Mothers and children who are not white have long been devalued in American society. Entire Indigenous families were massacred to create what we now think of as America. During slavery, Black women were treated as chattel, their offspring human capital to fund the building of white wealth. The romanticized image of the plantation hinges on the idea that Black parents lacked the emotional capacity to care for their children. That mythos persists today in Welfare Queen narratives that position children as checks and not as much-loved and wanted parts of a family. Whether the slur is “anchor babies” or something else, no one is safe from the racist lie that only white parents have the emotional capacity to actually want their children.
Indeed, despite the fact that assaults on marginalized bodies and their reproductive freedom have been well documented, mainstream feminist narratives often fail to engage with the consequences of that messaging on the culture or on the policies that come about in the wake of these constructs.
And while the most overt trappings of subjugation are no longer present in the public eye in America, the remnants can be seen throughout the very systems meant to be counteracting bigotry in the present day. Marginalized families have been torn apart due to state violence, whether that be mass incarceration or the impact of punitive policies toward the poor. Incarcerated women are still being sterilized without their consent; access to health care for migrant workers is impacted by public policy that punishes them for seeking help; those in low-paying jobs struggle not only to access care, but to be treated well once they receive it.
Stereotypical images and perceptions of marginalized people within the media aren’t just the province of conservative policy makers—even the way abortion access is discussed for low-income communities is framed in a manner that invokes sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility as reasons that access is needed. Only recently have we seen the idea espoused in the mainstream that poor people deserve to choose their family size. Far too often the need to limit family size is presented as a solution for resource issues that devalues those families and causes society to view them as less worthy to exist. The ripple effects of this attitude can be seen in how mainstream feminist organizations often neglect to respond to policies and programs that show minimal regard for the health of marginalized communities. The devaluation of families of color is manifested through the unchallenged structural racism of a system wherein public policies, institutional practices, and media representations not only work together to create the significant Black-white gap in maternal mortality but also contribute to the erasure of the maternal mortality rates in other marginalized communities.
Organizations led by marginalized communities are working to fix the problem, but challenging white supremacy in these spaces can’t just be the work of those most impacted. By confronting the role that racism plays in reproductive health spaces, feminism can help to reduce maternal mortality and in turn change the future for many communities.
Feminist programs that work toward increasing access to quality health care, along with addressing racial bias among health-care providers, can address important aspects of a comprehensive approach to reducing maternal mortality. Bolstering efforts to block proposals to strip maternity care from the list of essential health benefits is a great step. But so is protecting Medicaid, and challenging attempts to impose work requirements as a condition for health-care coverage through the program.
Reproductive justice means not just fighting to defend Planned Parenthood or the Title X family planning program. It also means protecting nutrition programs such as the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). As politicians rush to show their disregard for low-income people struggling to feed their families, feminism has to step up and support the work of advocates for all communities. For those already dealing with so many obstacles within their communities, it’s harder to find the energy to also fight for higher-quality care without support from those with more resources.
PARENTING WHILE MARGINALIZED
When I was eight years old, my uncle got drunk, showed up at my grandparents’ house, and waved a gun around for a couple of hours while making threats. It was some dispute over money that no one can really remember now, but what I do remember is that he wasn’t afraid to do it because he knew my grandfather wasn’t home. His wife (the aunt with whom he was having the money issues) didn’t live there, but he knew she had guns in her house. And since she had already responded to his earlier outbursts of violence by stabbing him or shooting at him, he knew better than to try her.
He thought that a houseful of women was an easy target as long as my grandfather wasn’t home. He was wrong. My aunt who did live there was more than willing to fend him off with her courage and a bottle ready to go upside his head. What I remember most about that night isn’t the gun or the drunken ranting. It’s that after he left, she sat down to do her homework and I sat down with her to do mine. I wasn’t her child, but she was co-parenting me with my grandparents, and there was work to be done. She made sure I had a clear idea of what I needed to do so that I might have a future without the kind of instability that had marked my life so far.
I joined the army after high school without much thought beyond the promised narratives about opportunity. Meeting my first husband and having my first child were steps in the road of my life that had very little to do with any ideas about tradition. I got married so we could be stationed in the same place, got pregnant because we decided we wanted kids. When I thought about having a child, I thought in terms of the life I wanted for my family. I never wanted my children to have to worry about drunk men, much less drunk men with guns.
Because of nights like that, I never really participated in the Mommy Wars. Life had taught me early and often that having food was far more important than fussing over whether it was from the right places. A safe, stable home was what mattered, not whether that home was in the right zip code. Before my oldest son’s little eyes could even focus, I found myself dealing with other people’s assumptions about whether I was qualified to make decisions for him because I was poor and Black.
I wasn’t a single mother, but doctors would act like I was, unless my then-husband was physically in the room. Sometimes even though we were very clear that I was the one staying home with our baby, they would start talking to him like he was the one qualified to make decisions because he was white. The hilarious and depressing thing is that these were often white women who were ostensibly feminist. They had somehow convinced themselves that my socioeconomic status meant that what I needed most was their input on parenting as though their “benevolent” racist assumptions had any value in my life.
A conversation about something as mundane as how I burped him (he preferred to lie across a knee) turned into a condescending lecture on the “right way” to burp from a white administrator. One of the Latinx nurses interjected to say that the way I was doing it was fine, but the white admin was oddly insistent that it was wrong. Baby-faced and Black added up in her head to mean I needed someone to teach me how to burp a child I’d carried and would be raising to adulthood. Later when he was in preschool, his allergy to milk was questioned by the preschool director. Not because he lacked a doctor’s note, but because she thought asking a friend who was a nutritionist was the same as me taking him to see his pediatrician. She decided to change his diet based on her assumptions, not on his needs, and was deeply offended when I didn’t welcome her help. Yet the dietary changes she attempted to make nearly landed him in the ER.