Breaking Down Reproductive Justice with Sandra Kumwong

Words By Gillian Moran-Perez

Sandra Kumwong is the author of “Becoming an Abortion Doula”,  a personal essay published in the anthology Colonize This which features the voices of young women of color and their views on today’s feminism. Her story uplifts the work of those who continue to dismantle white supremacy in the healthcare system. After reading her essay, I grew to admire Kumwong for doing her part to make the world a safer space for women from all backgrounds. If you haven’t read Kumwong’s essay along with the other amazing works in the anthology, you can buy a copy of Colonize This at Seal Press and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore on their websites.

Kumwong is a full-spectrum doula — a trained individual who provides physical, emotional and informational support to another individual going through childbirth or other health-related experiences. She’s an advocate for reproductive justice, a term coined by SisterSong, an organization founded in the 1990s, by a group of black women in Chicago who recognized that the women’s rights movements was dominated by middle-class and wealthy white women who “could not defend the needs of women of color and other marginalized women and trans* people,” according to SisterSong. The organization’s framework empowers women of color and uplifts their voices in the world of feminism by recognizing the many intersectional characteristics that may affect an individual’s reproductive choices, such as childbirth, becoming a parent, etc.   

Kumwong begins her essay by describing the strength of her mother in a single sentence: “the sun could fall on top of my mother and she would hold it up with her bare palms with no issue.” During a conversation with her mother about Kumwong’s experiences interning at Planned Parenthood, her mother reveals her own abortion story, a choice that Kumwong came to question whether it was really her mother’s decision. This begins the discussion of what reproductive justice is and why the term “pro-choice” isn’t always accurate, because many don’t feel the choice is theirs.

I had the opportunity to speak with Kumong and listen to her insightful opinions about the reproductive justice framework, how it’s more than just advocating for reproductive rights and what are some ways to get involved. In the end not only did I gain a better understanding of this practice that is new to me, I also gained a friend from across the coast whom I can talk about healthcare activism and pupusas. So I hope this article inspires anyone to learn more about reproductive justice and how to be an advocate for their community. 

Why is the term Pro-Choice problematic and how can we unlearn to use this term? Is there another term that we can use to replace this term?

I think the way people align their political alignments with, especially abortion, is up to them. I think that there is more of a movement in the reproductive justice field to identify as pro-abortion which is something that I would identify as just because I think pro-choice came at a time where people were fighting for abortion rights. Mostly white women were fighting for abortion rights and the view at the time was cis women deserve to get an abortion because if they don’t then this will happen, but then there’s restrictions to that. It’s a very conditional term I think. Whereas if we use the term pro-abortion it takes away all the conditions and throws out the window because no matter what happens, what the situation is, you should always be able to choose abortion if you want. 

In the experiences with the people I’ve supported and in my own experience, abortion sometimes is not a choice for people. Maybe people are in a space where they find themselves pregnant and they would really love to go through with the pregnancy and their first choice wouldn’t be an abortion but they would have to pick an abortion because they are restricted by their income. People may be restricted by financial status, their citizenship status, maybe their relationship status. It feels like they are pigeonholed to this choice. While they would not regret getting an abortion, it is still not their first choice because there’s so much more to it. Abortion is a topic where a lot of intersections happen where its more than just abortion.

How can we teach reproductive justice to people of all backgrounds? How can we begin to talk about reproductive justice to people with cultural backgrounds who don’t talk about abortion, puberty and even contraception?

The term reproductive justice was coined by SisterSong which is a black women-led organization, so even saying the words ‘I believe in reproductive justice, it already has the connotation where you believe that reproductive rights should apply to everyone and it’s in response to white washing of abortion movements and pro-choice movements.

I think these discussions are happening in our communities, and speaking of someone who is of Thai background but who is born and raised in the U.S., the way people talk about abortion in Thailand is much different just because of the way imperialism works. What I’m trying to say is there might be stigma [around abortion] but the stigma might be really different [in other places]

I think if you’re trying to talk to your own community members and your family [about abortion] I really think speaking from the heart,  about the topic [works]. I think people respond more to things that appeal to them personally.

Do you believe that using the language of reproductive justice is another way to make the world of “feminism” more inclusive?

I think RJ is a more inclusive feminism, I think it’s a more evolved feminism because RJ has been here for a while, when black feminists who came together and then realized that the world of feminism wasn’t for them because it didn’t meet their needs and it didn’t meet other POC needs, it didn’t meet queer needs, it didn’t meet trans needs, so they created reproductive justice as an intersectional way in response to how feminism was not inclusive enough.

How can mobilizing political movement around reproductive justice help eliminate unethical treatment of women as seen in the forced sterilizations in ICE detention centers? 

 Everything is RJ. I think of abolition as RJ and that’s what I really am thinking about when we talked about the forced sterilizations in the ICE detention centers because we will never achieve RJ until we don’t have jails until we don’t have ICE, and we don’t have the hyper policing of black and brown communities in and outside the U.S. because we know the anti-abortion movements are not just in the U.S.

You saw the murders that were happening in Atlanta about a week or two ago and I think that something that was beautiful that came out of it was the recognition of sex work and pro-sex work movements, [which] was really uplifting people who are sex workers who work in the communities who are being recognized by the mainstream.

In your essay in Colonize This you wrote about your current experiences as an abortion doula with the Doula Project and I really appreciated how open you were about the process and the brief stories of resilience from each of your patients. Since the start of the pandemic, has access to reproductive justice been a challenge for people?

One of the biggest issues that we have in the U.S. is the lack of abortion providers, where in most of the country you cannot find abortion providers within an hour or two. There have been many many cases where people have had to fly to get an abortion and obviously those are people who can afford to do that. There’s a saying that no matter what happens abortion won’t be illegal for white women because they will always find ways to access that meanwhile, everyone else is just suffering so I guess this is a problem that isn’t new where they haven’t had access to centers and physical providers. I think it’s been really eye-opening [during the pandemic] for those who’ve had this access always. On the other hand, there have been a lot of movements to take abortion pills to be shipped legally across the U.S.law. There's been a lot of movement around that where people are trying to loosen that restriction.

That’s just abortion alone. I think talking about birth, it just has been such a horrible, horrible time for people who are pregnant or for people giving birth. I think it was a lot for the first few months where they weren’t allowing support people into hospital rooms so if you were someone who was laboring you can’t even bring in your partner, you can’t even bring in your mom, you can’t even bring in your doula and that’s really dangerous for a lot of people. You know that black maternal mortality is really affected by these racist providers who are not trained in culturally competent care and they are able to rely on their doulas and people who advocate for them. So that was a huge issue in the beginning and so black midwives, black nurses, black doulas were really advocating against this because obviously covid is a risk but so is death in childbirth.

An article entitled “Spring 2020: Mitigating Black Maternal Mortality” found that “According to the CDC, per 100,000 live births, there were 14.1 deaths among Asian women, 30.4 deaths among Indigenous women, and 42.4 deaths among black women, in comparison to 13.0 deaths among white women.”

There’s a thing that people said that ‘honestly covid will not kill me it will be something else like a racist provider’ and I think a lot of times when people heard that, like a white doctor, they would say what are you talking about, this is a pandemic. Yes, this is a pandemic but also racism has been here a lot longer than covid and all these problems have been happening before covid and it’s just going to get worse before it gets better. 

For anyone who is new in learning about reproductive health activism, what are some steps you recommend on how to become informed, aware, and involved in this space?

If you are someone who uses social media definitely be very selective of who you follow on social media. Really just uplift people who have been doing this for a long time like honestly, one of my biggest fears writing this story was that this was not new, this is not my work, this is not my voice. Everything I do is because of generations of black women activists, brown activists, queer and trans activists that really mold my framework so I feel like following as many people as possible who really follow the RJ framework [has been helpful]. People who know RJ would be very adamant about it. They should be people who post abolition as well, racism as well, and not just birth work. I think that’s where we have seen a lot of the issues in white women being doulas if they only consider being a doula is associated with work and anything else they don’t work with.

Her second piece of advice is to do lots of reading on theory on feminist writers of colors and those who are still alive.

The third one is a little bit more actionable — find your niche in it. There’s lots of ways to be active and to mobilize in your community. If you’re someone who doesn’t want to be a doula which is totally fine, or someone who doesn’t want to do law advocacy or organize protests and stuff like that’s also fine. I think we have a lot of different needs in a community that needs to be filled so just find what you love and what you’re passionate about and what fulfills your soul and be conscious of everything else and be inclusive of everything else and don’t be afraid that you have to be good at everything.

Lastly, during our conversation, Kumwong shared two Instagram pages that highlight the topic of abortion experiences and sex work in the Asian community. The page “Shout Your Abortion” is a space where people can anonymously share their abortion experiences and uplift others, and “Red Canary Song” organizes migrant and Asian sex workers for their rights in New York. 

Any movement that dismantles U.S. imperialism is a Reproductive Justice movement.