Reproductive Justice Across Generations

My name is Maya. I am a queer, South Indian American, cis-passing, gender-fluid femme. I'm originally from Detroit, but have been based in New York City for many years, as well as Mexico City and London. I'm currently mostly based in Johannesburg, South Africa. I'm a community organizer and activist, a musician, and an artist, and currently a researcher working on a project on queer South Asian leftist organizing and activism in the diaspora, particularly in spaces of multiracial solidarity work. I share this story as someone who has been involved with and cares deeply about reproductive justice work for a long time. Being steeped in that tradition through my family and community for my whole life, it felt important to share some of this story, particularly with the overturn of Roe V Wade, alongside the longterm and general erosion of reproductive justice rights, especially for working class black and brown folks in parts of the U.S..  

My parents are both doctors and my grandparents were involved in medicine as well. One of the things that really oriented my framework around reproductive justice was my parents’ and grandparents’ lived experiences of working with people with pregnancies, and providing options for them to choose the best situation based on their moment in their lives. My mother was always really clear about talking to me about the accessibility of abortion and other reproductive care in the South of India where she grew up, and her grandmother also provided that sort of training. My mother was also really explicit with me that my grandmother had an abortion after my mom was born and before my mom's younger sibling was born. It was really impactful for me that she described that without any sort of moral or values judgment related to it, and that's the way that my grandmother talked about it as well. They were both really frank that that wasn't the moment for my grandmother herself to have a child, that wasn't what was right for her or their family. She had an abortion, and it was not a big deal. 

My mother also told me about how this sort of care would be accessible for the patients that she saw and the patients that my grandparents saw without even necessarily using the word “abortion”. If people with uteruses were late with their menstruation, they could undergo a procedure which was actually called a “menstrual regulation procedure”. Of course, in India, there are complications with regards to that sort of abortion access. Sometimes it has been used for femicide or female infanticide in the womb, because people don't want assigned female at birth children. At times it's also been a method of population control that has been casteist and Islamophobic. Those are critical complications for us to keep in mind when we're considering South Asian American work for reproductive justice. But I do think that the legacy of orienting the conversation around reproductive justice as a question of care and a question of economic dignity, as opposed to a question of morality, is really important. 

This also showed up in my own life. I am a queer person who dates people of all genders. In the past years, I had primarily been dating women and non-binary folks, folks with whom, for me, the possibility of getting pregnant wasn't possible, so it was something that I hadn't been thinking about for a while. But more recently I have been dating somebody with whom that was a possibility. And although we took multiple precautions, I ended up getting pregnant. It’s important to note that I've been lucky to have access to birth control most of my life, thanks to healthcare. But I went off of birth control while dating my ex-girlfriend because of the impact that it was having on my mental health, in terms of triggering heightened depressive episodes and other complications. I had also lost my healthcare for a variety of reasons to do with employment, which finalized my decision to go off of birth control. 

Given all this, when I found out that I was pregnant while dating my current partner, I was shocked. But it was clear to me what I needed to do. I knew that that wasn't the right moment for me to raise a child. I was in the UK at the time and I was able to call a hotline to inquire about abortion methods. This was during the lockdowns in 2020, and they just asked me some questions about myself and mailed Misoprostol and Mifepristone to me at my address, no questions asked. There was no fee associated: it was completely free and I wasn’t even required to share my NHS (national healthcare) number. I took the pills in the comfort of my own home and was lucky to have a system of support around me. I was really terrified about the possibility of having to go in in-person to receive care; I'm high-risk for COVID and I was really, really scared about having to be in a potentially dangerous place for me during the middle of COVID surges. So it was such an incredible relief to have access to just reproductive care. At the same time, I felt so angry that that isn't the case in the U.S. and in many of the places that I've lived. After I took the pills, the nurses checked in with me over phone. It was a painful process, but emotionally I felt really clear that I had made the right decision for myself and for my community. This is the type of just health care that all people should have access to.  

Prior to dating my ex-girlfriend, I had been in an abusive relationship for four years with someone with whom it would've been possible for me to get pregnant. Knowing that I could have access to reproductive justice, including an abortion, if I needed it was so important because I felt really confident that if I did fall pregnant and didn't have access to that, that would trap me in an abusive relationship. I never reached that point where I had to make that decision, but it was always something that I felt really clear about and felt was really critical to my safety as a person in an abusive relationship.

In all these ways, abortion access has played a large part in my life over a long time. As a baby activist, I spent some time campaigning and doing grassroots work with Planned Parenthood. It's been really beautiful that I've been raised in understanding of my South Indian culture that has not imbued reproductive justice choices with moral questions. Instead, it's been about health and economic dignity. In this country, we have much to learn from the organizing of Black and Latina and indigenous feminists around similar questions. Bringing along the history of reproductive justice that some of us have encountered in South Asia alongside that is really powerful for locating our organizing for rights and dignity for all people, regardless of whether we might have uteruses or not.