Felicia Kornbluh - A Womans Life Is a Human Life: My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice

A WOMANS

LIFE IS A

HUMAN LIFE

Also by Felicia Kornbluh

Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective

(with Gwendolyn Mink)

The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America

FELICIA KORNBLUH

A WOMANS

LIFE IS A

HUMAN LIFE

My Mother, Our Neighbor,

and the Journey from

Reproductive Rights to

Reproductive Justice

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 2023 by Felicia Kornbluh

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or .

FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

This book is typeset in 13-pt. Centaur by Alpha Design & Composition in Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: January 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6068-3

eISBN 978-0-8021-6069-0

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

A firm hand falls enthusiastically on my shoulder. Daughter, she says back on her own ground, next time, I wont wait for you to invite me.

When we are leaving the car, I lock her suitcase into the trunk but take along with me the manuscript on which I have been working. She raises her eyebrows, whispering, as if we were conspirators. Our book? she asks.

Kim Chernin, In My Mothers House

There are so many roots to the tree of anger

that sometimes the branches shatter

before they bear.

Sitting in Nedicks

the women rally before they march

discussing the problematic girls

they hire to make them free.

An almost white counterman passes

a waiting brother to serve them first

and the ladies neither notice nor reject

the slighter pleasures of their slavery.

But I who am bound by my mirror

as well as my bed

see causes in colour

as well as sex

and sit here wondering

which me will survive

all these liberations.

Audre Lorde,

Who Said It Was Simple

To my three sisters

and

To the memory of Susan E. Davis and Meredith Tax

Contents

: B OTH S IDES

: R EFORMERS AND R EFORM

: C HANGE THE L AW NOW

: W ANT AN A BORTION ? A SK Y OUR M INISTER OR Y OUR R ABBI

: R EPEAL G ETS A H EARING

: I NTO THE C OURTS !

: G AME C HANGER

: P ALANTE

: T O THE S UPREME C OURT

: F IGHTING P OPULATION C ontrol IN 1970 S N EW Y ORK C ITY

: T OWARD R EPRODUCTIVE F REEDOM

: W HAT T HEN ? W HAT N OW ?

THE A UTHOR

The morning after the cerebral hemorrhage that would take my mothers life, I was with my closest family members, all of us in our Saturday best, trying to compose ourselves as an audience for my nephew Elis bar mitzvah. My mind wandered to the scene in synagogue about thirteen hours earlier: Eli, insouciant in his suit, my sister Rebecca and me returning to our seats after lighting Sabbath candlesthat pointedly female responsibility in Jewish practice that we did only awkwardly, mumbling the Hebrew prayer. My mother, Beatrice, leaned over to kiss my sister. Then her face went slack, her words blurred, and we made a desperate call for an ambulance. It was too late.

By early Saturday morning, my mother was on life support, her brain mostly washed away like a cheap but utterly irreplaceable hard drive. My spouse and brother-in-law were at her side, not expecting a miracle. We wondered if the bar mitzvah should continue, but the rabbi and cantor told us to proceed. Apparently, in Jewish law, if a wedding and funeral party meet at a crossroads, the funeral steps aside for the wedding to pass: joy wins. The future over the past.

Karen, my older sister, leaned across to ask my father a question: Whats that organization Mom was part of? The one that legalized abortion in New York? The Professional Womens Caucus? My father, who was not having the best morning of his life, was game, nonetheless, to talk politics. I think that was what it was called. I stared, first at Karen, then at Dad: What were they talking about? I am a professional historian. I teach and write about women and gender, law, and movements for social change. What Professional Womens Caucus that legalized abortion in New York? On top of my hollow grief, I couldnt believe that I had never learned about this part of her life. And for about twelve hours it had been decisively too late to ask.

Alongside the sharpness of regret, this all crashed on me as a cosmic joke. Mom and I had a close, loving, relationship for the decade or so before she died. But I had spent years fighting with her, working to distinguish myself from her and succeed on my own. Cosmic joke, yes, and my mothers last laugh. Her rejoinder, in every one of those terrible arguments, was some version of You think youre so smart. Your old mother knows more than you think she does. Well, she got that right.

The conversation my sister Karen started that morning in synagogue set this project in motion. over one hundred years the ones who made public policy on abortion. Only at the end of a long process of change did activist lawyers take to the federal courts and advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court.

As I studied the history of reproductive rights, I stumbled onto the story of a second woman I knew: my familys neighbor for nearly a decade, on the other side of the hall in our Manhattan high-rise, Dr. Helen Rodrguez-Tras. Rodrguez-Tras was an effective activist, a female Puerto Rican physician at a time when that made her an extreme outlier, and eventually the first Latina head of the American Public Health Association (APHA). APHA at a historic United Nations conference in Egypt that repudiated postWorld War II policies of population control, which tried to entice or coerce poor people into having fewer children as a way to reduce their poverty, while not endorsing other policies that could reduce poverty right away. She built the foundation for this work in New York in the 1970s, when she cofounded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse (CESA).

Dr. Helen Rodrguez-Tras saw sterilization abuse as an invidious form of population control that was happening every day in the United States, targeting Puerto Ricans who were U.S. colonial subjects, as well as Black women, Latinas, and Native Americans on the U.S. mainland. Womens health, she argued, was endangered most of all by and the organizations she founded or inspired are nearly absent from scholarship and journalism about American history.

The more I learned about Dr. Rodrguez-Tras, the more I saw her story as a complement to the one my mother led me to about how abortion in America ceased to be a crime. Thats because of who I am: From the profile of my interests (feminism, activism, law), its pretty obvious that my apple did not fall far from the maternal tree. But after it fell, it rolled a few feet away. While I researched changes in abortion law, my day job was talking with students about the history of feminism, including the challenges many women of color and left-of-center whites have posed to the movements privileging of abortion rights and not, say, high-quality health care for all or policies that reduce economic inequality. A distinctive movement for reproductive justice has been offering these challenges since the 1990s, when women of color met to plan for that same conference on population that Rodrguez-Tras attended in Cairo and wound up naming a new feminist demand. The reproductive justice movement wants legal abortion and much more, to create conditions that let all people choose whether and when to bear and raise children. Around the time my mother died, I started serving on the board of trustees of my regional Planned Parenthood chapter. I joined a lively and sometimes excruciating effort within the board to incorporate reproductive justice into our work.