THE SOLIDARITY OF REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE, REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM, AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

That reproductive justice affects individuals is well understood. The most prominent example at present is the US Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, reversing an almost 50-year old decision conferring the right to abortions. This decision decisively limits pregnant individuals’ ability to terminate pregnancies, raising concerns about individual reproductive justice and individual reproductive freedom in a country that otherwise prides itself for its individual liberties.

However, reproductive justice and reproductive freedom, and the lack thereof, also affect communities, especially those that are also experiencing the lack of economic justice. Life and death are at stake not only for the unborn but also for their parents and communities who are forced to live in precarious conditions. Add to that the fact that the lack of economic justice is often experienced in compounded fashion by minoritized communities and women, and it becomes clear that the typical discussions around reproductive justice need to be expanded.

That overruling of Roe v. Wade does not affect everyone equally can perhaps best be seen at the top of the food chain. Economically privileged 1 percenters and their communities are least impacted, as they have the resources and the connections to procure abortions without too much trouble, even when they live in the most conservative and restrictive states. Even if the voting public is not always aware of this, the moneyed interests that drive much of politics in the US are hardly unaware of the fact that restrictive laws concerning abortion affect some more than others.

By contrast, most impacted by more restrictive abortion laws are individuals and communities that do not have sufficient resources for providing general reproductive health, starting with the availability of effective birth control and ending with the lack of care for pregnant mothers, babies and infants, including basic childcare. Note that in the United States, maternal mortality is the highest among 10 other wealthy nations, with pregnant African American women’s mortality rate being twice as high as that of white women.

Religion is part of the problem when it makes it seem as if opposing abortion is the only one faithful position. In reality the majority of people of faith support legal access to abortion and abortion is an ancient practice that is not rejected in the Bible and in the Jesus traditions. Moreover, religion is just as much part of the problem when it makes it seem as if abortion is primarily about the decisions of individuals for families, thereby covering up the discrepancies between the wealthiest parts of society and the rest, for whom reproductive justice is increasingly moved out of reach. These various insights alone should broaden any conversation about “family values.”

So, how can these discrepancies of reproductive justice be addressed and who has the power to change this? In a democracy, the assumption is that decisions are made by the many rather than by the few, and that laws reflect this. Unfortunately, the ideals of political democracy are often undermined by the lack of what, at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, we’ve been addressing in terms of economic democracy. Without economic democracy supporting political democracy, decisions and laws often reflect the interests of the wealthiest few rather than the many, and the worlds of reproductive justice and reproductive freedom reflect this.

In this conversation, it might be instructive to consider the parallels between restrictions of reproductive freedom and the freedom of collective bargaining and organizing labor unions that sets the United States apart from virtually every other developed country. In both cases, the most economically privileged minority is much less impacted than everyone else. The wealthiest members of US society have both plenty of opportunities to procure abortions and to maintain relationships that support their class interests (already Adam Smith was aware of the latter). At the same time, those who lack economic justice have neither, a fact that impacts the majority of Americans, not only the working class (which is the majority of the population) but more and more people who typically consider themselves middle class.

If it is understood that the absence of reproductive justice and reproductive freedom affects the many much more severely than the few, running parallel to the lack of economic justice in many workplaces of the 99 percent who have to work for a living, new forms of solidarity can emerge. Those at the bottom of the economy—with no hope for economic democracy—are certainly most affected not only by the prohibition of abortion but also by the restrictions on worker organizing, both with severe long-term consequences for personal and communal well-being.

But even the rest of the 99 percent are more affected by all of this than they commonly realize. Just as jobs are becoming ever more restrictive even for members of the middle class, decisions about reproduction such as child-bearing and child-rearing are increasingly controlled by a system that offers little support to anyone, putting the burden squarely on everyone else, from single mothers to families and communities. In sum, all but the wealthiest American communities are increasingly affected by restrictive laws that apply in special ways to the many rather than the few.

How can the power to make decisions and to change laws be returned to the majority? Protests can sometimes nudge those in power, but nothing of substance will change without the solidarity of the many. Such solidarity, as I have argued in my recent book Theology in the Capitalocene, is a matter of realizing who benefits from the current flows of dominant power and who does not. It requires an intersectional analysis of racism, sexism, and class, that opens our eyes to the fact that the 99 percent have more in common than meets the eye, and that white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism are designed to cover this up.

In the process, those who are most affected by the lack of reproductive justice and freedom—in particular members of BIPOC communities—are no longer merely the victims but become agents in their own right. Their voice and their agency matter because they can help the rest of us see what is really going on. And they are not expendable in the dominant system: just as the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of our dependence on essential workers, the system is absolutely dependent the reproductive labor of one-half of the population, beginning with the gestational labor without which no child would be born. When gestational workers of all nations realize what they have in common, and if the rest of us realize that we would not exist without with them, both reproductive and economic justice stand to benefit. In the process, a society could emerge that truly values life for all at all levels, with interesting implications for more wholesome religious discourses as well.