Hi everyone, this is Aida from Fasleh podcast by the A Project.

Today we have Rima, Zeina, Mona and Leila and we will be talking about reproductive justice. We just got back from a reading retreat on reproductive justice and that’s why we’d like to discuss it.

At the same time, we believe that this concept is not discussed or addressed much in our region and so we’d like to start by defining it.

Can you explain what reproductive justice means? And how do we differentiate it from reproductive rights?

 

Zeina: From what I know, Sister Song and another movement called Forward Together came up with the concept.

After that, the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) took place in Cairo in 1994.

 

Leila: Oh no they definitely didn’t discuss reproductive justice in Cairo, they didn’t even get to that point.

The thing is, prior to ICPD, a lot of discussions happened in the US about the right to abortion. And most of the advocacy for that was being done by feminists or women working on issues related to women’s rights who were mainly white and talking about the right to abortion in the legal sense to change the law since it was criminalized at the time and they wanted to legalize it.

But at the same time, women of color in the US were saying they did not have the problem of the right to abortion but that they were subjected to the opposite whereby they and their communities were forced to undergo abortions against their will.

On top of that, they were also subjected to forced sterilization whereby a woman would supposedly go to get a surgery and finds they have cut her Fallopian tubes in the process.

So they were objecting to the way the white women were talking about reproductive rights.

In their words: “we do want the right to abortion but we don’t want to only focus on that, especially that the tools you’re using for your demands are the same tools used against us”.

And so these talks have been happening since the times of slavery in the US. At the time, a lot of women were the subjects of medical and scientific experiments for medical discoveries related to how a C section happens or vaginal reconstruction surgeries.

Today we know all about these operations because they were tested on women of color who used to work for the white women; well not really work for them but they were more like slaves.

And so these black women were not part of the conference but were in an entirely different place in all of this conversation.

And there was a hype about the conference given that the topic of abortion was brought up. Which is true, but then again the issue was dropped and not addressed properly.

And eventually the conference reached the conclusion of most of the participants: most countries including the ones in our region and the ones where Catholicism prevailed were also against abortion. And this was what they agreed on: in countries where abortion is legal or not criminalized, it should be safe. As if they meant to say that in countries where abortion is illegal/criminalized, it should not or does not need to be safe; as a way of denying that abortion takes place in all other countries where it’s illegal.

So Sister Song, which is a group that was formed in a conference in Chicago around the topic of abortion by women of color in the US, came together to stand against some of the things proposed in the ICPD which were completely detached from their reality. And that’s how they reached the concept of reproductive justice.

The conversation was about abortion but at the same time not really, in terms of choosing to focus on factors in their lives such as the higher rate of poverty and violence among their communities and neighborhoods, and the lack of social services like healthcare and proper education.

All these things make their communities vulnerable, thus we want to talk about reproductive justice beyond reproductive health, and we want to focus on a more encompassing or overarching notion of justice that takes into consideration race, class and intimate relationships whether queer or not, as well as people with fertility problems.

Hence, those women broadened the definition and it wasn’t just a matter of rights anymore. In fact, Sister Song had been working long before they became official in the 80s. And there was also Forward Together which was a group that included Asian Americans, Latinas, and Arabs.

 

Aida: It’s still not very clear to me. I get why we are talking about reproductive justice but how is it different from reproductive rights? Why not use a rights discourse? Why not talk about a woman’s right to have an abortion or not to have one? How do we differentiate between justice and rights?

 

Zeina: It’s very easy to acknowledge a right, but very difficult to practically implement it. And I think that’s the difference between justice and rights.

For example, Lebanon has signed and ratified several treaties vowing to protect citizens’ rights. But in reality none of it is implemented since there is no infrastructure to guarantee the fulfillment of those rights.

 

Mona: To build on Zeina’s point, let’s consider when and how the human rights discourse first began and if we want to make it our starting point in this conversation, as in the supposed premise that everyone has rights they were born with that no one can take away when at the same time we address governments and states and ask them to give us our rights.

The framework and discourse of human rights started with the holocaust that targeted jews and other groups such as homosexual and queer people, in addition to people with disabilities whose bodies were not viewed as “productive”.

That happened in Europe. But this does not mean that that was the only moment in history where such violence and genocide were perpetrated. Genocides had happened over the centuries and years but mostly in countries in the global south and targeted darker-skinned people.

That historical moment in Europe led the big governments, as in the colonial states -and some of this colonization is still in place to this day- to meet and decide that no one has the right to take other people’s lives or their right to move or to imprison them or force them to do anything against their will.

This only happened when such a tragedy took place in Europe and in specific political conditions. Hence, the framework of human rights is rooted in that time and place and is also strongly tied to the rise of the nation state. So adopting this framework would limit us to the notion of citizenship in a way, given this connection.

And so when we demand justice, we do not envision a justice that is only for citizens or the people with certain identification documents proving their belonging to this nation state.

There are many different contexts and scenarios where people do not have identification documents in the first place. Some people have papers that do not grant them the same access to those rights as others.

So when we say human rights, we’re effectively referring to the rights of citizens. And even among citizens, there are second and third class citizens depending on certain factors and on the laws of the country.

If we take Lebanon as example, we can’t consider that Lebanese women have the same rights as Lebanese men. And here we haven’t even talked about people with non-conforming gender expressions. From that end, when we think of justice we find that it is much more than rights.

Someone said off the air that justice is something we can get retroactively, which refers to past atrocities and massacres committed and means that we can make up for the people who were targeted or affected.

However, when we talk about rights we are talking about the present moment and not about the things we experience in our lives and in our bigger collective memory which encompass all of our communities and all power dynamics.

Thirdly, the concept of reproductive justice and the term started with Sister Song and we took it from the English language. It combines the concept of reproduction and the concept of procreation.

And from that perspective, we can think of reproductive justice as not constricted to sexuality and procreation, but also related to reproducing the workforce, the people, and the “good citizen”.

So perhaps it would be a good idea to come up with an equivalent term in Arabic to encompass all those different layers of this.

 

Leila: To build on Mona’s point, a lot of conferences sometimes come up with propositions. For example, they specify what are reproductive rights, what are sexual rights, refugee rights, environmental rights etc.

This categorization and separation is scary. For example, some people consider that human rights are actually their rights as citizens.

But at the same time, if you read refugee rights you will just find them written and of course a lot of advances have to happen and many things need to be introduced in that regard.

The point is, when rights are read and thought of as separate from one another, it is quite  easy to forget the others on the list as if it’s not necessary to even think about them. So you start thinking of reproductive rights loosely as if they do not have an actual place in our reality.

And I think that’s what has bothered women who worked on reproductive justice in the US, because it doesn’t make sense to talk about it as if it will be practiced and implemented the same way everywhere.

Like when a new list of rights that we supposedly have is decided and spread out there. We say that we demand rights but when they tell you not to because you already have rights, well then how should I not demand them? And when do I actually get them? I shouldn't have to demand something that supposedly already I have and that is not separate from other rights.

It’s as if we’re playing a trick on each other with legal terms without our rights being legalized, like the UN language. And as if Santa Claus is throwing rights left and right but I can’t seem to find the gifts.

This whole thing is weird. So the idea of justice makes more sense than rights.

Even when I imagine rights, they don’t look good because they are separated and I cannot think of one group of rights existing on their own. I can imagine them on people with bodies in communities, but I cannot imagine them alone as their own thing.

Justice has a story and a narrative to tell, and that’s why it makes more sense to me.

 

Zeina: When I think of reproductive justice I remember the moment of October 17 when we were trying to change a system and build something new. People who were down in the streets wanted to change the system.

So reproductive justice is rooted deep down, while rights are floating on the surface. You can sell the idea of rights to people, but the point is justice takes an accumulation of work over time whereas you can keep saying everyday that you have rights even if you don’t have them.

In contrast, justice is when we plant something deep down that is rooted and grounded and that you can see grow by the day.

 

Aida: Rima and Leila, you both worked on preparing the reading retreat on reproductive justice.

Can you tell us why you decided to take a model based in the US to discuss here in Lebanon? Why did you feel you could talk about a foreign concept? Given that, as mentioned earlier, it is not something tackled much in our region by feminist groups and women’s rights organizations since the focus is usually on rights.

 

Rima: To me, the concept has never been irrelevant to our reality. Even though the movements and work around it started in the US and the West, such movements exist all around the world today. And that’s why we found it convenient to bring up here in order to build a movement that would include more people and various causes specific to our context.

Because indeed reproductive justice is entrenched in all aspects of our lives, whether in family planning or women’s rights or raising children or access to services for sexual and reproductive health, how you raise your kids, the options available to you for education and work etc.

So the concept is broader and includes many causes which we may see as separate and unrelated.

And so the way we imagine such a new movement is through including more people and giving a different discourse and form to the ways we organize for these issues more effectively. And also in a way that does not separate the issues from one another as Leila was saying.

We are used to seeing these causes as separate and out of their respective contexts, and perhaps we are guilty of joining the wagon of campaigns and hypes without thinking.

But justice keeps the bigger picture in front of us as well as the historical context, so that in the future we can build for the kind of society and conditions we aim to live in, including the kinds of families we want to have and what that means to each of us, and whether or not that fits the conventional image or idea of a family.

 

Leila: I also think that the situation is catastrophic in Lebanon. There are a lot of non-governmental  organizations (NGOs) and each one works on a specific issue or cause. For example, you guys at the A Project work on sexual and reproductive health, on gender and reproductive justice, and on health as a right for everyone. But at the same time you also address the related economic aspect and the racism and classism prevalent in the country.

We saw many other interesting things at the retreat. For example, one participant shared insights about her work in urban planning and explained how it affects housing, the environment, and safety depending on how the streets are designed and how the lights are spread and spaced out; all in addition to the harm that women and feminine individuals are subjected to in public and the fear instilled in them as a result.

So in this way, urban planning is very related to justice and protection and bringing up children in a healthy place.

There is a lot of work being done for rights in Lebanon and a lot of NGOs, and a lot of political parties built on a bloody history as well as on sectarianism and racism.

So what does that leave for the kind of work we believe in and that combines the aspects important to us, as opposed to organizing that focuses on one single topic or issue away from the history of harm that this causes?

My point is this is not so much an area for organizing as much as it is a concept for organizing that we aim to introduce or present as an NGO that perhaps should not be involved in organizing that way.

But what we do want to do is present a concept. And as politically and socially active people, we can take that concept and widen it in our politically organized space.

Especially with the geopolitics of Lebanon, a country that has one of the highest numbers of refugees and migrants in the world, and a country very complex in terms of the patriotism and citizenship that is promoted and who gets to have rights.

We believe that people shouldn’t die at the borders just because they don’t have the right to cross a distance from one border to another because of their papers or lack thereof. And reproductive justice as a concept has an important place and role to play in the fight against borders.

 

Zeina: Perhaps social justice is not only tied to NGOs that preach feminism and women’s rights, but something broader than me considering myself a feminist struggling for reproductive justice which is not tied to certain people in the NGO sector or in certain activist or organized spaces.

For example in 2015 when people took to the streets to protest the garbage crisis, they did not do that as feminists of NGOs fighting for the rights of marginalized groups, but as people protesting an an environmental crisis affecting them.

And if we want to look at this from a reproductive justice lens, you’ll find it is indeed related since environmental problems primarily affect women and the families making up the society we live in.

 

Leila: One of the readings from the retreat interestingly mentioned that the mother is the first environment a person experiences. Well we know that it doesn’t necessarily refer to a mother/woman since trans people also have a uterus and can be that first environment.

Hence, what happens to my body affects the development and health of the family and the children, and my own health.

And that’s what we saw in the reading retreat as well as in the 2015 environmental crisis and protest movement, and that’s why people in Naameh and Jiyeh were constantly talking about cancers in those areas that are systematically impoverished.

People there are outside the city and rely on transportation to get to their jobs there, and of course salaries are not enough to afford the expensive life in the country.

On top of that, garbage is dumped in their areas, the water they drink is intoxicated, so is the food grown in their lands, and the kids play on intoxicated ground.

And when a disease breaks out, the healthcare system is not designed to provide and accommodate for everyone, and it is extremely expensive and elitist when so many people die just because they cannot afford it.

So taking into consideration how all of these things are intertwined, the same person harming us in one aspect adds to the harm from another aspect. And so what is needed is systemic change.

 

Aida: You talked about the level of border and environment as two places where the absence of reproductive justice is clear. Can you tell us more about the other levels where that absence is clear and where you believe work should be done?

 

Mona: I will repeat some of the things said earlier and try to think of the different levels, going back to the point about right.

Another fallacy about the idea or concept of rights and how they become separated in Arabic is when we think of the legal system. For example, when we think of the “right word” we’d be referring to the truth, and hence we’d be thinking of something completely different from rights as access to a certain legal structure that grants us things we are supposed to have.

So this framing of how we get the right to move or to a nationality or any right we want, serves to create a separation of rights from one another.

Systems in the structural sense, beyond the state or the ruling party in a country, but rather the bigger power structures such as capitalism and the patriarchy, all work together to separate and disperse our causes and struggles in specific ways that frame our thinking for the solution; such as limiting it to merely a legal change that grants someone a right.

And when they do that separation, it is not really arbitrary. Because we organize ourselves in different fields. Someone can be a women’s rights activist, someone else an anti-racist activist, another can be an activist against borders, and another an activist against the death penalty or the whole prison complex.

Their activisms are separated even though the causes are just, and the reason they are separated is not arbitrary, similar to the context we live in. Because these systems, whether on the small scale such as the state or the ruling party or on the bigger scale like capitalism and the patriarchy or the system discriminating on the basis of bodily abilities, cause this segregation and separation of struggles to prevent us from reaching a comprehensive solution.

Put simply, this kind of segregated activism does not change our lives radically and systematically.

So the reason a Lebanese woman cannot pass on her citizenship to her children is the same reason why she cannot get custody after a divorce nor get an abortion. And it’s the same reason why trans people cannot have their gender identity on paper. Because of this control over our bodies in a way to ensure reproduction, whether by procreation or by reproducing and reinforcing the notion of the nation state and the system and the family and the people.

All of this happens through our bodies and through a very important job which is the reproductive function. People who have a uterus are the ones paying the biggest share of the price, in addition to people who are not in normative relationships as in compulsory heterosexuality such as a relationship between a man and a woman who then form a family.

And so all the reasons standing against justice for Lebanese women in terms of not passing on her citizenship or getting custody over her children or getting a civil marriage or an abortion, are the same reasons preventing refugee women from accessing work and healthcare. And they are the same reasons why divorce is not allowed, and why queer and non-normative/non-conforming people are denied identification documents that would make their lives easier.

And also the same reasons preventing Palestinian women in the occupied Palestinian territories from getting married just because she can’t choose her partner which goes in a cultural direction that denies her that kind of access to such decisions.

While in reality, there is a reproduction of the state that is denying her these rights, for the purpose of controlling the population: their number, the way they look, their color, their religion, and sexual practices.

To give another example, when we think of a woman’s right (in Arabic the term is “woman’s rights” as if there is only one woman) to work in a prison -a domain that is not typically feminine- from a right perspective, she has the right to do that.

However, if we think about it from the perspective of reproductive justice, we’d think of the actual function and purpose of the prison complex. And that function and purpose are to punish and oppress not only the bodies of the prisoners behind bars, but also their families in the outside world.

With regards to men in jail, the women in their families usually pay the price of their imprisonment in terms of emotional labor and reproduction and all kinds of other ways.

Hence, all of these things are intertwined and intersect with one another.

 

Leila: Speaking of Palestinian women, we read in the retreat that they cannot marry someone from a different area because of the borders and the way the occupation does not allow people to move freely between areas. Such as in Jerusalem’s designated areas A, B and C.

So theoretically, a Palestinian woman from Jerusalem can choose her partner since no one is forcing her to choose someone else. But if she does choose a partner from the wrong area, as in an area other than hers as designated by the occupation, then their children would be paperless without identification documents.

Thus, thinking about this from the perspective of rights is limiting because it does not show us the bigger context, as Leila was saying.

We do not exist in a vacuum, so it’s a shame to demand certain things that completely erase the existence of others who are could be suffering even more and in other ways.

 

For example if we think of sexual rights, they always tell us you have the right to choose your partner. But most of the time queer and homosexual people can’t do that if their gender identity does not match the sex they were born with on paper.

But in this specific example, the 2 people are in fact in a heterosexual relationship, so it’s all complicated as if the dynamics on this are made to be liberal only to think of them as purely sexual rights but not politically or socially.

In Lebanon for example, it has always been a problem generally when someone chooses to marry a partner from a different sect than theirs.

In that sense, we don’t give enough weight or consideration to what racist and classist values are being reproduced or to how this serves to reinforce the occupation beyond just reinforcing the values of oppressive regimes.

Lastly, there are also things related to love and reproductive justice

 

Mona: Quickly building on one of the points, generally sometimes when talking about reproductive justice there is a fallacy of assuming that we mean procreation and a woman’s ability to give birth, and whether or not she wants to be a mother. But in fact the concept is much broader.

At the same time, when talking about justice from a queer perspective or the way that queer movements envision it, there is a fallacy of assuming this is relevant only to gender non-conforming people and people with non-normative sexualities.

And I feel that it is also related to the way we organize ourselves in terms of our alliances and how we support and stand in solidarity with each other; as if I just support my friend’s cause without necessarily caring about it or being personally connected to it, and vice versa.

On the other hand, reproductive justice the way I discovered it through the A Project, helped me understand a lot of things on the personal and organizing levels when I was asking myself if I was interested in fighting racism, migration issues, feminist issues and women’s rights.

Framing all those issues and causes in a reproductive justice framework combines them all together in the ways they intersect, and also challenges the assumption that we should be organizing separately in different specializations.

And it also serves to remind us that we work on all these different issues not just to support each other’s causes, but rather because they all intersect at the end of the day and stem from our labor and our supposed productive job whether in procreation or otherwise.

For example, when we organize for the issue of migrant domestic workers under the Kafala (sponsorship) system in Lebanon when we are not ourselves migrant domestic workers suffering from it, it’s not because we just want to support them in their cause but because we have this collective consciousness and awareness about how the organization of the state and the economy, among other things, are built and based on this domestic labor that concerns and affects all of us.

This does not mean that we're coopting or taking away their lived experiences that we do not go through, but rather that we want to be part of those causes and struggles because it’s more effective and more serious when w join efforts.

 

Zeina: I agree. After the reading retreat, my thought process about the rights discourse and how we approach them have changed. I did use to see them as specialties in a activism.

For example if I want to fight early marriage of young girls and lobby for a law to specify the age of marriage, I’d be taking into consideration reproductive justice aspect in the way that I want to lobby for police change.

And so as Mona was saying, it’s not about specializing in one cause out of all the causes, but rather about making sustainable policy changes and changing our approaches to things.

There was also another thing we read about capitalism which I think has the most influence over reproductive justice because it’s quite vicious as a system with all its politics and policies.

It only cares about profits. Humanity, women and children don’t matter under it.

 

Leila: They matter if they can work to make profit.

 

Zeina: So capitalism is kind of double-faced. Take surrogacy as an example: in some place capitalism would make this banned, and in others it would promote it because it generates profits like in experiments that lead to more productivity in some markets.

So if I’m working for reproductive justice, I’m also working against the system of capitalism which oppresses people and only views them as production machines.

 

Rima: I want to add to Zeina’s point on big systems and structure that define our freedoms and racial systems that racializes certain people and their choice.

Speaking of capitalism, it’s very important to think of reproduction beyond procreation but rather as an entire process of reproducing and reinforcing the big machine making money and generating profits.

Because in such a process, the point is that we reproduce people of certain social groups who are forced to work in order to survive, and as a result forced to be part of this system.

Hence, everything is organized and put together for the purpose of reproducing this kind of family of two straight people with kids. And of course, their kids are supposed to be healthy so that they in turn can later take part in this capitalist reproductive process, because only these people can be fully part of it.

And in this system they are viewed as resource to exploit in order to produce something through them. While on the other hand, certain other people are considered to be a burden like disabled people and people with different bodily abilities.

And we as a society don’t encourage them the same way to have families and get the best healthcare and education in order to have the same capacity like everyone else to form these families that we promote and care so much about whether religiously, politically or economically.

Similarly, people with chronic illnesses face a stigma, like people with AIDS. Many people are forced to become sterilized or given contraception against their will in order not have children.

Hence, it becomes clear who is desired in the nation state that Mona talked about, and who should keep getting reproduced in order to meet the state’s priorities and policies demographically for example or like the case of the occupation in Palestine.

It’s also clear who are the people that we want to keep telling ‘you have rights that you were born with by virtue of being a human like everyone else and no one has the right to take them away from you”.

But in reality, the policies and obstacles facing them ensure they don’t have the same ability.

Even the environment’s role is not just restricted to diseases, but also affects fertility and causes problems in that. For example, native  American in the US are constantly targeted by policies of enforced sterilization or through polluting their lands, or by taking their children away from them so that they would be raised to certain values and language in order to fit this system that the people in power have in place.

And so all of these fit under the umbrella of reproductive justice.

 

Leila: To add to what Rima said, and address Zeina’s point on surrogacy and the double-face of capitalism, it’s actually the other way around: wherever there is profit to be made, capitalism is okay with whatever it is.

But in many places capitalism is not operating on its own. The demographic ends and values that the state wants also play a role in deciding and specifying which kids are desirable.

A lot of surrogacy examples that we read entail people being born without papers or documents because of the laws of the countries where they are supposed to be taken and raised.

A lot of people from the global north go to countries in the global south to find a surrogate because it’s much cheaper there. They would have to pay between 45-70k USD in the US, whereas in India for example they would pay only 2-3k USD.

Not to mention the many many problems that arise when twins are born and one of them is deformed or born with a disability. The parents would take the “healthy” baby and leave the other one to the surrogate who now has a white baby that is not hers, when supposedly this was meant to be a paid job as agreed with the parents; with no means to protect her nor to allow her to leave the baby or to force them to take it back with them.

And there were many other examples of worse complications like when a baby is born after the parents get separated or divorced, and neither of them want it anymore.

Thus there need to be policies put in place to protect the women who work in this, just like we demand protection in sex work since we know a lot of harm is caused in it.

And so we need to be aware of all this before the damage gets done, so that we can see the complications on different levels and try to prevent any harm.

But the problem here is not that capitalism does not favor surrogacy, but rather that it complicates the children that will come to this world and “whatever is going on with women and do we even want our women to have other people’s babies inside of them, no we want our women to have the children of our nation and homeland”.

In addition, referring to women as citizens reproduces the idea of the homeland and so being a surrogate mother as a job will be frowned upon and rejected because it is deemed the natural job of the woman and not something she should be paid or compensated to do.

Thus, this concept under the patriarchy is also a bigger concept under capitalism and more complicated. So, the surrogate mother loses something and profit is made elsewhere by someone else as a result.

And so the issue of surrogacy is not alone in vacuum without context, but rather it is very contextualized in and through the bodies of women who are giving birth to other people’d children.

As people invested in what happens to these women, do we also think whether people who can’t have babies are able to make use of medical advances? Or whether queer people who can’t have children are able to work with a surrogate mother and top pay fairly? And wether they can continue treatment in case of any complications from birth? Since delivery can cause serious issues.

So all these things should be taken into consideration when we are thinking of way to make use of medical advances and technology,

Especially when it comes to sex and sexuality and reproduction.

But then again this is our perspective which the state does not share because it doesn’t see that sometimes this is something favored by people and other time it is not.

 

Zeina: How do you think reproductive justice can be achieved? I thought about this after I’ve read about it and became more aware. How do we build a movement for reproductive justice?

I concluded that justice is quite relative from one country to another. For example in Lebanon, I would need to wait for generations to come before we reach justice.

 

Leila: What do you mean when you say it differs from one country to another?

 

Zeina: I mean that as someone living in Lebanon, I don’t have the most basics in order to reach reproductive justice.

 

Leila: I get your point but I don’t think the issue is complicated or deep. On the contrary, I think that the concept rights are harder to grasp. As in if I talk to people who are not politically or socially active, I think they won’t be responsive to rights issues like we do.

And while I wasn’t raised in a village, I either understand what the person is saying or I figure out that they’re making it up. For example, to me the issue with rights is a made up trick, and it’s true that we’re talking about reproductive justice but we also tackle other forms of justice and connect them to one another.

And on the contrary, it’s like you said. The demands of the people who protested in 2015 were related to reproductive justice without calling it that, and in fact such demands are never called that. We don’t really care about the term used. What’s nice is that people working in different fields are thinking about this issue because they’ve become aware of it.

And the work or struggle for reproductive justice is not elitist since the people that conceptualized it were not academics or coming from rich backgrounds. Rather, they were people from poor neighborhoods and with difficult histories since the times of their ancestors. And if you ask them, they don’t feel they can achieve reproductive justice anytime soon. It’s the contrary, they planted the seed for this some 50 or 60 or 70 years ago and they still haven’t seen concrete results yet.so the infrastructure for justice, or lack there of, is connected to other things but this doesn’t mean we can’t want and demand everything all together at once.

So we wouldn’t say “yeah let’s get electricity 24/24 then we’;; discuss whether it’s right or wrong to forcibly sterilize women”. I can’t say that such a basic demand for electricity is more important than talking about the problem of making women unable to have children for the rest of their lives and taking away their bodily autonomy, or than having laws that effectively protect women and punish rape. I do believe electricity is important but I don’t think any of these is more important than the rest, and I see all of them connected and tied to one another.

And so because this demand is stemming from a very real place, we are not calling for something difficult to attain but something that makes sense. But we want all our demands to be met at once. So yeah it’s not light.

 

Mona: I was going to say the same as Leila, we want everything at once. And I feel this is at least a way of organizing in order to work and continue.

My mom always tells me she is apolitical and dislikes politics, and we always argue about that. Because to her, politics is ugly and all about control and power, and not about the things we live and go through. So when I talk to her about right, she feels like she is living on a different planet.

But I feel that the concept if justice has more potential to reach people, which is not the case now in what is imposed on us through the elitist concept of rights and the assumption that you have to be specialized in a certain field, which is quite prevalent in civicl society and organizations.

So the idea of justice can reach many more people and get them to come together, and it doesn’t bother with a facade that alienates them nor doe sit require previous knowledge to fight for it. So as Leila said, we reach reproductive justice by demanding everything at once, and by not  succumbing to any unnecessary compromising on anything like is the usual case with prioritizing things at the expense of others in political organizing.

These demand should be in all of the movements we’re part of, and we should be wary of yang things like “it’s none of your business go back to your country if you’re not happy with the situation” when fighting for something like the Lebanese woman’s right to pass the citizenship to  her children. And even if the connection is not clear in our heads and we don’t quite understand what we’re doing here, we do know that our presence is crucial in any context where we can work; if not physically or materially the at least our demands should be out there.

Historically for example, lesbian women have contributed heavily to the movement for abortion even though they were not necessarily gong to benefit from it as they are not going to get pregnant through their relationships. And they did that because they saw the connection of that demand to their own liberation. So at some point they were excluded and let go in different parts of the world.

So we should stop thinking of rights as specific to social groups, whether queer people or refugees etc., It’s true that each of those struggles has its own context and circumstances, but we should be keen on rallying ourselves and others at the core of these causes and on admitting and acknowledging their legitimacy and rightfulness, and on making sure they are represented and out on the table in all movements we are part of, and not be ashamed of it. Because we get frustrated when we’re told we’re asking for too much, when in fact this is not a side talk nor do we remember other struggles out of the blue. So we shouldn’t be sorry for all our demands, otherwise it would be scary.

 

Aida: thank you so much for the great and rich discussion. We always learn a lot of each other on  the Fasleh podcast.

This podcast was brought to you by thunder since it was raining.

Our guests were Rima, Zeina, Mona, and Leila.

Thank you for tuning in.