In celebration of the new year, I am offering access to a PDF of a zine I published in 1999 which has been out of circulation for decades.

I have been thinking, studying, and writing about reproduction using an intersectional analysis for quite a long time. I also have a not-so-secret history as a prolific zine publisher and collector. Twenty years ago, these interests combined with my publication of the zine, Who is Fit for Motherhood? Why Abortion is Not the Only Reproductive Right. This was a post-college creation, when I decided to turn my senior project, “Race, Class, and Reproductive Rights: The Thread of Eugenics and Social Control,” into a zine mostly (though not entirely) unburdened by academic language and footnotes. The aesthetics and rhetorical style are an attempt to emulate the mimeographed Women’s Liberation pamphlets that had informed my research. At the time I wrote the thesis and zine, I had not yet heard the term “reproductive justice,” coined in 1994 by Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, and subsequently promoted by SisterSong, yet looking back I would like to think that this work fits into the RJ paradigm.

As I state on the first page of the zine,

"This zine is about reproductive rights in the United States, but it is not about abortion. Thinking and talking about reproductive rights solely in terms of abortion means that we ignore issues of sterilization abuse, forced birth control, population control and other ways that policymakers have attempted to restrict women’s rights to bear children.

"It is no coincidence that forced sterilization and birth control are abuses that historically have affected poor women, women of color, and immigrant women (which, of course, are not mutually exclusive categories), whereas white affluent women have traditionally struggled to achieve the right not to bear children through access to abortion & contraception.

"This zine is about that contradiction, about the attempts to decrease and limit the number of children born to poor women, women of color and immigrant women at the same time that white affluent women have been encouraged to bear as many children as possible.

"WHY:

• • • "because people of color, poor people, and immigrants have always been a part of the American reproductive rights movement

    • "because reproductive rights is not just a white professional women’s issue

    • "because we need to understand how history repeats itself in order to correct what’s wrong now

    • "because reproductive freedom is a right that every woman deserves"

Feel free to download, print, and circulate the entire zine, available as a PDF here.

Unfortunately, I no longer have any hard copies of the original available, but you can find them archived at Barnard College, Harvard University, Anchor Archive, and probably other zine libraries I am unaware of.

[January 4, 2019]