
Show up at the Department of Education in your state, in Washington, D.C. Let your lawmakers know. Let your judges know. Those that are issuing these decisions that are saving us from the worst of what could be happening, those judges need to be lauded for doing their jobs. One could say, why laud a judge for doing their job? But it matters. At the same time, the critiques and criticism also matters, of judges and justices that are not holding up their end of the bargain. It’s true, too, for members of Congress, as well. Folks need to let them know.
There is a reason why civil disobedience matters and was transformative during the period of the Civil Rights Movement, and connected with that marching, that protesting was also boycotting. If there are corporations and companies that are not doing the work of protecting the interest of women and girls and people with the capacities for pregnancy, then they should not be getting your dollars. They shouldn’t. Shop somewhere else. Do something else. It is not worth using your hard-won-earned financial capacity, spending capacities with people who don’t care about you and don’t care about your freedom and don’t care about your civil liberties and your civil rights.
Find those organizations that are standing in the line, that are doing the work in order to preserve our democracy. It’s important that we understand reproductive health rights and justice don’t just stand on their own. They’re part of a broader matter, a broader question of democracy, of human rights, of citizenship in our country, and therefore, shouldn’t be reduced to, even though very important, reproductive rights, or abortion. These are questions of democracy. These are questions of citizenship. These are questions of equality, human rights at a baseline.
Rios: And what do you hope or believe that the next 50 years of organizing can and will accomplish for abortion, for reproductive freedom, and beyond?
Goodwin: The way in which I see this is that this will not last. It will not sustain. The most awful and prurient in society does get crushed down, and it allows for the possibility of new growth. The question is, how will we tend that garden? How will we build it? How will we shape it? Will we be inclusive in that garden? Will we say that, look, you belong in this garden. You deserve the right to sniff the roses, too. You deserve the right to be able to plant the cucumbers and the tomatoes there and also reap the benefit of what this garden gives.
That, yes, we can all sit together and enjoy a feast with each other and not look at the other with suspicion. That we can share amongst the bounty of what comes from that garden, without a sense that, somehow, we didn’t have enough to eat because someone else’s child actually was able to fill their belly. That is what I’m actually hoping for: What’s on the other side of tending the soil and planting the seeds, how we sustain and build and nurture a garden that can sustain into the future and that we can all, as a community, as a society benefit from and also enjoy together.
That’s an aspirational goal for us. That there are times in which there is a sense where the interests align. That we can share the tomatoes, share the cucumber, share the kale, but too often, we lean into a sense that there’s not enough. That someone else being able to enjoy a thing, to have a thing, to enjoy that garden somehow takes something away from us, our families, and our children. That thinking, that deficit model thinking, is a significant danger in our society, and so, my hope is that we do some gardening in our future and we keep it alive, we keep it growing through all seasons of the year, and that we can all be proud in sharing from what it delivers, what we cultivate.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
