SPOTLIGHT ON ABORTION CARE & REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
Pride Month Connections: God, Guns, Gays & Abortion
Written by Jeff Koetje, MD, AMSA Reproductive Health Programming Strategist
Happy Pride Month, one and all! As a gay white man who came out in the late 1990s while living in Chicago (Oh, Boystown!), I am reminiscing fondly on the many Pride events over those years that helped me feel surrounded and held by a new community at exactly the moment that I was losing the love and connections of my Evangelical biological family. Now, more than 25 years later (Oh my!) I’m not finding myself on a Pride Parade float as I once did, but I am finding myself in another way – by committing myself to the cause for abortion care access and the movement for reproductive rights and justice. As a cis white man, who is gay, I’ve long reflected on the interconnections between the struggle for LGBTQIA2S+ rights and justice and the struggle for reproductive rights and justice. After all, having grown up in – and ultimately escaping from – rightwing, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal Evangelical Christianity, it is as apparent as gay glitter that the folks – armed to the teeth with their ideology and just as often with their guns – coming for abortion rights are the same folks coming for LBTQIA2S+ rights. The demonization of gays and queers on one side of the coin, and the demonization of people who have abortions and the people who provide abortions on the other side of that same coin. God, Guns, and Gays, as the rightwing political slogan goes. And although it breaks the alliterative catchiness, you can certainly append to the slogan…and Abortion.
What I find so compelling about the Reproductive Justice framework is that it starts from the first principle that there indeed is a universal human right to body autonomy/sovereignty, and this principle is ultimately the basis for every other human right – even ones that we are only just now starting to recognize, and even ones that we have not yet discerned/perceived. In its simplest formulation, Reproductive Justice is the universal human right to body autonomy/sovereignty; the universal human right to have children; the universal human right to not have children; and the universal human right to raise the children we do have in safe, supportive, and sustainable communities and environments. As an effeminate male child who was bullied through the entirety of my primary and secondary education, for the obvious crime of my non-normative masculinity, and the suspected crime of my being gay (to which I now say, proudly and defiantly, guilty as charged!) I learned very early on what it is to be the target of one kind of reproductive injustice, for I certainly was not raised in a safe, supportive, and sustainable environment.
We who are queer (in the broadest sense of that word)
have a special role to play in the movement for reproductive health, rights, and justice.
I do not have a uterus, and I will never become pregnant, but the reproductive freedom and liberation of my straight and queer kinfolk who do, and who can become pregnant is inextricably tied up with the reproductive freedom and liberation that I fervently dream of and desire for my queer-ass self, and that I fervently dream of and desire for all the generations of sweet gaybies who have come and will come after me.
So, yes, Happy Pride! And, yas queen! fuck the patriarchy! in all of its toxic and death-bringing forms. May every brick we throw in our continued riots and revolts and revolutions be the building blocks for a new world – a world renewed by the nourishing reign of Reproductive Freedom and Justice, in which everyone has what they need to thrive and flourish and become the fullest versions of themselves they were born to become.
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*Note: an excerpt of this Spotlight is included in AMSA Reproductive Health Project eNews #21:
Pride Month Connections: God, Guns, Gays & Abortion, June 22, 2024
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