Law Students for Reproductive's Reaction to CLORE's Showing of "La Operacion"

On page 12 of the September/October, 2010 issue of Mother Jones, an inset feature called “Conspiracy Watch” details the efforts of various pro-life groups to propagate a commonsense understanding that abortion is a racist genocidal plot. This is, sadly, not a belief confined to the lunatic fringe of a shadowy misogynist far-right coalition. Unfortunately, there is a very real and unsettling history of reproductive injustices that range from Planned Parenthood’s early ties to eugenics movements to the Supreme Court’s notorious holding in Buck v. Bell (upholding the forced sterilization of a woman said to be mentally retarded, an opinion in which Justice Holmes famously wrote “Three generations of imbeciles is enough”). If these tactics were embraced by pro-choice movements today, it would legitimately be seen as a dangerous movement, circumscribing the rights of populations of women who are (predictably) poor people of color. But it is much worse than misleading to imply that the pro-choice movement continues to hew to such ideals.
The brutal reality is that many people, governments, and social movements have used (and continue to use) technology and medical treatments in ways antithetical to human dignity, and such treatment is certainly not limited to women. The Tuskegee Experiments, during which black sharecroppers were unknowingly infected with syphilis, is one of the most well-known examples of clinical misuse of human subjects. Recently, a similar situation was uncovered in Guatemala. But it is emphatically not the project of the reproductive justice movement to limit women's choices about their own lives and bodies. Women have been systematically deprived of the right to make decisions about their own bodies and those deprivations have come from many sources. Whether that means they have been denied their ability to have children, or their right to choose not to have children, the larger struggle of the reproductive justice movement is a struggle for complete self-determination. Forced reproductive “choices” of any kind must be resisted. We can only accomplish this by coming together in solidarity to protect each woman’s individual preferences and choices about her intimate activities and the life-shaping decisions she makes. The notion that the pro-choice movement is genocidal, or similar in any way to forced sterilization, is of course false. This argument is a mechanism for dividing women in order to diminish their potential collective political power. To combat these strategies, women of all ages and backgrounds need to listen to each others' stories – the good stories and the tragic. The CUNY chapter of Law Students for Reproductive Justice is proud to co-sponsor CLORE in their presentation of La Operacion, a documentary film detailing the appalling government sanctioned forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women in the 1970s.