Viewpoints: California’s Poor Women Overlooked in Progressive Agenda

As California closed the book on the
2013 legislative session, a popular notion took hold, here and across the
nation, that the Golden State is a pretty woman-friendly place. At a time when
many states are losing ground in reproductive rights and women’s health care
generally, California has passed legislation that increases abortion access,
repeals Targeted Regulation of Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws and improves pre-
and perinatal health care services. These are legitimate political gains, and
the advocates who achieved them should be proud.

But I worry that California
progressives are prematurely popping the champagne. Yes, several of our new
laws protecting women’s rights are forward-looking, but that’s only part of the
story being lived by women in our state. Look outside the official narrative of
“progressive California” and you’ll see a different story unfolding, one in
which the state can, and does, assert strict control over female bodies. But
because those bodies belong to the poor and disenfranchised, we don’t hear much
about it.

One piece of pro-woman legislation
that didn’t make it to the governor’s desk was Assembly Bill 271 aimed at
repealing the Maximum Family Grant rule for CalWORKs recipients. Under this
rule, CalWORKs families are ineligible for a benefits increase if a new child
is born when they’ve been on CalWORKs for 10 months. This can be devastating
for families barely making ends meet with a combination of low-wage jobs and
government assistance. In refusing to acknowledge new children born to
struggling families, CalWORKs as it’s currently administered can cause them to
slide even further into poverty.

That’s bad enough – penalizing poor
women for their reproductive choices – but it’s not the worst part of the Maximum
Family Grant Rule. The worst is the exceptions to the rule. Some CalWORKs
families may be eligible for additional assistance, but they must prove either
that they were using state-approved birth control (Norplant or IUDs), that the
mother was sterilized, or that the new pregnancy was the result of incest or
rape. Got that? Because these women are poor, the state reserves the right to
control their contraceptive choices and make their personal traumas a matter of
public record.

Evidence shows that such government
efforts to control poor women’s reproduction don’t actually result in those
women having fewer children. The decision to add to one’s family takes place in
an intersecting space of values, hopes, desires and even religious beliefs, a
private sphere where the state doesn’t hold much sway. What these reproductive
penalties do accomplish is to assure that children born to economically
insecure families will suffer all the social, educational and health
disadvantages of poverty.

Dubious as the CalWORKs policy is,
the state has something worse in store for California’s women inmates. In July,
the Center for Investigative Reporting broke a story about the surgical
sterilization of women in California prisons. The practice of coercing
prisoners into such procedures is illegal, and sterilizations that aren’t
medically necessary require high-level state approval. Nonetheless, from 2006
to 2010, about 150 sterilizations were performed without appropriate
authorization.

Legislators called for an immediate
review, but for many women the irrevocable damage had already been done.
Although the story caused a few news cycles’ worth of outrage this summer, it’s
since gone quiet. I have to assume that if illegal sterilizations had been
performed on middle-class women we’d still be hearing about them, and in fact
would never hear the end of it until the matter was resolved and restitution
was made.

The public’s appetite for grim
stories like these is limited. We have to be prodded into paying sustained
attention – that’s why we have political activists. If the sterilization story
slipped off the radar, and if the CalWORKs issue never quite broke through,
it’s in part because they didn’t get sufficient backing from professional
advocacy groups, the women’s advocates and other progressive types who work at
the Capitol to ensure their issues get due consideration by legislators and the
press.

It’s not that progressives don’t
care about prisoners or CalWORKs recipients. It’s that it is dangerously easy
to be lulled into thinking that matters affecting marginalized groups are
lower-stakes issues, which are somehow less relevant to the majority. Like so
many things in America, whether you benefit from progressive political reform
is often determined by economic class. I urge progressive activists to remember
that social “progress” that excludes the economically disadvantaged is
ultimately a hollow achievement. Next time we’re rallying or writing letters to
protect women’s right to control their bodies, let’s make sure all women’s
bodies are accounted for.

Camille Hayes, a Sacramento writer,
is a domestic violence advocate who works for the California Partnership to End
Domestic Violence. The views expressed here do not represent those of the
partnership or its member agencies. Read her blog, Lady Troubles, about
politics and women’s issues, at www.ladytroubles.com. Reach her at
chayes.bee@gmail.com.

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