Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation

Queering Reproductive Justice

An Invitation

CANDACE BOND-THERIAULT

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Candace Bond-Theriault. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bond-Theriault, Candace, author.

Title: Queering reproductive justice : an invitation / Candace Bond-Theriault.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024003630 (print) | LCCN 2024003631 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503638716 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503639584 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503639591 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sexual minorities—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States. | Sexual minorities—Health and hygiene—United States. | Reproductive rights—United States. | Reproductive health—Law and legislation—United States. | Right to health—United States.

Classification: LCC KF4754.5 .B66 2024 (print) | LCC KF4754.5 (ebook) | DDC 342.7308—dc23/eng/20240205

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024003630

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024003631

Cover design: Lindy Kasler

Cover art: Shutterstock

Typeset by Newgen in Arno Pro 11/15

For Scott, may our Counterevolutions always be in sync; with you, Everything Is. For Lewis, my shining moonbeam in every dark night sky, may you imagine a beautiful and equitable world beyond my wildest dreams. For my father, Michael, who always knew that I was destined to grow up to be somebody. For my mother, Jenise, my best friend, being your daughter is the greatest honor of my life.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Queering Reproductive Justice: A Movement-Building Framework

2. Queering the Right to Not Have Children

3. Religious Exemptions and Denying Health Care to LGBTQIA+ People

4. Queering the Right to Have Partners and Children

5. Living Free and Well: Queering the Human Right to Safe and Healthy Environments

Appendix: Glossary of Gender and Sexual Orientation

Notes

Index

PREFACE

I began writing Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was leading the reproductive health, rights, and justice project at the National LGBTQ Task Force,¹ and I was exhausted by the past six months of assaults by the new Trump administration. As someone who graduated from law school during the Great Recession, and who began my professional legal career during the height of the Obama administration, up until 2017 my work had mainly focused on challenging my allies and the administration to do better and create progressive policies for people of color, queer communities, women, and poor folks. On January 20, 2017, my work quickly shifted to primarily defending the gains that we had made in the name of social justice throughout the Obama administration and throughout the last sixty-plus-years since the 1960s civil rights movement.

I started writing this book in an effort to share the deep culture change and policy work that many folks within the Black and brown and LGBTQIA+ community were leading—in collaboration with so many advocates in the reproductive health, rights, and justice space—despite the immense losses we were facing during the Trump regime. I also wrote this book to remind us, the advocates, that transformational movement work itself outlasts presidential administrations. Yes, our work often shifts focuses; nevertheless, it continues to exist and evolve. I also began writing this book when abortion was still a constitutional right, though for many women and femmes of color, gender-nonconforming folks, and transgender individuals, Roe v. Wade was not enough because the decision itself did not ensure access to abortion. Thus, for too many, abortion was not a reality even in 2017.

As I fast-forward to the summer of 2024, I’m struck that so much has changed—we no longer have the constitutional right to abortion in the United States due to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization² decision—yet so much has remained the same, as Black and brown reproductive justice leaders are still advocating for intersectional solutions to reproductive health issues while we raise our own families, support our communities, and grieve systemic violence and oppression.³

For me personally, since 2017, I became a professor of sociology and criminology at Howard University where I now teach a course on reproductive justice, health, and social activism. However, the biggest change in my life is that I became a mom to a beautiful boy. My son has transformed my world, my orientation to movement making, and has reminded me why queering reproductive justice as a movement-building framework is so important: it is a direct call to shift power, change systems and institutions, and demand that progressive movements do the work to actually center the needs of those most impacted by policies and practices. In the world of reproductive health, that includes the need to center Black and brown queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming folks, particularly those who are experiencing poverty, incarceration, and those who are otherwise negatively system impacted. In the world of LGBTQIA+ rights, that call means we must include reproductive health and access to the praxis of policy priorities and movement making. As a Black queer mother, I find this work to be even more personal and powerful than ever before.

Queering reproductive justice is my life’s work. My hope for this book is to invite new readers and seasoned advocates alike to learn, grapple with, and ultimately bolster the queering reproductive justice framework and its corresponding movement. This book offers a particular queering reproductive justice framework that is both a vision and a practice that intentionally, and respectfully, builds from the reproductive justice framework first developed by SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, LGBTQIA+ scholarship, movement literatures, Black feminist storytelling, kitchen table conversations, and a few of my own experiences as a Black queer feminist movement-building policy lawyer and professor.

The ultimate goal of this book is to center a conversation that too often gets pushed to the margins of the reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights movements: the reality that we must try to ensure that movements, policy, law, and research actually center the reproductive needs, and desires, of LGBTQIA+ people, our families, and our communities.

Queering reproductive justice asks us to create more space around the collective human rights table, so that we can all partake in the feast of liberation. Reproductive justice, from which queering reproductive justice stems, emphasizes the importance of the Black feminist storytelling tradition, because all of our voices matter and we are all experts in our own experience. Thus, in order to pay homage to and live into the teachings of Black feminism, as the author of this book, I, Candace Bond-Theriault, want to provide you as readers with a proper introduction. Who I am affects my writing because writing is subjective by nature. More importantly, you and I cannot be fully in community with one another if I do not start this book by leading with a little transparency and authenticity.

Who I am matters. My positionality matters and I want to share my birth story

From my hospital bed, I looked over at my son’s bright newborn face in his bassinet as he looked up sweetly and inquisitively at nurses taking his temperature, measuring him, and checking his vital signs. I sat in disbelief that in the last few hours, after a successful emergency C-section, I had become a mother, to a son who would share my features, my namesake, and my many mornings and midnights on this earth. I gave birth on May 12, 2021, the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that certain requirements like mask mandates in response to the COVID-19 crises were no longer necessary in certain spaces.

My pregnancy experience was not perfect—I found out that I was pregnant during the height of the pandemic and spent my entire pregnancy in my house with my loving husband and dog, but without my family or friends. My son’s birth story was not perfect.⁴ Yet I survived,⁵ which, unfortunately, for a Black woman giving birth in the United States, survival is itself a huge success.⁶

I also recognize the many privileges that I had during my pregnancy. As a queer/bisexual woman married to a man, I have so much undeniable privilege compared with much of the queer community. I conceived easily. I had professional privilege as a lawyer who has a job with good health care benefits. I was also able to apply for and receive Washington, D.C., paid family leave. I am privileged to be a homeowner in a neighborhood that I could bring my son home to and feel safe and supported. My birth story is one of recognized privilege that far too many Black pregnant people, LGBTQIA+ folks, and those experiencing poverty do not get to experience—regardless of the reality that we all deserve to live, birth, and raise our families in safe environments, with dignity and support.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all of the authors of each movement perspective for your work and words. Your voices add substance and meaning to the quest of queering reproductive justice and I am so grateful to call each of you colleagues and friends: Gretchen Borchelt, Natasha Chambria, Jaclyn Dean, Julianna Gonen, Kierra Johnson, Christine Soyong Harley, britt walsh, Daniel Bruner, Alexis Robles-Fradet, Mara Youdelman, Kate D’Adamo, and Meghan Maury. Thank you to Sabrina Rewald, B. Schaff, and Zsea Bowmani for helping to evolve my thinking on queering reproductive justice. Thank you to my many colleagues and friends on the front lines of this important work: Kelsey Ryland, Pamela Merritt, Jennifer Driver, Candace Gibson, Preston Mitchum, Elizabeth Platt, Regina Mahone, Edwith Theo-gene, Reese Rathjen Amyx, and numerous other movement warriors.

I want to particularly thank Naomi Washington Leapheart for being a beacon of hope who lives into the intersection of Black queer faith leadership every day. I’d like to give a special thank you to Stacey Long Simmons, Victoria Kirby York, Camden Hargrove, Shanequa Davis, and my North Carolina Central University School of Law crew for your unwavering friendship, love, and support. I’d like to thank Professor Khiara Bridges for your guidance on this project. Thank you to my amazing editor Marcela Cristina Maxfield and all those at the Stanford University Press who have made this book possible. Finally, and most importantly, I’d like to thank my family for always believing in my vision and supporting me each step of the way. Specifically, I’d like to thank my wonderful husband, Scott Bond-Theriault, my son, Lewis Baldwin Bond-Theriault, my parents, Jenise and Michael Bond, my brother, Justin Bond, my grandparents Lillie and Johnie Bond, and the rest of my biological and chosen family for being my foundation and guiding light. Finally, thank you to my pup, Spartan, who has been by my side as I wrote this book from start to finish.

Introduction

Queering Reproductive Justice Is Essential

Black and brown LGBTQIA+ people deserve to live in splendor and abundance. We are worthy of positive and affirming experiences in this world and within the United States. We are deserving of equitable access to opportunities to become pregnant, have children, and build our families in safe and healthy environments. Black and brown queer, transgender, gender nonconforming, and gender expansive people deserve to achieve reproductive justice. The premier reproductive justice organization SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.¹ Reproductive justice also includes the human right to bodily autonomy, gender justice, and sexual justice.²

Queering reproductive justice as a movement-building framework centers queerness and the reproductive needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual individuals plus other sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQIA+) communities. This framework builds on the reproductive justice framework and the LGBTQIA+ liberation framework and demands that all people have (1) the right to not partner with others and to not have a child; (2) the right to create a family of one’s choosing and to partner with one or more consenting persons, regardless of one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or sexual expression; as well as the right to have a child and build a family without regard to traditional forms of conception, pregnancy, birthing, or two-parent child-rearing, and (3) the right to raise oneself, and to raise one’s family, in safe and healthy environments absent stigma, discrimination, and systemic institutional oppression.

Queering reproductive justice is a bold movement-building framework that is intentionally intersectional from its foundation. Queering reproductive justice will be achieved when all people have the ability to determine if, when, and how to partner, parent, and raise oneself, and one’s family, in safe and healthy environments. Queering reproductive justice is a liberation-first framework that celebrates difference, needs, abilities, and desires. This framework seeks to center those who have been made-to-be-marginalized by the oppressive mandates, and narratives, of white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchal normativity, white Christian nationalism, and ableism.

This movement, and the accompanying movement-building framework, encompasses everyone who is invested in, actively engages in, and explicitly supports the analysis and advocacy of LGBTQIA+ reproductive liberation. This book is an invitation to learn about this work and to join in solidarity with the many individuals and communities already working toward the goals of queering reproductive justice.

Queering Reproductive Justice Is Not New

The queering reproductive justice framework that this book introduces is new and specific; however, it cannot be overstated that the concept of queering reproductive justice itself is not new.³ This work was born out of the glorious against-all-odds tradition of innovation that queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming Black women and femmes have spearheaded for centuries. In so many ways, queer Black woman-and-femme-hood is itself a full-bodied sensory experience of creating, reimaging, reckoning, questioning, grappling, and affirming. Queer Black femme existence is a courageous and needed intervention within the American polity.

For example, we know that Black women are three times more likely to die from mostly preventable pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum-related complications than white women.⁴

This is a startling statistic that is well documented and is often shouted by reproductive health experts in the halls of Congress, on protest pulpits, and on digital advocacy platforms. Yet to actively queer reproductive justice we must also consider a deeper inquiry: Of the number of Black women who are likely to die from pregnancy-related complications, how many identify as queer, transgender, gender nonconforming, or gender expansive birthing folks?⁵ Are transgender folks, gender nonconforming folks, and masculine-identified birthing folks even considered in this calculus? Moreover, is gender identity considered at all when discussing maternal mortality rates? Queering reproductive justice argues that if gender identity is not intentionally considered in research, data collection, policy, or the provision of health care, then the default becomes cisgender, which is not only harmful to non-cisgender folks but also potentially harmful to every birthing person because it skews one’s actual birthing risks.

Ultimately, the queering reproductive justice framework requires us to become more intersectional thinkers and advocates. This framework demands that we consider the who more deeply when naming a societal issue so that we can better determine the why and the how. In order to create better solutions that work for those who are really the most impacted, we have to know who those folks really are—and who they fully are—without assumption or the practice of un-naming. The queering reproductive justice framework asks questions such as, Who do we leave out and who can we center?

Scholars including Kimala Price,⁶ Zakiya Luna,⁷ and Laura Mamo⁸ have written about the concept of queering reproductive justice and presented their own ideas and framings, many of which this book relies on. Similarly, reproductive justice organizations such as Forward Together [formerly Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ)]⁹ have been advocating for reproductive justice for queer communities since 2005; and organizations like SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW!¹⁰ have led queering reproductive justice trainings for advocates and communities for more than a decade. Legal organizations like If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice,¹¹ and LGBTQIA+ organizations like the National LGBTQ Task Force¹² and the Victory Institute,¹³ have been advocating for queer reproductive justice policy solutions since the latter half of the 2010s.

It is also important to recognize Miriam Zoila Pérez, a queer Cuban American writer, who wrote an article in Rewire in 2007 about the importance of queering reproductive justice when they worked at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.¹⁴ In this article, Pérez poignantly writes, Reproductive justice is not just about one’s ability to reproduce. It’s about autonomy, it’s about respect, it’s about shared principles based in the human right to health and a desire for real social change. Scholars and advocates like Kimala Price, Zakiya Luna, and Miriam Zoila Pérez make this book’s queering reproductive justice framework possible.

The framework of queering reproductive justice would not be possible without the innovative theory of reproductive justice itself espoused by the preeminent reproductive justice organization, SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.¹⁵ SisterSong’s all-encompassing, yet highly specific, framework changed, well, everything, particularly for reproductive health advocates in the Black/brown and the LGBTQIA+ community. SisterSong defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.¹⁶ The reproductive justice framework also centers the human right to have sexual and bodily autonomy.¹⁷

Second, scholarship and policy interventions that focus on the intersections of LGBTQIA+ health and reproductive health, rights, and justice already exist in both the academic and advocacy worlds.¹⁸ For example, in 2016, scholars from multiple disciplines including reproduction, sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies convened at the University of California–Berkeley for a workshop entitled Making Families: Transnational Surrogacy, Queer Kinship, and Reproductive Justice.¹⁹ The stated purpose of the gathering was to bring into direct conversation three theoretical frameworks that have each transformed scholarship and influenced practice around transnational surrogacy and reproduction: ‘stratified reproduction,’²⁰ ‘reproductive justice,’ and ‘queer reproductions.’²¹ While this convening focused specifically on transnational surrogacy and assisted reproductive technology, it also sought to work through apparent tensions among these three approaches so as to forge intellectual and political solidarities that can strengthen scholarship and influence policy.²² This is an example of scholarly movement making, not only because the participants created an innovative and necessary catalog of writing on the intersections of surrogacy, queer families, and reproductive justice, but also because the conveners clearly state that this symposium issue serves as an opening and an invitation to further scholarship and action.²³ This book answers their call to create new scholarship that focuses on the intersections of queerness and reproduction, but it also expands the scope of the symposium’s original focus to issues beyond transnational surrogacy. Even so, the queering reproductive justice framework set forth in this book builds from foundational frameworks espoused by scholars of queer kinship, reproductive justice, and innovative family building.

Similar to reproductive justice,²⁴ queering reproductive justice is both an advocacy framework and an academic framework. Thus, it is the purpose of this book to introduce a new framework that builds on, and expands, existing scholarship and advocacy.²⁵ Queering reproductive justice looks to reproductive justice²⁶ and to LGBTQIA+ liberation as its dual foundations.

Queering Reproductive Justice, Reproductive Justice, and LGBTQIA+ Liberation Are Inextricably Tied

To queer reproductive justice is to explicitly center the LGBTQIA+ experience, as well as the theory and praxis of LGBTQIA+ liberation, while honoring and expanding the seminal tenets of reproductive justice.²⁷ As discussed above, the foundational tenets of reproductive justice include the human rights to (1) not have a child; (2) have a child; and (3) parent children in safe and healthy environments.²⁸ There is also a fourth tenet of reproductive justice that calls for sexual autonomy and gender freedom for every human being.²⁹ This book affirms, and expands on, this fourth tenet by directly centering the reproductive needs of LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities.

LGBTQIA+ liberation requires that the needs of the LGBTQIA+ community be included at the beginning of all social justice and civil rights conversations—and not added at the end as an asterisk—so that queer and nonbinary communities will become free when all others are freed. LGBTQIA+ liberation must include equity for all people including people experiencing poverty, young people, immigrants, people of color, those with disabilities, people interacting with or incarcerated within the prison industrial complex, and all systematically oppressed and politically discounted peoples, because all of our freedoms are tied up with one another.

Reproductive LGBTQIA+ liberation will occur when all queer, transgender, nonbinary, agender, gender expansive, and sexually expansive folks, particularly those with intersecting made-to-be-marginalized identities, such as queer and transgender people of color and those experiencing poverty, have actual autonomous access to all needed, and desired, reproductive health care. Queering reproductive justice will be fully realized when all people have the ability to make self-determinative, and community informed, decisions about their bodies without governmental intrusion and coercion, health care provider bias, systematic oppression in the forms of white supremacy, cisheteronormativity, global borders, capitalistic mandates, and harmful religious exemptions.³⁰

Queering reproductive justice as a movement-building framework resolves to ensure that everyone has the human right to bodily autonomy, sexual health, and sexual pleasure. These human rights apply to all of us regardless of our sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. However, members of the LGBTQIA+ community often face disparate, specific, and interlocking oppressions when it comes to bodily autonomy, family formation, and living free.

Above all, the intersection of LGBTQIA+ liberation and reproductive justice is characterized by three major concepts. The first is the rejection of state control and criminalization of our bodies, families, and communities as well as systems of social stigma that dehumanize certain bodies, gender expressions, reproductive decisions, and families while denying, depriving, and punishing others. Second, queering reproductive justice demands that the government play a part in the liberation of its people through some form of reparations that requires the government to account for past harms.³¹ Third, in order to finally be free and live well, queering reproductive justice as a movement-building framework calls for the development of social programs that actually aid all individuals and families, particularly families of color, like public benefit programs, family formation interventions, and the revitalization of school curricula that includes all races, ethnicities, bodies, and experiences.

Today in the United States it is still a radical statement to exclaim that LGBTQIA+ people can get pregnant, need access to contraception, have abortions, and need access to culturally competent health care services including prenatal, birthing, and postpartum care; testing, prevention, and treatment for HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs); reproductive cancer screenings; and gender-affirming care. This book seeks to shed light on the reality that LGBTQIA+ people also give birth; are adoptive and foster parents; form families that are nontraditional, nonnuclear, and not determined by blood; and have sex both for pleasure and for reproduction.

The futures of reproductive justice and LGBTQIA+ liberation are inextricably entwined. Both movements were born out of the desire to live, love, and build families of one’s choosing—when and how we decide. Women of color,³² Black women in particular,³³ and queer and trans people of color³⁴ created both movements to free our communities from the oppression of what Black lesbian feminist bell hooks called white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,³⁵ the systems that categorize and valorize bodies based on gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, race, color, nationality, ability, economic status, and more.

Words Matter: A Demand for Gender-Inclusive Language

³⁶

Queering reproductive justice demands that gender-inclusive language become the standard practice within the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements. Gender-inclusive language should not, and cannot, be an addition or an addendum included in reproductive health, rights, and justice scholarship, activism, and movement building only when suitable or politically expedient. While the reproductive justice movement has historically utilized more gender-inclusive language than the reproductive health or rights movements, all reproductive movements could do more to ensure that gender-inclusive language is automatically infused into discussions of reproductive health care needs at the beginning of strategic conversations.

Exclusion of gender-inclusive language only further marginalizes the reproductive health needs of those who should be centered: queer folks, transgender folks, gender nonconforming folks, genderqueer folks, and all people who do not fit into sex-specific stereotypes society has created in order to keep communities quiet, ashamed, and in a box.

Queering reproductive justice seeks the universal goal of bodily autonomy and reproductive liberation for all people by focusing on the needs of LGBTQIA+ individuals and communities. The goals are similar to the sociological political theory targeted universalism in which universal goals are established for all groups concerned and then strategies developed to achieve those goals are targeted, based on how different groups are situated within structures, culture, and across geographies to obtain the universal goal.³⁷ A newer kind of framework is exemplified by that of Black Women Best (BWB),³⁸ a name coined by Janelle Jones in 2019. It argues that if our government brings Black women from the margins to the center and intentionally creates policies that pull Black women out of economic precarity and into economic prosperity, then everyone will benefit, is also a praxis aligned with the intentions of the queering reproductive justice framework. Integrating gender-inclusive language into reproductive scholarship and the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements is a way to operationalize the practice of targeted universalism.

Additionally, queering reproductive health language is important because most governmental, and nongovernmental, data about reproductive health is gathered and analyzed based on the undefined term women in the name of the undefined category women’s health. While this may seem to be harmless, it can lead to misrepresentation and the possible miscounting of people in the LGBTQIA+ community. In the U.S., the term woman is often used to singularly refer to cisgender women. This practice is problematic for many reasons, but particularly when it comes to interpreting data.³⁹ A lot of data on reproductive health care, whether regarding the provision of services or access to services, may not be explicitly disaggregated according to gender identity (cisgender, transgender, agender) or sexual orientation (heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, queer, poly), which makes it extremely difficult to know whether transgender women, genderqueer, and nonbinary folks are included in the dataset’s definition of women. Additionally, many studies make it difficult to ascertain if the study focuses on all women, regardless of sexual partner, or only women who singularly have sex with men.

Researchers must do better and more explicitly state whom they are gathering data about so it can be more useful for LGBTQIA+ folks and all those who are invested in making reproductive health care more accessible for all people regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. We all must encourage the commission of new studies that intentionally focus on the reproductive health needs of LGBTQIA+ folks so we can have a better sense of what the LGBTQIA+ community is actually experiencing and what is needed for our families to truly be able to live, survive, and thrive.

There is an ever-evolving LGBTQIA+ lexicon. The LGBTQIA+ community is constantly defining and redefining themselves, for to endlessly evolve is to be queer. One of the most common questions that I hear as an LGBTQIA+ advocate is, How can I keep up with the language? In response, I’ve created the following lexicon that provides the common terminologies, frameworks, and institutions referenced throughout this book.⁴⁰ While this list of terms is important to get us started, a full glossary of terms is provided at the end of the book.

The Queering Reproductive Justice Lexicon

LGBTQIA+: