Democracy, Equality and Reproductive Rights
Note: I wrote the following in 2006 for multi-issue progressive coalitions that were engaged in internal debates about defending abortion rights. The context at the time was shaped by the post-Casey world in which states were testing out new levels of restrictions. It is still painfully relevant for today, and what may be a post-Roe world where states are testing out total abortion bans. SH
The Right continues to use a very narrow conception of democracy to claim that a constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion represents the worst kind of judicial fiat — that Roe v. Wade squelched the democratic process that was playing out in the states and forced the nation into a polarizing battle. Cultural conservatives have created a catch-phrase — ‘judicial activism’ — which evokes images of liberal elites and unaccountable judges who are pushing their agenda on the common person. To take this on, we have to speak beyond policy positions and provide an alternative version of democracy — an active version that takes into account diversity and difference, and in which self-actualization is not only encouraged, but is seen as necessary. In this version of democracy, reproductive freedom is a pre-condition for active participation that strengthens democratic institutions and practice.
The Role of Government
At the heart of both economic and gender justice struggles is a contest over the role of government in a democratic society. Should government actively promote economic and social equality, through anti-poverty programs, public investments, civil rights and labor laws and regulatory frameworks that protect peoples’ health, safety and economic wellbeing? Or should government provide minimal legal protections while leaving it up to communities to raise themselves up through self-help initiatives?
As progressives, we struggle to say clearly how and why we support a positive role for government in creating conditions for shared prosperity and in stamping out all forms of discrimination. The chain of meaning associated with privacy, choice, individualism and anti-government themes works against us; we have to create a new chain of meaning, using themes about democracy, equality and participation. In this section, we explore different ways of thinking about the role of government in a truly democratic society. We use these alternative versions of democracy to argue that reproductive self-determination is essential for women’s democratic participation. A society that values all of its members and recognizes the equal worth and dignity of every person must do more than safeguard basic human rights; it must actively promote the fullest expression of those rights. For women, reproductive justice must be among those rights, even if a majority of voters in any one state would legislate restrictions on those rights.
How can we use the an expansive understanding of ‘democracy’ to protect a right about which there is such strong disagreement? The ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a problem in the narrowest conception of democracy — the conception that is interested only in the formal trappings of democratic decision-making. Throughout the long march of expanding democratic rights and values, this narrow conception of democracy has been challenged; beyond the right to vote in elections, organized groups and constituencies have fought for the right to be full participants in all areas of social, political and economic life; to have more control over the conditions that affect their lives — at the workplace, in communities, in civil society, in the governance of religious institutions, in the schools, and more. These movements to expand participation, recognition and rights have pushed the boundaries. Participation in movements for social change has given people a sense of their own power, and of the way that power depends upon collective action, which in turn, has led to greater demands. It has helped people imagine a different world, a different way of structuring human relationships and institutions.
Expanding our sense of democracy and the state’s role in allowing all citizens to participate fully is part of the unfinished business of America that people like Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglas, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ida B. Wells Barnett, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. sought to keep alive in our collective conscience.
Expanding the Power to Make History
During the founding era, two notions of democracy were in competition. The libertarian ideal took the form of a narrow sense of self-government that embodies the negative side of privacy — that freedom means being left alone to pursue one’s personal interests. The participatory ideal of democracy agued that citizens should be actively engaged in making, maintaining and changing their society (making history). A participatory vision of democracy and governance rests on the premise that all people are capable of and have the right to make their own history. Further, participatory democracy requires that government must seek to provide routine and unimpeded access and participation in all the decisions that affect people’s lives.
We take the notion of ‘making history’ as part of the democratic experience from Richard Flacks. In Making History, Flacks identifies two distinct but related forms of human activity. The first form refers to the range of activities that maintain our physical beings — the activities and tasks that enable us to take care of our physical needs, maintain our households and support our loved ones. These are necessary daily life activities. A related set of human activities has to do with maintaining and developing society — what Flacks refers to a history-making: “History is constituted by activity that influences the conditions and terms of everyday life of a collective.” (page 3). These activities include making laws as well as making investment decisions, creating art and cultural expressions, hiring and laying off workers, to name a few.
Inequalities based in class, gender, race, ethnicity and immigrant status place constraints on peoples’ abilities to make history. As a result, an elite few tend to see themselves as history makers. When the capacity to make history, or to “influence the conditions and terms of everyday life in a collectivity” resides in the hands of a few, then most people will experience a separation between everyday life and history. Our aspirations tend to become bounded by private efforts to gain some fulfillment in our daily lives.
Ideology combines with material realities and experiences of relative powerlessness to rationalize and naturalize the status quo. Rugged individualism is linked to a notion of democracy in which government is limited to those activities that enable free men (and perhaps women) to pursue their personal interests — we leave the governing to specialists and insist that those who govern stay out of our personal lives, protect individual space, enable the market to function as freely as possible and, above all, protect private property.
For most working people and historically oppressed groups, the experience of being shut out of decision-making processes gets internalized and understood as the ‘natural state’ of things. An individual’s sense of powerlessness is reinforced by the experience of social isolation. Too often, people who are disaffected from political and economic decision-making have no spaces in which to come together, think and discuss and struggle together to articulate their grievances into a set of demands. If we remain isolated individuals who seek fulfillment in private pursuits, we will continue to have little or no say in the conditions in which we seek our fulfillment. We need ways of framing democratic participation that lift up the social basis of self-hood.
The vision of democracy put forward by Flacks and so many others harkens back to an early American radical — Thomas Paine. For Paine, individual liberty was inextricably linked to social conditions. He called upon the state to develop public welfare initiatives that would address the material inequalities that make life oppressive for working people and the poor [2005 page 5]. Paine’s words on liberty, freedom and democracy have inspired many an activist who has recognized the persistent contradictions between American ideals and realities.
Paine and other early radicals were part of a long line of struggles to expand democracy and freedom. The line stretches from the farmers’ revolts, to abolitionists, to the freed slaves and populists, the early feminists and suffragists, the line runs on through the Progressive Era and the founding of the NAACP, the labor movement, alternative parties and the social movements that made the New Deal possible, the community organizing traditions that have evolved since the 1930, the great civil rights movement, the second wave of feminism and the LGBTQ movement, global justice, environmental justice, consumer rights and more. Each movement has struggled to deepen the meanings and experiences of democracy.
Expanding the universe of rights
Beyond the formal mechanisms of democracy, each citizen needs the ability to perceive herself as an actor, as a participant in making our society — our nation — our collective history. What makes it a living thing? A sense of power combined with a sense of being part of something larger than ourselves: that we are part of a collective in which we are valued as human beings with equal worth and dignity.
Liberals and progressives who don’t see reproductive rights as fundamental to democracy need to be reminded that formal democratic rights — like voting — are not enough. The right to abortion is simultaneously individual and social. Reproductive rights cannot be extracted from social context and conditions in which women exercise these rights.
A feminist quoted in A Peoples’ Charter makes the link between democracy and self-determination in this way:
When we talk about women’s rights — the right to vote, the right to go to school — none of them means a thing if we don’t own the flesh we stand in, if we can’t control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force. [quoted in Burns and Burns, A Peoples’ Charter].
In this sense, self-determination fundamentally is about making one’s own history. People can only participate in making history if they have the material and psychological capacity for self-determination. If the most basic, important aspects of your life are given over to others — father, husband, boyfriend, church, state — you cannot even think about being an actor in making history because you cannot think about having power and self-determination. Thus, for women, reproductive self-determination is a pre-condition for democratic participation. For workers, having a voice at work, and the capacity to shape working conditions and decision-making is a pre-condition for full democratic participation. In both cases, a democratic government must protect and extend women’s and worker’s rights to participate in these basic decisions.
Women must maintain the legal right to abortion — this is an immediate and critical priority. But we can and must secure this right by also securing the conditions that are necessary in order to actualize the right to decide if and when to become a parent. This means a wide range of social supports that go beyond public funding for abortion to include equal access to sex education, contraception, pre-natal care, health services, nutrition, child care and housing, as well as the host of issues related to getting and keeping good jobs with benefits. In order to advance all of these needs, we need to be able to operate on 2 tracks: defending legal abortion whenever and wherever necessary while also creating opportunities for reproductive justice writ large.
Democracy and Identity
As part of this ever-evolving and expanding notion of democracy, social movement activists and scholars concerned with identity and oppression have challenged the Left to recognize the non-material aspects of inequality that must also be addressed by the state and by institutions in civil society. Iris Marion Young is one such scholar who has written extensively about the politics of difference and inclusion.
One of Young’s primary concerns has been using democratic practices and institutions to dismantle structures of domination. A person lives within structures of domination if other groups have the power to determine her actions. Justice demands that structures of domination be replaced with institutions and practices that promote self-development and self-determination for all members of society. Young’s use of ‘justice’ takes the concept beyond the distribution of resources — jobs, housing, property, healthcare, and so on. It includes oppressive conditions that are less tangible — the kinds of things that promote or constrain individual self-development. Race, gender, sexuality and nationality are recognized as conditions that contribute to structures of domination. They work with as well as separately from economic inequalities and oppression.
Like so many words and themes that are used in social change discourse, ‘oppression’ is one that can be greatly misunderstood. For most people in the US today, ‘oppression’ is associated with authoritarian or totalitarian states that exist somewhere else. To make it a useful term for understanding inequality in the US, Young specifies oppression to mean: “the disadvantages and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices within a well-intentioned liberal society.” (Justice and the Politics of Difference, page 41).
To describe the workings of oppression in societies with formally democratic institutions, Young offers a framework that describes five conditions or categories of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence. While a slight majority of people in the US, especially white people, including white women, would not see themselves as being oppressed, most people have experienced one or more of these conditions at some point in their lives, especially powerlessness and exploitation — as workers who do not control the conditions of their employment, if not as women or people of color or immigrants, etc. (page 40).
This is one of many ways in which identity matters. Our identities can provide us with deeper connections to political life, when, as part of a group, we see that we have a stake in political decisions, and, at the same time, we see a possibility to take action. It may be that a specific issue catches our attention, but it is not the issue alone. It is the way in which the issue interacts with our experiences.
What the economic justice activists may miss when they emphasize ‘bread and butter’ issues at the expense of ‘personal’ issues is the rich complexity of identities, and how these are important to peoples’ sense of themselves as political actors. This is especially true at a time with identities are in flux.
Increasingly, globalization and modernization have unsettled people’s sense of who they are as part of a collectivity. As identities become more fragmented, popular anxiety increases. Conservatives use this anxiety to prey upon our fears, especially since the shock of September 11, 2001. Conservatives identify a ‘bad guy’ who is responsible for people’s sense of dislocation. The bad people may be immigrants, gays and lesbians, and/or feminists and abortionists.
Scape-goating some group in society helps frame the problem. Scape-goating invariably leads to reactionary answers — fighting abortion, holding the line against gay marriage, curbing immigration, etc. Conservatives use elements of identity to define a narrow ‘we’ against an ‘other’ that is making unreasonable demands upon society (women who want abortions, Blacks who want Affirmative Action, immigrants who claim to have the same rights as the native-born). Either implicitly or directly, the ‘other’ is less deserving of rights than the ‘we.’
In the late 60s and early 70s liberation and related themes were compelling because they provided so many groups with an alternative sense of identity and connection to a collective effort to transform the social order. Beyond policy prescriptions, we need to speak to wider possibilities. In order to galvanize constituencies, especially among groups who have experienced some form of oppression — an agenda or platform or charter must embody a compelling worldview, or vision of a transformed society.
When oppressed groups imagine the possibilities for becoming active participants in making and reshaping society, they start to see the gap between the themes we say we believe in — equality, freedom, liberty — and the actual way that our society works. They start to push for a wider vision of these themes. Liberatory versions of equality, freedom and democracy say to oppressed groups — we can solve social problems together. We can make history. In this case, the sense of ‘we’ can grow ever more inclusive.
Religion and the State
Abortion raises very pointed questions about the role of religion in a democracy. Through the lens of abortion, there appears to be a diversity of opinion about church and state. Some Protestant denominations still value the wall of separation, reflecting a strong American tradition of religious freedom. For each of the non-Orthodox Jewish movements, belief in the separation of organized religion and the state trumps any qualms that religious leaders may have about legal abortion. And many dissidents within the Catholic Church have made the separation of church and state a priority, in part, because it aids them in pushing for reforms within the Church. As part of a healthy internal debate about democracy and the role of government, progressive people of faith need to make the case that religious beliefs flourish better in a climate where the state does not impose any religious doctrines upon its citizens.
We could extend this to civil society as well. For example, should funders or others in positions of power vis a vis social movement groups and community organizations impose doctrine upon their grantees? Since faith-based themes about justice, dignity and the inherent worth and value of all human beings are so vital to a progressive worldview –for secular as well as faith-based activists — and given that we would advocate tapping into those themes in very thoughtful ways, are we not contradicting ourselves by saying that progressive officials, leaders and funders should not impose a point of doctrine on social change organizations? We think not, because the process of exploring, developing and testing out alternative worldview themes is voluntary, dialogic, deliberative and shared, whereas issuing an edict based on a powerful institution’s doctrine is antithetical to deliberative practices within organizations. When churches devote considerable political and financial power to translate a doctrine into law, they are imposing their beliefs on others. This is fundamentally un-democratic.
What we ask for is open, healthy debate among progressives who have differing views on abortion rights. It is hard to debate when money is used to silence groups who might otherwise be interested in taking on issues related to reproductive rights.
In coalition politics, pro-choice progressives need to be able to ask leaders from groups that cannot or will not take a position on abortion because of faith to stand aside during campaigns related to abortion and reproductive rights. We can and should work together in fighting for conditions that support and sustain healthy families, so that no woman who wants to have a child ever feels pressured terminate a pregnancy. On legal abortion, we can agree to disagree, but not without open debate. We need our faith-based allies to stand aside on the fight to protect legal abortion. And we need to join forces with faith-based allies in the struggle for economic support for families. We have a shared goal: creating conditions in which all families can thrive.
Looking Inward: Progressives’ Commitment to Democratic Values
Part of our project and purpose as a movement is to expand the sense of ‘we,’ and to get beyond past tendencies to define a ‘we’ in opposition to an ‘other’ that is less deserving of rights and freedom. To bring this about, we need to talk about democracy again. It can be a way to expand our own sense of what we are fighting for, ultimately. This in turn can provide a basis for struggling with each other over strategy and agendas that reflect the broadest sense of what we are fighting for.
We suspect that the narrowing of our collective social change horizons is part of the reason that progressives generally avoid gender and sexuality these days. Some progressives still believe, as many radicals did in the late 60s, that women’s liberation demands are a diversion (a bourgeois diversion, no less) from the core agenda and issues that go to the heart of capitalist and corporate domination and attendant class oppression. Another problem that we labor under today is that we don’t really know how to talk about oppression in ways that do not privilege some groups’ experiences over others.
The second-wave women’s movement had to fight within radical and left movements to be taken seriously, and alliances were at best tenuous; Women’s allies were successfully split off in the late 70s as the Christian Right challenged the ERA, abortion on demand and LGBT rights; The corporate-conservative infrastructure had the discipline and foresight to divide and conquer, splitting us off and hastening our fragmentation using gender and sexuality, traditional values, calls for spiritual renewal.
In our fragmented state, we have few opportunities to discuss and debate our differences, and how these have affected us, let alone figure out shared strategies and negotiate ways to deal with our differences internally while standing together around a broad program or platform.
References:
Flacks, Richard. Making History, 1988: Columbia University Press
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1991: Princeton University Press.
