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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (35 page)

BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• Queering Black Female Heterosexuality BY KIMBERLY SPRINGER
• What It Feels Like When It Finally Comes: Surviving Incest in Real Life BY LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
• When Pregnancy Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Pregnant BY TILOMA JAYASINGHE
 
 
 
If you want to read more about SURVIVING TO YES, try:
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
• Shame Is the First Betrayer BY TONI AMATO
• Sex Worth Fighting For BY ANASTASIA HIGGINBOTHAM
 
22
 
When Pregnancy Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Pregnant
 
BY TILOMA JAYASINGHE
 
 
 
THE DAY MAY COME AGAIN when a woman does time for terminating her pregnancy. But women are already incarcerated for continuing their pregnancies to term. Why are some women incarcerated for years—even decades—for continuing their pregnancy to term, giving birth, and becoming mothers?
 
It comes down to sex.
 
Pregnancy is clear evidence that a woman has had sex (excluding, of course, those who have used in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies). To many members of the public, certain types of women having sex are considered not only undesirable and disgusting, but immoral, even criminal. Those who would control women’s sexuality attack women in various ways; nowhere are these efforts more blatant than in the arrest and prosecution of the most vulnerable women: low-income women of color who are drug-dependent and pregnant.
 
Here’s how attacks on women who seek to continue their pregnancies to term in spite of a drug problem are framed, in basic form: 1) We have proof that the woman had sex, because she’s pregnant; 2) we have proof that she used drugs—a positive toxicology of either the mother or the infant; 3) we “know” drugs are bad; why else would they be illegal? When these elements are combined, the result is that certain prosecutors seek to punish and incarcerate these women for continuing their pregnancy to term, because their drug use allegedly harmed the “unborn child.”
 
Here’s what’s wrong with this way of thinking: In one fell swoop, these prosecutions combine the anti-choice rhetoric of granting personhood to a fetus with drug-war propaganda and with the inherent and insidious anti-women’s sexuality beliefs that punish women, rather than men, for being sexually active.
 
Let’s break down what’s wrong with these attempts to criminalize pregnancy and addiction (two health conditions that merit treatment and support, rather than punishment):
 
Pregnant women fall prey to prosecutors trying to look tough on crime and drugs. Women are expected to suddenly become paragons of virtue and self-denial during their pregnancies, forgoing sushi, caffeine, nicotine, unpasteurized cheese, tuna, alcohol, cleaning the cat’s litter box, etc. Other members of society feel quite free to censure a woman who breaks any of these taboos. Witness the woman being denied a cup of green tea by her server at a restaurant because she is pregnant. Or disapproving looks from neighboring couples as a woman slowly sips one glass of wine during her dinner. But even women who drink or smoke a ton, while they may get disapproving glares, do not get arrested or prosecuted (at least, not yet).
 
Nicotine and caffeine have proven adverse effects on a developing fetus. Cocaine, heroin, and other illegal drugs do not demonstrate a similarly causal relationship between prenatal exposure and resulting adverse effect. The government-sponsored “drug war” has ingrained in people’s heads certain myths about drugs—including the idea that prenatal exposure to cocaine results in irreparable mental/developmental harm (the so-called “crack baby” myth). You’ve probably heard about that, but have you heard that this “fact” has been debunked? That no reputable scientist or doctor will support the finding?
1
The war of propaganda creates perceptions that are hard to unseat. It demonizes drug users as criminal, unsavory, dangerous types, and doesn’t grant addiction the same level of response as any other chronic disease. Diabetes and hypertension are chronic conditions, like addiction, but you don’t see police arresting a pregnant diabetic when she has a cookie—or a doctor refusing to give her insulin. However, a drug addict in an abstinence-based treatment program can be kicked out if she exhibits evidence of relapse, such as a positive drug test, and in some cases, if she is on probation, such probation is revoked and she may be sent to jail.
 
Let me make clear: There is no law that makes it a crime for a drug-dependent woman to become pregnant, continue a pregnancy to term, and give birth. In the majority of these cases, the prosecution, knowing that their cases are untenable as a matter of law, logic, or science, offer a plea bargain. However, a condition in some of these plea bargains is probation: For a certain number of years, the woman will submit to drug tests and—
here’s the clincher
—will have to go on birth control or cannot have children. This has happened in numerous states, among them South Carolina and Missouri. Local defense attorneys say that offering that their client will go on birth control is a big negotiating tool that can knock years off incarceration or probation. In one case, a woman had a
forgery
conviction, and a condition of her probation was that she not get pregnant. What does one have to do with the other? Nothing, except that the authority establishing these conditions views these women as undesirable mothers—and has no hesitation about regulating who can procreate.
 
Pregnant women are also affected by the war on abortion. If the fetus is granted rights of personhood, then a woman’s right to choose not to become a mother, for health or personal reasons, will be eliminated; she and the doctor who performs abortions could be charged with murder. When fetal rights are elevated over the right of a woman to choose when she wants to become a mother, to determine the spacing of her children, and to make a private decision about what happens to her body, then she loses her ability to control her own body, and her choices are supplanted by those of the state—the state can pretty much tell a woman that she will be forced to carry her pregnancy to term. But when women who are addicted to drugs do seek to carry to term, they are liable to be punished more harshly for giving birth than if they had sought an illegal abortion (were abortion to become illegal again). And yet the anti-choice machine has not stepped up in their defense, despite the fact that these women “chose life,” and despite the fact that being punished for continuing to term while grappling with a drug problem only deters women from seeking healthcare and substance-abuse treatment. In fact, these cases are supported by the anti-abortion groups because the people whom these laws affect are those women whose procreation is not valued anyway—those low-income women who are typically of color. Anti-abortion groups are clearly “pro-life” only for certain kinds of life (white and middle to upper class) and are really, in fact, anti-sex.
 
Legislation proposed in several states would make pregnancy a crime. Typically, such legislation would make it a felony for a woman to give birth to a child who tests positive for an illicit drug, or who shows signs of unspecified and undefined harm as a result of prenatal exposure (based on assumptions not supported by science). One statute created a first-level offense for the first child born, and increased penalties with each subsequent child, until, after the third offense (i.e., a woman’s third child who tests positive), the state could require a woman to be sterilized or to go on long-term birth control. These proposed bills have also sought to make smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol during pregnancy a crime, thereby extending the punishments for consuming illicit drugs to include legal drugs. However, appropriate healthcare and drug treatment are rarely provided for. The rhetoric and the discussions during committee meetings make clear that these laws are intended to apply to unsavory segments of the population—low-income would-be mothers.
 
A recent discussion with an addiction specialist in New York City brings this trend into stark view. This man knows firsthand that addiction is a disease; he knows firsthand that treatment does work to promote recovery—in fact, he provides it. He even knows that most drug-using women were abused or have traumatic pasts that contributed to their using drugs as a form of self-medication. But still he asked me the following hypothetical: If your drug-using sister had five children by five different fathers, wouldn’t you want her to get on long-term birth control, or terminate the latest pregnancy? He brushed away my response: that I would ask why she is having children with multiple fathers. What was her past like? What does she need? What does she want? Is there a way to provide her with the support and classes and skills that she needs to keep her family together? He could not see that the idea of someone else’s paternalistically taking away her choice to have sex, or to forgo birth control, or to become a mother, renders her not mentally sound, less than human. This is from a so-called ally. Why did he highlight that they were five different fathers? He was not only condemning the size of her family (her choice to have five children); he was also condemning her “promiscuity” (that she had multiple sex partners). Nobody talks about men with drug dependencies fathering children—the scrutiny and the blame fall squarely and solely on women.
 
Many people believe that low-income and drug-dependent women should not have children—or, at least, no more than they can handle economically, physically, emotionally, and so on. But that path of reasoning quickly becomes scary—it is one slippery step to then limiting the rights of women of color, women suffering from diseases, overweight women, immigrant women, women in abusive relationships, women of certain religions and races. This has happened before—in the name of eugenics, at the turn of the twentieth century, when colonial powers viewed the population growth of their subjugated natives with horror: The problem with the natives was that “they are born too much and they don’t die enough,” a public-health official in French Indochina stated in 1936.
2
Or the mass forced sterilizations conducted in India among its poor populations in 1976.
3
Anytime you to try to limit the procreative rights of a class of people because its progeny are considered doomed, or a burden, or generally unwanted, it results in a slow genocide of the poor.
 
The arrests and prosecutions also beg the question: If we punish a woman for having one disease—addiction—then what stops us from punishing a hypertensive or epileptic or depressive woman as well? All of these are diseases with far greater impact on pregnancy outcomes, but we don’t seek to incarcerate or punish, because it really isn’t about healthy pregnancies. It is really about controlling who reproduces, prohibiting women from having sex, and starting with the easy targets—the vulnerable and marginalized.
 
If our response to drug-dependent women or other women with health conditions is to limit their procreative capacity, then the only way to guarantee that would be to not let them have sex. It is a farce to imagine that contraception is readily available—with some states permitting pharmacists to refuse to dispense these health products, and other limitations such as price and access. Beyond that, contraception is not 100 percent effective. The only way to ensure that women don’t have babies is to prohibit sex.
 
Vulnerable and marginalized women such as drug-using, low-income women of color are considered too dangerous to have sex, because then they might become pregnant. We must either give them long-term birth control or sterilization, motivate them to terminate their pregnancies, or punish then when and if they do get pregnant. Regardless, in no way are we letting them “get away with it.”
4
Sexuality is a form of power, so if women own their sexuality and their ability to be sexual creatures, then they are empowered in ways that society does not want them to be. Punishing women for certain outcomes of sexuality (pregnancy and giving birth) is in effect punishing them for having sex. Why, if you are a vulnerable woman, do you have to have sex in fear that you will get pregnant and then have criminal penalties and jail time instituted against you? Why are you made to feel and charged as if you were a criminal for experiencing a drug dependency and also wanting to become a mother?
 
Instead, why can’t we imagine a world where a woman can get pregnant, and where the sort of social network will exist that will help her get the treatment and support she needs, regardless of her socioeconomic status or health condition? That if she has sex and does not want to get pregnant, she has access to contraception? That if she wants to get pregnant, or happens to get pregnant, and decides to keep the pregnancy, she will be given support rather than being judged for being human—for having trouble overcoming an addiction—especially during the nine months of pregnancy?
 
But that means recognizing that women are first-class citizens, not less than human. That we like to have sex and don’t always want to get pregnant. That when we do get pregnant, we remain human and don’t turn into angels. Women are just as human as everyone else, and simply because women become pregnant or have the capacity to become pregnant does not mean that we then lose our humanity or the right to fundamental human rights, which include the right to say yes, I want to have sex, without fear, without punishment, without judgment.
BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
3.4Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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