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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We begin today in Mississippi, a state whose history reveals the connections between reproductive and disability justice.

Speaker 2: [crosstalk]

Speaker 3: Curse on our nation. Just curse on this [unintelligible 00:00:21].

Melissa Harris-Perry: These were the sounds from outside the Jackson Women's Health Organization last month on the day it closed its doors for good in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The United States is now in a post-Roe world. A world that in many ways had already come to Mississippi. After all, by 2006, Jackson Women's Health Organization was already the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi. Now, the little Pink House, as it was known, is also closed.

Mississippi's history of restricting reproductive rights, it's not always meant that the government used its power to insist that pregnant people carry pregnancies to term. During the 20th century, Mississippi was one among many American states that used the power of government to restrict some people from having children. These were programs of eugenics. For example, a law in the Commonwealth of Virginia allowed for sexual sterilization of women committed to state mental institutions, women like Carrie Buck.

Rebecca Cokley: Carrie Buck was a poor disabled woman, and the state sought to sterilize her.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Rebecca Cokley, the US Program Officer for Disability Rights at the Ford Foundation. Rebecca says that the Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell led to decades of eugenics policies that promoted the sterilization of those deemed unfit to reproduce.

Rebecca Cokley: Her mother was also poor and considered feeble-minded, was the term that they used at the time. They ruled under the 1924 Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act that she could be sterilized. Buck v. Bell, the decision, determined that compulsory sterilization doesn't violate due process under the 14th Amendment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion. It's read here in a PBS media learning video about the case.

Oliver Wendell Holmes: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In 1928, Mississippi passed a sterilization law similar to Virginia's. It allowed the leadership of mental institutions to recommend that mentally or physically disabled inmates be sterilized. In the following decades, it became so common for doctors to sterilize poor, disabled, and Black women without their consent that the procedure gained its own notorious euphemism, the Mississippi appendectomy. Civil rights organizer, Fannie Lou Hamer, was a victim of this state abuse. In 1961, while undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor, a white doctor performed a hysterectomy on Hamer without her consent.

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Alabama's gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Lord have mercy on this land of mine

We all gonna get it in due time

I don't belong here

I don't belong there

I've even stopped believing in prayer

Rebecca Cokley: While people look at Lou and say, "Well, look at how far we came in that period for disabled women," we've never had equal rights to our bodies.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca reminds us that this country's eugenicist history is not relegated to the past. This she knows from experience. During her pregnancy, Rebecca had a fiercely supportive OB-GYN, but while giving birth to her daughter, Rebecca heard the anesthesiologist say something terrifying. Luckily, her fantastic provider was there to be an advocate.

Rebecca Cokley: An anesthesiologist said to said to her, "While you're down there, why don't you go ahead and tie her tubes because people like her don't need to have more kids." I thought she was going to go over the drape. I was somewhat anesthetized and I was like, "I'm not going to be able to hold her back." Having someone like her who is such a staunch advocate, every person with a disability deserves that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In at least 32 states and in Washington DC, it would've been perfectly legal for a doctor to sterilize Rebecca without her explicit consent. Just two states prohibit the forced sterilization of disabled people.

Rebecca Cokley: People often think that that is just the past. In the last 20 years, we've seen numerous class action cases of people of color in the prison system who were offered time off their service if they decided to be sterilized or castrated. We saw the Doe case come up during the Kavanaugh hearings, where he ruled that two disabled women who were living in an institution in Washington DC could be forced to undergo an abortion, not only without their consent, but without even informing them of it. I can't even imagine being one of those women who already lives under state control, and finding yourself drugged and having gone through this procedure, and no one tells you about it and no one tells you what's been done to you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The ways that disabled people are prevented from making their own reproductive healthcare choices are not limited to policy. Despite the Americans with Disabilities Act barring discrimination, barriers persist in healthcare.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: The barriers are so high, and especially for folks with physical disabilities, but not just that, for people who have sensory disabilities, for people who have mental health issues.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Laurie Bertram Roberts, the executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: Just getting people to travel three hours, a six-hour round trip could be a problem. Having people be able to do a surgical abortion. It's barriers that people wouldn't necessarily even think of. If you're not a person who experiences, say, autism, sounds don't bother you, then you wouldn't think about the fact that sitting in a crowded waiting room could be a barrier to you. Being shouted at by protestors could be more than just an inconvenience for you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund helps pay the cost of people seeking abortion, including travel and childcare.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: We've been trying and working workarounds for these things for years, taking people to different clinics that are less likely to have that problem, taking people to clinics that are accommodating, but now with a shrinkage of clinics that are available, that's not as much of a thing that we can do. Of course, obviously, communities have been and are leaning on self-managed abortion. I just want to really emphasize that people in the disability community have been self-managed during abortions forever out of necessity.

Also, of course, abortion funds have also been working on distinct strategies. Like our fund in Mississippi has had an accessible van since 2015, '16. Accessibility doesn't just mean giving people rides, but it means being able to have an accessible vehicle to put people in, to give them rides. Pushing for clinics to make sure that their ASL translation is in person, not video, so that people actually can understand what's being said to them, instead of it being glitchy or not necessarily translating properly to them because that's their right

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Laurie is a mother of seven. When they were 25, they chose to terminate a pregnancy, only to arrive at the clinic and finally they couldn't afford the procedure. In Mississippi, over a third of people with disabilities live below the poverty line, and over a third of Black people live with disabilities. This nexus of poverty, racism and disability makes the cost of abortion excessive.

Rebecca Cokley: We watch over 3,000 wheelchairs get broken in the air by the airline industry with no accountability. It costs twice as much typically for us to travel if we end up needing to have somebody come with us, which also means that that person might need to take off of work. If you're a person with a disability that's been assaulted by your caregiver and become pregnant because of that, and that caregiver is the person that you need to take you out of state to access an abortion, you're up the creek without a paddle. The complications facing everyone in this moment are horrific.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Even when disabled people find their way around, or through, over or under these barriers, many find they still face the constant task of self-advocacy in the healthcare system.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: Just being seen as a sexual being so that when you go in to get healthcare, your doctors even recognize that your sexual health is part of the care that they need to give you. I've heard so many stories from people who go in with abdominal pain and their doctor doesn't even STI test them because they think they're not even having sex. I had this happen to me at the rheumatologist, where I was like, "Hey, I need this, this, and this because this is how it's impacting my life." Then at the end, I said, "By the way, I'm not able to have as active of a sex life," and he just looked at me like, "Oh, so you have sex?" "Yes, bro."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Laurie says that the mindset behind the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision, that disabled people can't make choices about their own bodies, is present even today.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: I can walk you through an appointment I recently had. I showed up, I signed in, the receptionist spoke past me to my daughter as if I was not there, as if I needed a caregiver to be spoken to on my behalf. I clearly do not. When I went back for my appointment, the nurse practitioner did not listen to me at all, deferred to the notes that she had from my referral, which they messed up anyways. It actually took another doctor calling on my behalf to get me the services that I actually needed.

I do believe that there was definitely an intersection of race, class, and disability going on at that appointment, where it was like they thought I couldn't afford what I needed, but they also thought I wasn't worth listening to. Then there's also just the assumption that I was not able to speak for myself. They literally kept deferring to my family members as if I was not sitting there. I'm not the only person this happens to. I'm using my personal example because I think it plays out differently for different people, but it's the fact that our humanity is just not even recognized as our own.

When you have that, if you're someone who needs someone to come with you for physical reasons because you need a care attendant, you need someone to help you with toileting, you need someone to help you with whatever daily task for living, and then that person is with you, and then they're deferring to them and not you. This is just regular health matters. How does that play out for you when you go for a sexual health appointment?

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's pause for a moment. We'll have more of my conversation with Rebecca Cokley and Laurie Bertram Roberts about reproductive healthcare for disabled folks. Stay with us. This is The Takeaway.

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The Takeaway is back. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been hearing from my conversation with Rebecca Cokley and Laurie Bertram Roberts about reproductive healthcare access for disabled people. Now, some who oppose abortion have advanced the argument that abortion harms disabled people because it allows somebody to terminate a pregnancy if they have reason to believe a child would be born with a disability. During our conversation, both Rebecca and Laurie emphasized the importance of respect, dignity, and the ability to make choices about their own bodies.

I wanted to know how they responded to the arguments of anti-abortion advocates that ending Roe v. Wade advances disability rights by making it more difficult to terminate pregnancies based on a fetal anomaly.

Rebecca Cokley: It's a really complicated issue even within the dwarfism community. When both parents have the same type of dwarfism, the fetus ends in a fatality a quarter of the time. My parents lost two before me and one after me. I'm the one that made it through. The reality is bodily autonomy is a human right. The UN has ruled that it's a human right.

To me, being a pro-choice disabled woman means that I have to have that issue of cognitive dissonance, thinking about the fact that I believe fundamentally in the right to bodily autonomy, but that also means that it is extremely likely that I have friends or family members who have aborted a child that have the same diagnosis that I have. That's hard, but at the end of the day, a person's right to decide what happens to their body, to me, is such a fundamental right that it supersedes everything else. That doesn't mean that it's not hard and that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have those conversations.

I would actually say that it doesn't do away with eugenics because look at how we treat poor and disabled people that live. Our community lives in a state of codified poverty. We tell you where and how to live. We give you a limit for how you can save money. We prevent you from getting married without losing your health insurance. The litany of rules that govern the lives and behaviors of disabled people are still eugenics. It might not be genetic code, but it impacts your ability to live, to breathe, to work, to be educated, and to have a family. The people that are arguing that abortion bans are good for disabled people have no grounding in the reality of the disability existence.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Laurie, can I ask you to speak to that same question?

Laurie Bertram Roberts: Oh, yes. Especially as a mother of people who have disabilities and also as a disabled parent, I find it rather offensive. I am a reproductive justice advocate. To me, the right to parent, the right not to parent, and the right to parent in healthy and secure communities is an absolute human right. For me, that means why you have your abortion is your business. Then, secondly, the same people who are yelling about eugenics due to fetal diagnoses are the same people who fight so hard for poor people, and specifically those often poor people who are disabled not having any kind of social safety net. They're the same people who fight for all of the restrictions that Rebecca just spoke to.

We make political choices in how we educate disabled children. We make political choices in how we house disabled people. We make the political choices in how we handle mental healthcare. None of those are speaking that we care about the disabled community. None of them. We could do better than the ADA, and we have never even bothered from the people who say they're pro-life. The only solution they've ever given for disabled children being born post-Roe, their solution to everything is adoption, orphanages, and maternity homes. I'm sorry, but that's the most [unintelligible 00:17:55] thing I've ever heard, and I don't know why anyone would want that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca, I'll start with you and then Laurie just to help me understand what a just reproductive system looks like, what it would feel like, what it would be experienced like for disabled persons in terms of sexual healthcare, termination services and reproductive healthcare?

Rebecca Cokley: It really does start with sex education in elementary school, and ensuring that kids with disabilities have equal access to the same information as kids without disabilities. That they're being taught the conversation around consent. How to say no to somebody who wants to touch your body regardless of who it is. I think for so many children with disabilities, you are fundamentally raised that other people have the right to your body, whether it be the attendant who may help you go to the bathroom or cut up your food, to the X-ray tech who's lifting you to put you on a table.

Starting there. Moving into ensuring that as people go through their developmental phases, they understand what's happening. They have access to preventative care. They have access to birth control if they want it. It is being talked to about the choices that you're making with your life and being the driver of those healthcare conversations. Being able to have that relationship with a doctor that you trust, that takes you seriously, and doesn't talk to your child or your parent or your provider instead of you. All the way up to, if you decide to have a child as a parent with a disability, having all the supports that you need.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Laurie?

Laurie Bertram Roberts: Even now, I want to have conversations that center disabled people who need to do abortions because we are more likely to experience sexual assault. We are more likely to have health issues that are impacting the reason we need an abortion. We are more likely to be poor. We are more likely because of our poverty to experience unplanned pregnancies. Because of those things, our stories of why we need an abortion should be centered.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder and executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. Thank you for being here today.

Laurie Bertram Roberts: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Rebecca Cokley, the program officer for US disability rights at the Ford Foundation. Thank you for joining us, Rebecca.

Rebecca Cokley: Thank you for having me, Melissa.

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