With a federal Republican trifecta, the reproductive and disability justice movements need each other more than ever.
By Regina Mahone ,
November 29, 2024
Abortion rights advocates rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 14, 2023, in Washington, D.C..Olivier Douliery / AFP via Getty Images
After his uncle was first elected president of the United States, Fred C. Trump III wanted to use the access he had to the White House for something positive, he explains in his new memoir, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way. “I was eager to champion something my wife, Lisa, and I were deeply passionate about, something we lived every day: the challenges for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families.”
Fred Trump’s son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder involving infantile spasms that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities. Having an intimate understanding of the way our society does not make it easy for families and caregivers to raise disabled children with dignity, Fred and Lisa Trump convened a series of meetings with White House officials, starting in April 2017, in hopes that the government might take action on this issue. For example, writes Fred Trump:
We discussed the need for all medical schools to include courses that focus on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We emphasized how crucial it was for hospitals and other acute-care facilities to help patients transition from pediatric to adult services. We emphasized the importance of collecting sufficient data to explain medically complex disorders.
After meetings with members of Donald Trump’s cabinet, including retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (secretary of Housing and Urban Development), Chris Neeley (chair of the Committee for People with Disabilities) and Alex Azar (secretary of Health and Human Services), Fred Trump’s group was passed along to meet with the president in the Oval Office. At their meeting, which he wrote ran 45 minutes when he thought it would be just a quick handshake, Fred Trump explained that the president “seemed engaged, especially when several people in our group spoke about the heart-wrenching and expensive efforts they’d made to care for their profoundly disabled family members.” But after the meeting, Donald Trump called Fred Trump back into the Oval and reportedly said, “Maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
According to Fred Trump, that was not the only conversation he had with his uncle about the issue. Fred Trump writes in All in the Family that when he needed help covering the cost of his son’s care and asked his uncle, who had been consistently contributing to a medical fund for Fred’s son, Donald Trump said, “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
As a parent of a child with a disability, I found this excerpt from Fred Trump’s book deeply unsettling to read. It also reminded me why we need reproductive justice and disability justice. And now, with Donald Trump planning his return to the Oval Office, the stakes could not be higher.
Moving Past the Single-Issue Struggle
Twelve Black women established the reproductive justice framework at a convening in 1994, responding to a health care policy proposal from former President Bill Clinton that did not adequately address the need for reproductive and sexual health care, particularly for people living in underresourced communities. The mothers of the reproductive justice movement were clear that while abortion care was essential for marginalized women to exercise their reproductive rights, Black women and other people of color would not truly experience reproductive freedom without also having “health care, education, jobs, day care, and the right to motherhood,” one of the founders, Toni Bond, explained in the 2017 anthology Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundation, Theory, Practice, Critique.
More than 10 years later, queer and disabled activists of color coined the term “disability justice” to create a framework that went beyond the disability rights movement’s single-issue focus on disability, which erased the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, immigration status, and other identities impact disabled people’s needs and lived realities. Much like the reproductive justice founders, disability justice practitioners are guided by principles centering those most impacted by racist, sexist and capitalist systems. “One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of Indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy uses ableism to create a lesser/‘other’ group of people that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable,” explains a primer written by the founders of the disability justice movement. The primer adds:
A single-issue civil rights framework is not enough to explain the full extent of ableism and how it operates in society. We can only truly understand ableism by tracing its connections to heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. The same oppressive systems that inflicted violence upon Black and brown communities for 500+ years also inflicted 500+ years of violence on bodies and minds deemed outside the norm and therefore “dangerous.”
Both frameworks complement one another and demand that all people have access to reproductive and sexual health information and services, to ensure everyone, especially disabled people, can make decisions about their own bodies in a society that has prioritized taking away their bodily autonomy and reproductive agency.
The founders of the reproductive justice movement understood 30 years ago that we needed a framework for freedom that benefits everyone by lifting up those most disadvantaged. And in fact, reproductive justice requires a whole host of systemic changes in order to be realized for all. For example, “the right to parent” tenet exists because our capitalist systems set parents up to struggle no matter how hard we try to do everything “right.” This is particularly true for parents who are disabled or who have a disabled child or disabled children. And those systemic failures impact not just us, the parents, but everyone in our lives — coworkers or collaborators, siblings, our parents (who may become full- or part-time babysitters when child care fails) — not to mention those who might want to become parents but who are forced to make a different decision because of financial or logistical barriers, or the immigration or incarceration systems that separate families.
It is only when we allow white supremacists to divide us that we lose.
Take, for example, Trump’s alleged comment that children — or anyone for that matter — with a disability “should just die.” This notion is a core part of the eugenics movement, which believes that only some people deserve to exist or deserve to procreate. The Nazis exterminated hundreds of thousands of disabled people and young children, between 1939 and 1945, because they were considered “unfit.” Before that, it was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said in his 1927 Buck v. Bell opinion that legalized the sterilization of disabled people in the United States, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” What Donald Trump said isn’t new, as Renee Bracey Sherman and I document in our new book, Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.
But even when “pro-life” lawmakers and politicians don’t say out loud what Trump told his nephew, their actions suggest that they feel exactly the same way. How else can you explain their resistance to policies that would improve families’ lives, like the expanded child tax credit or paid family leave? And these programs are just the most obvious ones.
There are numerous other ways that families’ lives could be improved if lawmakers would stop wasting taxpayer money on attacking abortion rights. Fred Trump mentioned a few. My experience offers other examples. Until we can recognize the harm of our ableist, anti-family, capitalist systems, we will continue to fail to achieve reproductive justice and disability justice for all.
Reproductive Justice Doesn’t End at Birth
When a pregnancy test at my gyno’s office confirmed the news that I knew but had been dreading to hear spoken aloud, I was confident about my next step: I would make an appointment to have an abortion. It was 2013, and while access to abortion care had already begun to dwindle in conservative pockets of the country, I was able to make an appointment and have the medication abortion that I had desired with significantly fewer barriers than there are today. After my abortion, a lightbulb switched on, and I knew without a doubt that I wanted to become a mother someday. So, my partner and I began making plans to have children, knowing that we first wanted to build a strong enough foundation to support raising a child. It took a few years for that to happen, but in January 2020, I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.
Being all too familiar with the Black maternal health crisis, I was overjoyed to have made it through pregnancy to my son’s birth. But that moment of joy passed all too quickly. Not 24 hours after he was born, our son was transferred to a different hospital, with his dad following closely behind the medical transport vehicle, while I had to stay put as I recovered from a C-section. The hospital we selected for labor and delivery was not equipped with a NICU to support our newborn who was not maintaining his body temperature and, according to the hospital standards, not eating enough. So our son was transferred to a hospital 30 minutes away, only after we strongly advocated that he be moved there rather than to the one within our hospital’s same system that was 90 minutes away.
It was one of the most painful moments I have ever experienced, being separated from my son less than 24 hours after giving birth. I have had four years and an additional birthing experience to recover from that moment, and tears still well up in my eyes every time I think of it.
Until we can recognize the harm of our ableist, anti-family, capitalist systems, we will continue to fail to achieve reproductive justice and disability justice for all.
When I imagine a world with reproductive justice, I picture NICU care being more widely available, so that families do not have to be separated in order to receive needed medical support. However, our inefficient health care system’s regulatory process blocks providers from expanding care in a way that would best serve patients — or, for that matter, the NICU workforce. This particularly impacts patients of color, who disproportionately lack access to specialized care in their communities.
Instead of addressing this system of unequal care, we’ve normalized the experience of separating newborns from their parents after birth — not to mention we have become desensitized to high rates of infant and maternal mortality, which are now seen as expected and not a direct result of a health care system in crisis. Infants are already being left to die under our current health care system, and abortion bans have only made this situation worse as maternity wards close amid laws criminalizing health care.
But as I said, the system’s failure of our disabled child did not stop at the hospital. When my son finally entered daycare, we were told he had just a few months in the facility before, under a state regulation, he would age out of the infant room while still not mobile enough to be in the toddler room with his peers. There weren’t any other options for care, so my partner put his business on hold to become a stay-at-home dad in order for us to get through this period. But not every parent or caregiver can do this — too often, parents are forced to choose between their work and their children.
More recently, we’ve experienced our health insurance company denying us needed services because we’ve met the threshold for care despite our child’s ongoing need. Our insurance allows up to 60 outpatient therapy appointments a year. Our son’s care needs mean he reaches that threshold mid-year every year, and we have to watch him go without additional outpatient support for months before our policy refreshes. Again, we experience the failures of arbitrary policies that directly harm families. Why does this keep happening?
Building the World We Deserve
Instead of deepening their awareness of reproductive issues and the solutions to systemic challenges people face on their reproductive journey, the right continues to wage its cultural war against the left for being “anti-family.” Far from being anti-family, for years progressives have been introducing and increasing support on the Hill for policies like an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave and the Momnibus Act, which would directly address the Black maternal health crisis with investments in maternal health care nationwide. But those bills have languished due to obstruction from the so-called pro-life party.
Instead, the right is pushing a “pro-family” agenda that, to be clear, will greatly harm low-income families and families of color. The right’s “pro-family” policies (like “school choice”) only benefit white, wealthy, heteronormative families. These policies are rooted in eugenics and reward those who have assimilated to the Christian right’s ideals of family and social order at the expense of everyone else. Consider, for example, Trump’s plan to eliminate the federal Department of Education. This agency exists to protect students’ civil rights. Should Trump succeed at bringing his mandate to fruition, it will be students of color, queer and trans kids and disabled students who suffer. This is a reproductive justice issue and a disability justice issue.
All of these fights are intertwined, and the reproductive justice framework invites us to imagine a world that is more than just a response to MAGA Republicans and their agenda but one that could truly meet all of our needs — every person and every need. For people who choose to parent, that would include reimagined health care, education and child care systems that meet a universal standard of care. It would mean employers that pay their workforce a living wage. It would mean that services and resources are accessible in every state without income-based systems that force people to make decisions based on what they can afford to pay out of pocket. These reimagined systems would go a long way toward achieving Fred Trump’s vision for resources and services that actually meet the needs of parents and caregivers of children and adults with disabilities.
But with MAGA Republicans set to take full control of the federal government, we can expect a wave of policies that will decimate reproductive rights, not to mention gut programs that disabled people rely on to survive. In their quest to do something, anything, to improve people’s lives, the Democrats and advocates may be tempted by “bipartisan” compromises that ultimately bargain away our reproductive justice and disability justice priorities. Instead, the left must be grounded in these frameworks and form a united front that understands that when we support the most marginalized first, we all win.
It’s up to all of us to hold the line and keep demanding our communities have the resources they need to thrive, even as we are imagining the world we want and deserve for our children and neighbors and as we are working towards making that dream a reality.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Regina Mahone is a writer and editor whose work explores the intersections between race, class, and reproductive rights. She currently serves as a senior editor at The Nation magazine. She is also the co-author of Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve and co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor.
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