Beyond Carrots and Sticks: Effective Public Education and Feminist Research in Conservative States
This article is a response to Michele Bratcher Goodwin's
"Reproductive Carrots and Sticks" in this issue.
By serving up "carrots and sticks" alongside fertility cocktails in
her essay on artificial reproductive technologies, Michele Bratcher
Goodwin examines society's two main offerings to women who use drugs and
who become pregnant.[1]
As Goodwin makes clear with case studies and
legal analysis, policy makers and law enforcement officials too seldom
pass around any incentives or rewards for seeking prenatal care and
rehabilitation, opting instead to serve up plate after plate of
punishment for women whose pregnancy and drug use coincide. Goodwin
recognizes that the "stick effect" does not work and bemoans the fact
that there are so few carrots in the form of "treatment, education, and
support" for women who use drugs and who become pregnant. The answer is
to discipline, not punish, and to create the incentives and conditions
so that she learns to self-discipline on her own.[2]
"Enacting legislative policies that help women craft healthy prenatal choices is
an urgent carrot goal of which I am in favor," Goodwin
concludes.
One limit to the carrot and stick approach, however, is that it
implies that the individual pregnant woman is what needs to be fixed. It
too easily accommodates those who see a woman's prenatal decisions and
actions as the problem. From this perspective, it is the woman—not the
criminal justice system or an American economy heavily reliant on the
corrections industry—who needs rehabilitation. It is she—not a
media that produces sensationalist and inaccurate coverage of these
cases or the communities who champion such punitive attitudes toward
women—who needs education.
We share Goodwin's concerns about whose reproduction is valued and
the consequences of punitive measures. We would like to move the
discussion beyond documenting carrots and sticks, however, to consider
ways in which the legislation and court rulings she describes and the
contexts in which they take place can be challenged and changed. The
role that public education and feminist research can play in this is
huge, even in places often deemed by academics and others as
too conservative to contend with.
What does it mean when we mention, as Goodwin does in her essay, that
a particular reproductive injustice took place in Kentucky or South
Carolina? Too often (though not necessarily in Goodwin's case), this
implication summons unexamined stereotypes: name a state presumed to be
more rural than urban and it suggests backwards attitudes and practices.
Mentioning a southern state or rural area inevitably calls up easily
demonized and therefore under-examined dynamics of racism, poverty, and
patriarchy. Such places are written off by many scholars and activists
as far too entrenched in conservatism (or worse) to live there, study
there, or teach there, or try to change anything, least of all
reproductive injustices such as a lack of access to prenatal care and
drug treatment, coerced sterilizations, tight restrictions on access to
abortion, bans on fact-based and proven effective sexual education,
no-procreation orders, and, as Goodwin's essay attests, punishing and
prosecuting pregnant women with reinterpreted laws and judicial
redefinitions of child abuse/neglect and drug trafficking.
To be sure, such reproductive injustices do not occur evenly across the United
States, and "red" states see more of them. National Advocates for
Pregnant Women (NAPW) has documented hundreds of known cases in at least
forty states where pregnant women who are identified as drug users have
been arrested.[3]
Preliminary analysis provides empirical support for
Goodwin's claim that the brunt of the criminal justice system's
intrusions into women's pregnancies has been borne by low-income women
of color. Furthermore, more than 75% of the documented cases have taken place in
the South or the Midwest while fewer than 10% have taken place in the
Northeast.
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