20th Century in the United States

Reproductive Justice: An Analytical Framework, An Activist's Blueprint

Professor Crystal Eddins, Department of Africana Studies at University of North Carolina Charlotte | Limited use with courtesy

I first became interesed in the possibilities of using reproductive justice as an integrative theoretical framework after reading an article that examined how enslaved African women used marronage, or escapng from slavery either alone or with one's children, in St. Domingue (present-day Haiti) in the eighteenth century. Written in 2020 by Crystal Eddins, she argues that marronage "was a rare but effective mechanism for women to achieve reproductive justice by exercising agency over their lives and protecting their childbearing capabilities." Furthermore, Eddins states, and I agree, that applying reproductive justice as an analytical framework to numerous historical events has important ramifications for written and digitally-produced scholarship today. First, such an application "can help establish historical precedent for contemporary reproductive justice claims," and second, these studies have "important implications . . . on how Black women resist structures of racial capitalism that negatively impact their reproductive health and other areas of their lives."²

But before we dive further into how reproductive justice can work as an analytical framework within historical scholarship (and why I am using it in this project), it is necessary to first understand how it was created as a tool for racial and gender freedom in the mid-1990s. 

As Crystal Eddins and numerous other scholars have documented, the fight for reproductive justice by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and LGBTQ+ women is one that is literally centuries old. However, it wasn't until 1994 when the recently-created Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice established this framework, which they then brought to the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. As is written on SisterSong's website, "rooted in the internationally-accepted human rights framework created by the United Nations, reproductive justice combines reproductive rights with social justice." Thus, reproductive justice is broadly defined as "the human right to mainain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children one does have in safe and sustainable communities."³

There are two phrases in the paragraph above that I want to  draw attention to, as they are what form the analytical framework of my own argument: "reproductive justice combines reproductive rights with social justice" and "to parent the children one does have in safe and sustainable communities." As has been pointed out many times before by scholars and activists alike, reproductive rights is far too narrow a framework through which to understand and critique the myriad oppressive structures which restrict Black and Brown women's lives, and especially those who are single mothers.⁴

Although social justice concepts may seem self-explanatory, even obvious, by combining them with reproduction it offers us new ways of thinking about, understanding, and responding to social, political, and economic inequities and dangers. As Laura Briggs writes in her 2017 How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump, "Reproductive politics are, in fact, powerfully central to everything else we talk about in the United States - whether we look to wealth and poverty, schools and policing, financial speculation in the housing market . . . or even foreign policy."⁵  Thus, by shifting how we understand all social justice issues to include, even center, reproduction and everything that comes with it from time, labor, money, to energy and care, we can create better solutions that adequately address the intersectional problems of people's lives.⁶

Book cover and title | Limited use with courtesy

Secondly, the words "safe" and "sustainable" are particularly relevant to understanding the 2008 financial crash through the lens of reproductive justice. In December 2006, as the American economy was beginning to rumble and shake but hadn't fallen yet, the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) published a series of findings in their report "Women are Prime Targets for Subprime Lending: Women are Disproportionately Represented in High-Cost Mortgage Market." They concluded that not only were women and particularly women of color "most likely to receive subprime loans" over white men, but that a subprime borrower could expect to pay "between $85,000 to $186,000 more in interest than average borrowers." The authors go on to say that the significantly higher rate of subprime loans among women unsurprisingly "diminishes their ability to fully utilize homeownership as a pathway to build wealth." In one breathtaking statistic, the report states that Black women were 256.1 percent more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than white men, while Latinx women were 177.4 percent more likely to own the same loan compared to a white man. ⁷

"When I bought my house, it was the American dream . . . Now I need to save it for my kids . . . When they turn 18, I want this to be theirs." 

I chose this quote to open the page because it does more than simply set the tone. It also literally speaks to the lack of safety, stability, and sustainability facing single women, single mothers, and their families because of the glut of subprime mortgages targeted towards predominately Black and Brown women. In her 2014 article, Amy Baker documented that "subprime loans . . . tend to be more prevalent in neighborhoods of color where women are predominately the heads of households." Taking that one step further, the predatory (subprime) lending market is "characterized as a 'push market,' in which lenders shop for customers rather than wait for the customers to shop for mortgages." Such a practice, Baker argues, was not coincidental or could be explained by other, more innocuous, factors. Instead, she writes, "they [single women] were targeted. Cash-strapped but equity-rich elderly African American women were more likely than anyone to receive those costly loans." ⁸

So what does this mean in terms of the wealth (not to mention health and opportunity that monetary resources provide) that remains in these homes and neighborhoods, and what are the implications for families? Unfortunately, it isn't great. The Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) found that between 2007 - 2012, over 12.5 million homes went into foreclosure. Furthermore, they estimated that over 95 million households lost home equity (the value of the house minus what is still owed) in direct relation to their neighbors' foreclosures. Over one-half of that spillover loss was associated with communities of color, and at the time of the article's printing the CRL expected that "minority neighborhoods [had] lost or will lose $1.1 trillion in home equity as a result of spillover from homes that have started the foreclosure process, reflecting the high concentration of foreclosures in neighborhoods of color." ⁹

When viewed from this perspective, the idea of a person parenting their child in a safe and sustainable community, a community that has good schools, grocery stores, businesses, and other opportunities, is just shy of ridiculous because with such financial devastation how could that be possible?  As John Leland reported in his article, the slew of foreclosures within Kue McIntyre's community was not only destabilizing for the women themselves but it also "threatened the neighborhood's fragile stability."¹⁰ People are forced to switch from living to surviving, cutting back on non-essentials, moving in with parents, or becoming outright homeless. In December of 2011, the National Center of Family Homelessness reported that "1.6 million children last year were living on the streets, in shelters or motels, or doubled-up with other families." That number represented a 38% increase in child homelessness since 2007, a fact which was attributed by the center's president to "fallout from the recession and a surge in the number of extremely poor households headed by women." ¹¹

"Decent Housing a Right Denied, Dream Deferred," Nathaniel Sheppard Jr. and Tom Hundley, Chicago Tribune | Limited use with courtesy

Reverse redlining. That is the term housing activists used to call the practice of predatory lenders purposefully seeking out Black, Latinx, and female-headed households for subprime mortgages.¹² It is a deliberate practice that erodes the individual wealth of women, destabilizes entire communities, and places families in financial jeopardy. And that doesn't even account for the emotional and psychological toll that housing insecurity and/or homelessness inevitably takes. Whether or not we grew up in the same home or moved around a lot during our childhood, home, and the feeling and lived reality of community is not something that should be up for grabs depending on the state of the market. Quoted in Laura Gottesdiener's 2013 A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home, Bertha Garrett poignantly stated how "memory lives in a space. This is what people don't understand. We raised our kids here. It's more than just an investment." ¹³ 

Given the multi-layed complexity of the 2008 financial crash, using reproductive justice as an analytical framework is powerful because it provides a comprehensive method of understanding how macro-level forces ineract with and shape people's lives. But perhaps even more importantly, reproductive justice assumes agency from the start, and it is most interested with re-framing indivdual people to the center of analysis and not on the periphery. By taking this approach, reproductive justice then becomes not only a useful tool for the historian, but also an effective tool for those interested in present-day activism and even helping to prevent disasters like the 2008 financial crash from happening again. 

Now that we understand what reproductive justice is and why it's a useful analytical tool, I invite you to travel back to the late 1980s with me and see that this period was more than just a time of bad fashion and enormous cellphones. It was also the time where the seeds of crisis started.