Dear little Lucy,
You are ten years old now, still secretly sleeping with your stuffed animals, but at the same time starting to wake up and worry about the realities of the world. I know you feel so grown up right now, but also so scared and small in the chaos that surrounds you. You have so many questions right now about what it means to be the perfect feminist. I hate to break it to you, but we are still figuring out what feminism means. We have done so much learning to help us understand some ideas, but at the same time everything seems more blurred and complex than ever.
You know when people ask you what you’re going to name your assumed future kids or how many babies you are going to have, even though you are only ten years old and don’t even think you want to have kids because you like to be in control? Well, these questions and this pressure is because right now you are an able-bodied little white girl who is a people pleaser, athletic, and does well in school. This assumed destiny of your uterus is because right now you are ‘desirable traits’, you are ‘Canadian’ whiteness and your genes are gold. This pressure is not applied to other bodies of colour, of disability, of queerness because as you are subconsciously being taught right now, they are not desirable to our “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” run world (hooks, 2012, p.27). This idea of who should have children is called eugenics and is the system in which certain bodies deemed to have ‘desirable traits’ are encouraged to reproduce and bodies that do not ‘fit’ are not and can be prevented from doing so (Wilson).
You recently have learned that being pro-choice is like the answer to feminism and the key to being a good feminist. Perhaps, like many things little Lucy, pro-choice is much more complex than that. Reproductive justice fights have been steeped in reproductive violence (Davis). The pro-choice discourse which implies that you should have kids has also been employed to say that racialized, disabled bodies, should not have kids and utilize eugenicist justification so they cannot. One horrifying example that is still happening today is the forced sterilization of Indigenous women (Rao, 2019). Little Lucy, Indigenous women are being coerced into having procedures that make them unable to have kids, ever. The sterilization of Indigenous women has been justified by eugenicist-based thinking which implies that stopping Indigenous births will solve poverty and will essentially cost the government less money in the long run (Rao, 2019). They are saying that Indigenous bodies are ‘undesirable traits’ by equating their existence to being a money pit and in doing so completely absolve that we live in a country founded on the genocide of these bodies (Rao, 2019). I know it is hard to comprehend that the discourse of pro-choice you cling to so fervently as the golden answer has and continues to cause so much harm.
I hope that you can take this information and change the way you frame your argument. Perhaps we need to shift to thinking that pro-choice does not just mean safe abortion, but also means safe pregnancy and birth for all bodies. Understand that your choice not to have kids is equally as important as the right for all bodies to bring 8lb bundles of ‘joy’ (?) into this world. I leave you with room to think my little love, because I know we need that, it takes a little bit to form what we want to say. I know that you understand that these structures forcing your body to have kids while meanwhile taking this right away from others are painful and linked.
XO, Lucy, ten years older and a lot happier now <3