Reproductive Rights and Media
The fight for reproductive justice has continually been fought through multiple forms of media. Posters at marches, social media posts, flyers, and more are seen everywhere with people expressing their beliefs on the issue. Despite women attempting to make their voices heard through all of these different mediums, legislators refuse to listen, thus making the fight that much harder. Social movements' primary goal is to implement reforms in order to amend social issues; therefore, the necessity for government support is crucial to implement concrete changes. Feminist activists around the country continue to protest outside legislative buildings, to make their views and strength known. Legislators attempt to cover their ears to the noise created by people across the nation but, through the use of provocative and compelling media, feminist activists continue to fight for reproductive justice. These select publications and posters represent the voices that refuse to be silenced, the voices that transcend opposition and share their thoughts with the world.
The first item within this exhibit is the photograph of a Pro-Choice movement in Atlanta, Georgia from 1980. This image highlights the idea of social movements being supported by a form of media, posters. These posters convey messages that the women within the movement were fighting for, which was mainly to keep abortion legal.
We Pledge To Protect Her, a colored poster, highlights the inhuman infringement on women’s reproductive rights and society’s discriminatory view on women. This media was created in order to combat the gender-selective abortions that were occurring within the country of India. The concept of female infanticide is an adjacent ritual similar to those of ancient Roman and Greek societies, where they regulated the population by disposing of the less wanted offspring. The practice in India occurs primarily due to the system of hypergamy. In uppermost castes, high-status women could not locate someone to marry above her social class, and since it was socially acceptable to remain unmarried, the family had the female fetuses aborted to avoid this social humiliation. The primary reason for modern female infanticide includes: decrease in the availability of land, poverty, increasing dowry customs, high gender differentials in wages, and limited economic opportunities for women. The poster, We Pledge to Protect Her is not pro-life propaganda, but a feminist outcry for women’s rights. The oppressive patriarchal structure in India is the driving force for gender-selective abortions; the poster is protesting this sexist institutional power that oppresses the socio-economic status and reproductive rights of women across the country.
The final item, Reproduce Freely, a zine centralized in Canada, provokes crucial conversations concerning reproductive justice and feminist ideologies, centralizing the topic around pro-choice ideals. This collection of artwork, news stories, interviews, facts, and political commentary highlights important aspects of the reproductive movement and provides women of different socio-economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds a platform to vocalize their outcries against the institutional dismantlement of women’s bodily autonomy. The fight for reproductive justice is not just a battle for the right of choice, but the right to be recognized as an individual: “To have the right to make a choice is to be legally recognized as a full human being with agency.” Reproduce Freely is a bilingual — English and French — compilation of work revolving around women’s rights written by women. The importance of this document is the magnitude of the volume it has on society. The provocative and unapologetic structure of this zine creates a space for women in the conversation.
An influential excerpt from this archive is titled “Hijabs and Abortions: two rights, two choices; ” it goes into depth explaining the definition of choice and its significance on society. The author goes into detail outlining the similarity between the right to have an abortion and wearing a hijab. “Yes, like the right to choose an abortion, the right to wear a hijab seems to have become another private issue that many feel is open to public debate.” In both scenarios, a woman's right to make an individual choice for herself is questioned and challenged. The patriarchal society denotes that women are unable to make their own decisions, deriving archaic ideologies that dominated in prior decades. This text is important because the author emphasizes the plethora of obstacles female-presenting individuals endure and how the fight for bodily autonomy includes more than abortion rights.
All of these different forms of media, created as a result of the vocalization of women's objection to the oppressive, patriarchal structure, have been instrumental in the reproductive rights' social movement around the world. Digital media, posters, letters, magazines, etc. have been the primary weapon in the reproductive movement's arsenal, and they have been the most effective. During the modern age, media exists forever; therefore, having an impactful effect on the world around them. Feminist activists have utilized this concept to expedite the process of the movement for reproductive justice. It is hard to silence something that will exist forever. Feminist futures is the media. The usage of posters, bulletins, zines, and social media posts will help implement changes in modern society that continue to progress women's reproductive rights, specifically over bodily autonomy.