Reproductive Justice Organizing, Feminism and the [centre] Left [read ‘right’…?] : a Retrospective Note.

Looking at a personal (and of course political) archive today, I felt the urge to pen a quick retrospective note of my past contributions to reproductive justice campaigns, from what I construed as a perspective of the left. The left has been a very challenging space for women in general, and especially to develop critical feminist politics. Years ago, Professor Kumari Jayawardena wrote about the left’s problems with women. Unfortunately, this continues to be the case, especially for women with lesser levels of agency (due to a myriad of intersecting realities) in many supposedly progressive political movements of the left, in the global north as well as in the majority world/s.

In so-called leftist (and for that matter centre-left) political circles, things get exceptionally challenging when it comes to reproductive rights, inclusive gender justice, and meaningful gender equality, equity and justice issues. Quite often, we can also notice a tendency to pay lip service to, or conflate, basic identity politics as a means of addressing these issues in political movements/circles of the left. This is deeply counterproductive, because identity politics are, by definition, an invention of the imperialist captialist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy to sustain its vested interests.

In this context, one of the key questions I have been asking myself over time, has been the following: “how to build frameworks for truly critical feminist worldmaking in political movements of the left?” Just by being a political movement of the left, or by subscribing to Eurocentric leftist discourses alone (e.g. Marxist, Leninist etc.), a political movement does not and cannot create a conducive environment for critical, and preferably decolonial feminist worldmaking from a perspective of the left, if not of progressive politics.

I once engaged in a political circle of the left in the north of Ireland, which left me utterly disappointed on many counts. It was also a (in retrospect, a much-needed) learning curve, which brought me to close contact with the sheer violence (and indeed fragility) of white supremacy and white (non)feminism, biopolitics, eugenics in leftist political circles, and the aversion to critical feminist and racial justice discourses and praxes in such spaces.

Lessons learnt, one moves on.

For a reproductive justice, or to be precise, abortion rights event held in Belfast in October 2017, I took the initiative to publish and disseminate this flyer, in my then capacity as an elected office bearer of a local political party. I wrote every word of this flyer and designed it. If I were to write something of this nature today, it would certainly include more critical decolonial feminist weight, and I would certainly not be in a position to write it under the banner of what has turned out to be a political persuasion of the right.

Memories and precedents, for their part, do teach us crucial lessons along the way.