Читать книгу The Movement for Reproductive Justice - Patricia Zavella - Страница 19

The Strong Families Network

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Founded in 2005, participants are careful to say the Strong Families Network is not a coalition. It was initially called an “initiative,” but eventually activists changed its name to a “network.” In an interview, Shen characterized the Strong Families Initiative as incorporating the movement’s three-pronged strategic approach: “Strong Families is a long-term initiative that is changing the ways we support a family, and for us a family is chosen or family of origin. And a strong family is one in which every member has the opportunity to thrive. So that means that we very much want to lift up the voices of those who can be more marginalized like women, girls, queer and trans folks. The core strategies that we use are movement building, policy change, and culture shift.” According to González-Rojas, “Strong Families Initiative is a ten-year initiative to change the way people think about and feel and experience families.”

The Strong Families Initiative was constructed organically out of EMERJ, Expanding the Movement for Empowerment and Reproductive Justice, led by Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, which had been active since 1989.52 Eveline Shen described the formation of Strong Families from EMERJ:

Through EMERJ we brought groups that have never worked together and work in different states over an eighteen-month period. Then we realized that we wanted to figure out where we could really align ourselves around policy. For the most part, groups across the country are doing work around their communities, but we wanted to figure out what kind of united work we could do.

We sat in a room for a few days in Oakland and mapped everything out, and what we came up with was the idea of families. Whether we were working on parental notification [of abortion], making sure that our youth have what they need, to banning of the shackling and taking advantage of women who are incarcerated and giving birth, to abortion access, to medication—everything. A lot that we worked on was tied to the notion that women are often the primary caretakers for the families. The connection that we have with each other—whether it is the chosen family or our family of origin—what gives us, as a human species, meaning to our lives. And so that is when the Strong Families Initiative was born, and we realized it’s not just within reproductive justice; it’s across the progressive movement.… So now Strong Families is the home for many organizations.

In 2018, there were over 220 partner organizations that had signed on as supporters of the Strong Families Network, which include those working on reproductive justice, immigrant rights, masculinity, tenants’ rights, farmworkers’ rights, and LGBTQ rights.53 A few organizations collaborated on specific projects (see later in this chapter).

While Forward Together is the lead organization for Strong Families Network, anchor organizations include CLRJ in Los Angeles, COLOR in Denver, WSC in Portland, and Strong Families New Mexico and YWU in Albuquerque.

The Strong Families Network directly contests the conservative ideology of strong family values discourse. According to the sociologist Judith Stacey, strong family values discourse was promulgated by an “interlocking network of scholarly and policy institutions, think tanks, and commissions [that] began mobilizing during the late 1980s to forge a national consensus on family values that rapidly shaped the family ideology and politics of the Clinton administration and his New Democratic party.”54 Teen pregnancy in particular received extraordinary public attention, and often it was assumed pregnant teens were young women of color. The women’s studies scholar Kimala Price clarifies, “By the early 1980s, the issue [teen pregnancy] entered the public consciousness and was placed on the national agenda along with other concerns such as crack-addicted mothers, drive-by shootings, and the failing educational system.”55 Prolife advocates viewed unplanned pregnancy as a lack of responsibility and control rather than contraceptive failure or lack of access to reproductive health care. By 2013, these supporters had formed the Traditional Values Coalition, which supports the “right to life” and “fidelity in marriage and abstinence before marriage,” while opposing “homosexuality, bi-sexuality, transgenderism and other deviant sexual behaviors [sic]” as well as pornography and addictive behaviors.56 These self-proclaimed warriors were “right-wing Republicans and/or fundamentalist Christians, overtly antifeminist, anti-homosexual, and politically reactionary.”57 The anthropologist Susan Greenbaum points out the political agenda of conservatives: “Family values, personal responsibility, the economic importance of marriage, the need to encourage work, and the diminution of the role of the welfare state, were prominent features of policy making and research.”58 This nostalgic ideology ignores structural and cultural changes going back to the 1950s, before the influences of the second-wave feminist and civil rights movements, which began transforming families in the United States.59 The proponents of strong family discourse turn a blind eye to the multiple experiences of family life, and often their critiques of low-income families of color are expressed through coded language like “social decay” or “disorganization,” ideas that circulate widely. Focus on the Family, for example, uses its nearly $90 million annual budget to deliver radio and other programs to an estimated audience of thirty-eight million listeners.60

The conservative views of families are belied by the twentieth-century discursive and material shifts that have led to the need for multiple contributors to household income. More than 50 percent of mothers with infants remain in the workforce, and 70 percent of US children live in households where all the adults are employed.61 The decline in social welfare benefits to single parents, overwhelmingly women, led by “welfare reform” under the Clinton administration, means that more women are entering the labor market or returning to school, managing child care and other responsibilities with members of their support networks.62 The marriage rate is the lowest ever, and the percentage of women who have children outside of wedlock has increased.63 Further, increased immigration has led to families whose members have different legal statuses—US citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary protected status, or unauthorized. Immigrant families often maintain strong ties to their home countries and reconstitute intimacy through technology such as Skype or FaceTime that facilitates transnational communication.64 And now that marriage equality is the law of the land, gay, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming families are gaining increased visibility as they juggle parenting, care for family members, and paid labor as they always have, though often through legal battles to have their families recognized.65

Reproductive justice advocates incorporate these many demographic, social, and legal changes into their representations of family and define their mission this way:

Strong Families is a home for the four out of five people in the United States who do not live behind the proverbial picket fence—whose lives fall outside the outdated notion that a family consists of a mom at home and a dad at work. While that life has never been the reality for most of our families, too many of the policies that affect us are based on this fantasy. From a lack of affordable childcare and afterschool programs, to immigration policy and marriage equality, the way we make policy and allocate resources needs to catch up to the way we live.66

Highlighting family diversity and place, Strong Families New Mexico states, “We recognize that families come in all shapes, sizes, and ages; biological and chosen; living in one household, many households, or across national borders; documented, undocumented, or mixed status; with children or without. And we pursue both culture shift and policy change to ensure that all families have what they need to survive and thrive in New Mexico, the land of enchantment.”67

The Strong Families Network has called for the right to comprehensive sex education and reproductive health care for adolescents, an exploration of sexual identities, recognition of diverse family formations among people of color, and a destigmatization and decriminalization of teenage parenthood. In an interview, Aimee Santos-Lyons, trainer and field coordinator for Western States Center, stated, “We brought people together to really challenge the discourse about strong family values directly: how do we build a progressive family values agenda? In that convening we developed guiding principles and a covenant among the organizations present to figure out how do we formulate our analysis and an agenda around this?”68

The Strong Families Network has three major goals: The first is to build movement infrastructure with a grassroots base of supporters through community organizing and developing organizational capacity. According to an interview with Adriann Barboa, executive director of Strong Families New Mexico, “The whole point of Strong Families is to see where there’s a critical mass of folks already doing work that is aligned. If they need it, how do we connect them, but also how do we leverage some resources? And issues of power for coordination or facilitation or technical assistance? How do we bring resources to that critical mass already moving in a direction to really leverage it for the most power and most impact it can have?” One of Strong Families’ reports, written with fourteen other organizations, fulfills this goal by presenting accessible information to help lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and trans people choose health-care plans.69 Another pamphlet, a collaborative effort between the Strong Families Initiative, CLRJ, and NLIRH, provides information about how to vote in Spanish.70 Second, Strong Families Network advocates policy changes that may be local, statewide, or national. At the national and state levels, they have been active in immigration reform and marriage equality, and at the local level, they were instrumental in helping defeat a proposed municipal ban on abortion after twenty weeks in Albuquerque.71 A third key component of the Strong Families Network is a critique of the discourse that stigmatizes or marginalizes people of color, undertaken through cultural shift work. Cultural shift work can be seen in representations about families, in specific projects that advocate for particular marginalized groups and recognize that structural vulnerabilities place families at risk in relation to state policies that target, harass, jail, deport, or criminalize low-income people of color.72

Ongoing cultural shift work can be seen in the “Mama’s Day Our Way” annual celebration of Mother’s Day, launched prior to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in favor of marriage equality. Mama’s Day Our Way includes a series of Mother’s Day cards and artwork (see plate 5). These representations recognize the beauty and diversity of families of color and disrupt heteronormativity and dominant notions of masculinity by pointing out that men, including gay men, also nurture their children. There is also a “Papa’s Day Our Way” project with artwork and cards representing diverse families. Mama’s Day Our Way also includes political slogans—for example, “The flowers are lovely, but I’d prefer a revolution” and “Love makes a family”—and an online blog where anyone can post a photograph and narrative about their family, contesting the commercialization of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. At the fundraiser at my house, Eveline Shen pointed out how heteronormative most Mother’s Day greeting cards can be, which made her feel like her own family was not included and provided the impetus for honoring families that are diverse by structure, race, and identity. In 2016 Strong Families partnered with the immigrant rights organizations CultureStrike, Present.org, and NWDC (a grassroots undocumented-led movement) and sent Mother’s Day cards to women in detention to help boost their morale after they staged a hunger strike to protest the conditions at detention centers.73 The Mama’s Day and Papa’s Day cards have been downloaded in countries across the globe. Cristina Aguilar recalled that COLOR held a successful fundraiser using the Mother’s Day cards: “People loved those cards! It’s just incredible the way their imagery matches the communication and how much they resonated for our communities to actually see themselves.”

The Strong Families Network is committed to creating the culture and conditions necessary for all families to thrive:

We respect the decision of young people who make the choice to parent, or not to parent, and work collaboratively to change policies that inhibit young parents and families from succeeding. Strong Families knows that young parents have experience and expertise in identifying solutions to the challenges facing their families, which is why the leadership of current and past young parents is a necessary component of any change strategy we move. From advocating for legislation at the state level to addressing problematic campaigns that shame young parents, the organizations and individuals involved in Strong Families [Initiative’s] Young Parent Cohort are sharing and aligning their work to make culture and policy that shifts away from the culture of stigmatizing young parents.74

The reproductive justice movement’s work of base building, policy change, and cultural shift about families came together in a recent election in Oregon. Western States Center had four organizations develop videos illustrating how families were being harmed by proposed ballot measures. According to Aimee Santos-Lyons, “These videos are very powerful with people telling their stories. One was saying her husband has been deported; she’s now raising four children on her own, and she was pregnant when she was put in jail. She says, ‘I understand why Strong Families is important. I understand why we need to be in solidarity with other organizations to build strong families. This election is going to be important because there are policies that matter.’” Strong Families New Mexico developed a Legislative Report Card that assessed eighteen pieces of legislation that would affect New Mexico families in 2014.75 According to Adriann Barboa, executive director of Strong Families New Mexico, “For me it means not grading individual legislators; we didn’t want to hurt relationships with legislators. We’re pushing people to think about multiple issues at the same time—immigration, education, and environmental justice. The criteria are the heart of what we’re trying to get at for community members and decision-makers. As we’re building criteria, make sure are we including families of all formations, and ask, Will this harm other communities? Are we decreasing barriers? Yes, accountability but how we’re measuring, not doing harm, and thinking positively.” In Oregon and New Mexico, reproductive justice organizations saw framing the diverse needs of families as integral to their work advocating and monitoring policy changes. The Strong Families Network has produced numerous voting guides for different states.76

I was surprised when I first learned about the Strong Families Initiative, which tackles a discourse promulgated by powerful organizations. Yet Corrine Rivera-Fowler, former deputy director of COLOR, addressed my concerns: “Our opposition is really organized and really well funded, and we know that. But we have power and strength and muscle and might in our numbers. And it takes many years of organizing to change our public policies. But I know that we can do it together in unity.” The notion of directly challenging powerful discourses also includes the cultural politics related to teen pregnancy prevention.

The Movement for Reproductive Justice

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