Hood Feminism Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot - Mikki Kendall Page 0,87
Rights Watch notes, people with disabilities who are sterilized and are unable to comprehend or consent to the procedure are particularly vulnerable to abuse.
We must be careful to avoid contributing to a damaging narrative about people with disabilities. Feminism can’t parrot the idea that people with disabilities are a drain on resources and thus their lives are worth less. Instead of bolstering the eugenicist myth that people with disabilities are a burden on the community and undeserving of public funding, we must address the fact that it is so expensive for families to raise children with disabilities in a society that doesn’t provide for anyone’s needs adequately. We must push back against the idea that disability status is a predictor of fitness to exist, to be heard, to have a choice. Eugenics makes the argument that members of many communities are not worthy or capable of making their own reproductive choices, and thus are not fit to be parents. That rhetoric is carried from pop culture all the way through to medical science.
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THOUGH THE PRIMARY FOCUS of maternal mortality research has been on Black mothers in the United States because the rates of maternal mortality are highest for us (Black women are 243 percent more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes), the same factors rear their heads in many communities. The outcomes in those communities, however, are slightly better, because there’s less of a stake in the idea that they don’t deserve respect or care. For Black communities in the United States, even when factors such as physical health, access to prenatal care, income level, education, and socioeconomic status are controlled for, Black women are still far more likely to experience maternal mortality at rates that hark back to the days when Black motherhood was seen as a problem to be solved with sterilization.
Social and environmental risk factors that influence poor maternal health outcomes disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Poverty-based risk factors, from housing instability to increased exposure to toxins because of subpar housing to increased exposure to violence, contribute to higher stress levels and lower access to quality health care, including comprehensive mental health services. Additional factors like workplace barriers and food insecurity can easily trap someone in a toxic environment and pregnancy in the United States.
In that same vein, we must be willing to confront the -isms that let people think maternity is only something to celebrate when the mother is white. If you read comments on articles about Black moms like Serena Williams, Beyoncé, or Meghan Markle, you notice a theme in the racism. A Black mom is somehow gross for cradling her pregnant belly, but the same posters find it adorable when white women do it. It’s a passive form of racism, rarely examined, much less discussed. And yeah, comments are a cesspool, but medical staff make comments on forums too. So when you see people on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook claim the babies of Black moms are meal tickets or monkeys, or when they make hate into a hobby so thoroughly that they are profiled for it in the press, you have to ask yourself if they’re the kind of medical professional who treats babies like puppets and calls them Satan for Snapchat points.
When someone like Serena Williams or Beyoncé Knowles-Carter shares her stories of pregnancy complications and concerns, it briefly pushes the problem of the maternal deaths of Black women front and center in mainstream feminist media. But it shouldn’t take an impassioned story from one of the most famous Black women in the world to get it into everyone’s head that America can no longer ignore the health of Black mothers. Fully addressing the issue requires interrogation of not only the obvious flaws within the medical system but also all the other institutions that can affect various aspects of health-care access and quality for marginalized people. For too long, the same systems and institutions that oversaw slavery, Indian boarding schools, and eugenics programs have been allowed to operate without dealing with the biases rooted in their formation. Fully addressing maternal mortality calls for an acknowledgment that unexamined biases within the medical system and outside have been a key factor in the paucity of care for those communities where motherhood is perceived as a sin instead of a sacrament.
Imagery of white motherhood is standard in media, complete with the seemingly