Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement by Nelson Jennifer;

Author:Nelson, Jennifer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2003-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

4

“Abortions under community control” Feminism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Reproduction among New York City’s Young Lords

Eighteen days after a new abortion law went into effect in New York State—on July 1, 1970—the heart of a 31-year-old Puerto Rican woman, Carmen Rodriguez, stopped during a saline-induced second-trimester abortion at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx. She was the first woman to die from a legal abortion after the reformed New York State abortion law—legalizing termination up to 24 weeks—became effective.1 This tragic event immediately became a lightning rod for criticism of both national and local reproductive policies and the conditions of public hospitals serving the poor in New York City. It also helped to crystallize an original reproductive rights discourse combining both feminism and nationalism stridently put forth by women in the Young Lords Party (YLP), a New York City–based Puerto Rican nationalist organization.

The YLP, echoing similar claims made by Black Nationalists and Black Muslims, pointed to Rodriguez’s death as evidence that Puerto Ricans and other people of color were targets for mass genocide through population control. For example, after Rodriguez’s death, Gloria Cruz, health captain of the YLP, warned that the new state abortion law, in the context of the dangerous medical environment of New York City public hospitals, was an essential part of an attempt to reduce the population of low-income Puerto Ricans. Cruz announced: “A new plan for the limitation of our population was passed—the abortion law. Under this new method we are now supposed to be able to go to any of the city butcher shops (the municipal hospitals) and receive an abortion. These are the same hospitals that have been killing our people for years.”2

As we have seen, the belief that people of color were being subjected to a genocidal plot was a popular political position in nationalist circles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This view was extreme, and no evidence confirms that population control reduced the numbers of people of color in America. But the realities of inadequate health care at Lincoln and other public hospitals—long waits for emergency room care, exhausted and hurried interns as medical staff, the lack of provisions for drug treatment or pre- and postnatal care, run-down accommodations, and Carmen Rodriguez’s death—provided a context for the dire warnings espoused by Cruz and other people of color.

At the same time, the YLP distinguished themselves from other nationalist organizations active during this period by demanding a broad reproductive rights agenda, which included the right to legal abortion. As we have seen, most nationalist organizations of the early 1970s, like the Black Panther Party or the Nation of Islam, were staunchly opposed to abortion or any other form of reproductive control, even if chosen voluntarily. They insisted that by increasing their numbers, people of color would gain political power. By contrast, the Young Lords’ pro–fertility control position developed as a result of the actions of a few very outspoken and powerful women within the organization who were sympathetic to feminism. These

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.