Upstream - A Socialist Perspective on Abortion with Diana Moreno & Jenny Brown

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

The US Supreme Court has just overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion rights which had set the precedent for almost 50 years, throwing authority over abortion down to the states to decide. As of now, a dozen or so states have trigger laws which will outlaw abortion fairly rapidly, and many others will likely follow suit in the coming weeks and months. In light of this, we're interrupting our regular 2 week episode release schedule to bring you a special extra episode. There’s a lot of media coverage on the Roe decision, of course, but a lot of it is lacking in its analysis, and that’s why we’ve brought on two guests to provide a much needed perspective. Diana Moreno is an immigrant rights activist and Democratic Socialists of America organizer in Queens, and Jenny Brown is an organizer with National Women's Liberation and the author of several books on feminism, reproductive rights, and labor, including Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now and Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women's Work. Both Diana and Jenny approach their feminism with a socialist analysis that provides a strong materialist grounding, a deep understanding of the dynamics around immigration, and an orientation that challenges traditional liberal and oftentimes white, heteronormative feminism that dominates most mainstream discussions. In this Conversation we explore the history of abortion in the United States, a class analyses on abortion and reproductive justice, the ideologies of liberal versus socialist feminisms, the abject failure of the Democratic Party, possible paths forward, and much more.  This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Before we get started on this episode, please, if you can, go to Apple Podcasts and rate, subscribe, and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. And as always, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to support us with a reoccurring monthly or one-time donation. It helps keep this podcast free and sustainable, so please

if you can, go there to donate. And just a quick update. Robert and I are currently working on upstream's next quarterly documentary to be released this summer, exploring the U.S.'s Green New Deal and the European Green Deal, and presenting critiques and alternatives from the global south, indigenous communities, and other populations on the periphery. We don't have a release date set yet, but stay tuned. It's going to be really interesting and an important dive into a topic that deserves much more media attention than it's currently getting. Framing abortion as a choice at all. I mean, we can clearly see that it hasn't even been a choice for so many, especially poor women in this country, right?

And so obviously abortion is a class issue and abortion is a labor issue and part of that is because they're reproductive labor that women and folks who give birth do not just walk pregnant and giving birth, but also like raising children is generally labor that they do for free without any support from the government. And it also is what creates new workers for our capitalist machine to continue running. You are listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. The US Supreme Court has just overturned the landmark Roe v Wade ruling on abortion rights, which had set the precedent for almost 50 years, throwing authority over abortion down to the states to the side. As of now, a dozen or so states have trigger laws which will outlaw abortion fairly rapidly, and many others will likely follow suit in the coming weeks and months. In light of this, we're interrupting our regular two-week episode release schedule to bring you a special extra episode. There's a lot of media coverage on the road decision, of course, but a lot of its lacking in its analysis, and that's why we've brought on two guests to

provide a much needed perspective. Deanna Moreno is an immigrant rights activist and DSA organizer in Queens. And Jenny Brown is an organizer in the Women's Liberation Movement, then the author of several books on feminism, reproductive rights, and labor, including, without apology, the abortion, struggle now, and birth strike, the hidden fight over women's work. Both Deanna and Jenny approach their feminism with a socialist analysis that provides a strong materialist grounding,

a deep understanding of the dynamics around immigration, and an orientation that challenges traditional, liberal, and oftentimes white heteronormative feminism that dominates most mainstream discussions. In this conversation, we explore the history of abortion in the United States, a class analysis on abortion and reproductive justice, the ideologies of liberal versus socialist feminisms, the abject failure of the Democratic Party, possible paths forward and much more.

Here's Robert in conversation with Diana Moreno and Jenny Brown. Deanna and Jenny, it's great to have you both on Upstream. And I'm wondering if to start, if maybe you could just introduce yourselves for our listeners. And yeah, just briefly let us know sort of what brought you to do the work that you're doing. Sure, I can get started. Hi, thank you so much for having me. My name is Diana Moreno. I'm an organizer with New York City DSA, Democratic Socialist of America. I'm the co-chair of our Queen's Branch and yeah, I've been organizing for socialism, for feminismism for feminism for immigrant rights for a decade now actually met Jenny and Gainesville Florida

doing some feminist organizing with national women's liberation and continue to do the work here in New York City and yeah this is the time to really not just speak about this ideas but organize around them to truly when abortion on demand without apology, which we haven't really had before. And so I'm really excited to be in this conversation with Jenny and with you Rob. Yeah, and I'm Jenny Brown. So I'm currently an organizer with National Women's Liberation, which is perhaps best known

for our successful struggle to get the morning after pill over the counter. I've always also been involved in the labor movement in various ways, including as an editor at labor notes and as head of a labor party chapter in Florida in the 90s when we were trying to start a working people's party in the United States. And I wrote two books that came out in 2019, which are kind of relevant to the discussion. So Birth Strike Strike, they didn't fight over women's work from PM Press and without apology, the abortion struggle now from Verso. And although my name is on the cover of these books, they were basically projects of our group. And our group has roots in the 1960s Women's Liberation Movement in particular groups in Gainesville, Florida, Gainesville Women's Liberation, and Red Stockings in New York.

So we come out of that tradition. Awesome. Thank you both so much. And so, yeah, we're obviously going to get into the specifics of, you know, why we had you both on in terms of the discussion around abortion. First, though, just sort of to set the table and orient ourselves. I'm wondering, if you can just maybe give us an idea of what

socialist feminism or feminist socialism, what it is, and why it's sort of an important theoretical and political framework to view the world within. Sure. So to me, it's different from maybe this individualist sort of liberal feminism that I think we're all familiar with that is very much been commodified and sort of sold to us as sort of like, you know, the corporate feminism of the leaning feminism of the Facebook woman I forget her name. Cheryl Sandberg. Right, sort of the I want to be an equally powerful oppressor, right?

But just as a woman, right? Like, so for me, socialist feminism is really considering, first of all, the labor that women contribute to society many times for free, to care for children, to care for a household, to race, essentially future workers, right? That's certainly labor that women do disproportionately in society as a whole. And taking feminism through a social lens to me also understands that women's rights and reproductive justice and reproductive rights are a larger part of a social good that we all must fight for in order to achieve liberation, right? And so I try to separate it from, again, sort of a commodified

liberal feminism that is unfortunately what I think is popularized and accepted as a status quo. And I think especially now in the abortion conversation, it's really, really important for us to talk about abortion as a class and labor issue in order to organize around this as a right. Yeah, and I appreciate you bringing up the importance and the significance of socialist feminism when exploring abortion discussions. And of course, we will be diving a little bit deeper or much deeper into that just shortly.

But yeah, I'm wondering, Jenny, did you have anything that you wanted to add to that or anything that you wanted to talk about when it comes to your views on socialist feminism? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because in the 60s, people who identified themselves as socialist feminists or at the time called themselves politicos tended not to think an independent women's liberation movement was necessary and that women would just be freed by socialism. And the leaders of the women's liberation movement, which thought you needed an independent movement, were all on the left. They came out of civil rights, anti-war, student-left backgrounds. So they were all on the left. They just didn't think it would be enough. But right now we have a situation where the women's liberation movement actually won a lot of strides in equality with men in our class.

They were things that didn't really impinge too much on the prerogatives of capital and the employing class. We did win some on employment discrimination, ability to control our own money, improved sex, loosening dress codes, men doing more housework, that kind of thing. But we didn't win on things that they were able to win in countries with strong labor parties or even socialist countries like free childcare, healthcare, paid family and sick leave, child allowances, free college and so forth. So a great example of the weakness of feminism when it's disconnected from working class power in the US is that We decrease the wage gap between men and women's pay, but

half of that is men's wages decreasing to meet ours as an example of how Disconnecting from class power just does not get you the kind of equality that you're looking for Yeah, that's really important to note. Thank you for that. Okay, so we've established some basics on what socialist feminism is. And so yeah, I'd love to move into sort of the pressing, very pressing issue that I'd like to take the rest of the interview to discuss. And so let's hone in on the question of abortion. And Deanna, you wrote a really fantastic thread on Twitter recently pointing to a deep distinction between the liberal and socialist views on abortion.

And you touched on that in your opening, but I'm wondering maybe just if we can dive a little bit deeper, and can you sort of unpack what you were pointing out there in that Twitter thread? I'm thinking of like this idea of individual choice versus a social issue and the language that we use. Like, can you maybe just talk about why you thought it was important for you to really come out and explicitly state like, hey, liberal feminism and liberal discussions on abortion versus like the socialist view. Definitely.

I think the abortion debate, I guess. I mean, it's really not, first of all, the framing of it as a debate. I think most people agree that abortion should be a right. And so it's really not a debate. I think it's been propagandized, right, as a debate that is more divisive than it actually is. And I had to unlearn a lot of the language and a lot of what has been propagandized around the

quote unquote abortion debate for me, especially around I'll use the language of choice as an example. So folks, you continue to use the word pro choice to, you know, talk about being supporters of abortion. Personally, I think that we need to get away from using the word choice to talk about abortion, because first of all, it should not be framed as an individual choice. It should be framed as an inherent right that people that give birth should absolutely have, because as human beings, they should have the right to have control over their bodies. And I think that the word choice definitely strips the social value from abortion as it does from many things, right? I think the word choice is used by neoliberals and

conservatives alike to essentially make the destruction of social safety nets sound like freedom, right? Like if you think about the use of the word school choice that is choose to talk about the charter school takeover public education or if you think about the way that people frame the ills of universal healthcare because it'll take away your choice of health insurance, right? It's like such a false dichotomy that I think we not just need to move away from using that word, but need to move away from using that framework of what really should be a choice versus what needs to be a social good and a social right. Abortion as part of

reproductive health care should be a right. And so we shouldn't be afraid to talk about it, shouldn't be afraid to say the word. And that's what my thread alluded to that a socialist, as feminists, we should normalize the use of the term and we should normalize the fact that it should be viewed as a right and as part of a larger framework of reproductive justice. And it's so interesting to me too,

because it's a topic I've been really interested in recently is really thinking about this idea of how individual rights are framed in liberal democracies and this idea of an abstract right to something versus like, you know, like the abstract right to an individual having the choice of an abortion in this case, versus creating the actual material conditions that allow for this more. I guess one way you could put it is a social right for people to ensure that they can actually exercise those rights because when they're just framed as these abstract rights that you're not even really explicitly naming what it is a right to, right, like pro-choice.

And I just think that's such a barrier, really, and not just like, you know, theoretically how we think about these things, but also how they play out materially. And yeah, and I'm wondering, is there something maybe that Jenny that you wanted to add to that, or do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, they never talk about the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a union, the right to housing job, the right to a union, the right to housing when they're talking about our rights, right? Those are like positive rights rather than kind of a negative thing of, oh, there's no law that prohibits you from

getting an abortion. So, exactly, we need these guarantees. And I totally agree with what Deanna was saying about the choice framework. I think it's really, it really gets us away from the whole question of who's doing the work and who's going to pay for it, which is really what, at least in my group, we think is what the abortion struggle is about ultimately. So without getting into like too many minute details, because it's a very rich history and like to any folks who want to dive deeper I definitely recommend checking out Jenny's books which We plugged at the top and which Jenny herself mentioned in her introduction without apology especially in terms of this question

So I'm wondering if you can just briefly outline the history of abortion like before, wrote in the United States, there was a lot of interesting information that I learned when I was reviewing that excerpt that you sent me last night. And I'm wondering, yeah, like why was abortion banned outright, which it was in 1873, and along with contraceptives, and this really made my jaw drop any information about the process of reproduction or sex. So I'm wondering if you can just walk us through that timeline. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are surprised, and the Alito Supreme Court decision that just came out has a lot of misinformation actually in it about the history of abortion

in this country. Abortion was basically legal from the founding of the country up until the 1850s and 1860s when the state started to pass prohibition. So it was legal up until quickening, which is the fourth or fifth month when you can feel the fetus move and that's by the report of the person who's pregnant. So basically abortion was legal. There were laws against killing someone through bad technique, so obviously that was fine. But pills and medicines and even surgical intervention were widely advertised. You know, they talked about unstopping your

period, restoring your balance, lunar pills. And what happened is from the 1840s to the 1860s, the newly emerging profession of medicine, basically doctors, wanted to eliminate their main competition in healthcare, which was midwives and wise women, who did most of the primary care for most people, including births and abortions. So they went on a crusade against abortion, writing books, giving lectures. They eventually succeeded in getting some state laws, but in 1873, they won basically a total victory when the federal Comstock Law banned any information, medicines, devices, about contraception abortion. This was all under the category of obscenityity and they also banned all sexual materials and whatnot.

And they did actually arrest booksellers who were selling medical texts that had explanations of contraception. I mean, really they were trying to completely crack down on just ordinary people's knowledge of how this works. Well, a reason that doctors were able to get traction in that period after the Civil War was that the birth rate had actually dropped. It had been eight children for women 1800 and it would be four children for women in 1900. So it was really noticeable by the 1860s and at the same time you had a very strong women's rights movement arising, right? And so women were asserting themselves. And then you also had an increase in immigration, particularly among Irish people and people from,

mostly from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slavs, mostly. And so that made Protestant nervous. They would be overrun with all these Catholic immigrants, which might sound slightly familiar to you now. But anyway, their efforts led to a hundred years of illegal abortion, and there were waves of crackdown. And then some loosening, like, for example, during the Depression, there wasn't much enforcement of the laws because so many people had no money to raise kids. Doctors were looking for business.

People needed abortion. So there wasn't much of a crack down then. In the post-war war two period, which we're most familiar with, there was a massive crack down. Competent doctors were arrested. That basically left the field to quacks and butchers. It drove up the price. And it led to about 5,000 deaths a year for some of that period.

But our post-war baby boom was longer than in other countries after the war. And this is part of why, right? The crackdown on abortion and effective contraceptives were not really available until the mid-60s. And they didn't become legal all over the country, so 1972. So by that time, the ruling elite was freaking out about the long baby boom. They were blaming the population increase for crime,

overcrowding in the cities, popular rebellions that were going on, and they were divided about whether abortion should be legal. And this was the moment that the women's liberation movement was able to make the movement for free abortion on demand really stick. And so they were able to get the law changed in New York State in 1970, various court cases vacated the laws in DC and weakened them in some other states, and then finally the road decision in 1973. So the movement was necessary to win obviously, but we were also able to take advantage of splits in the ruling class at the time by

1975 the birth rate had plunged and The ruling class stopped freaking out about overpopulation and went back to the standard ruling class worry, which is Let's raise the birth rate as ruling classes from feudalism throughout capital history have always done. They want people for the army, they want workers, they want a large significant country. So that very brief moment in history when we were actually able to get row was one where we had a division in the capitalist class, which I think that's one of the reasons we're seeing the situation we are now. Yeah, and I do want to get into that definitely that part of abortion as being sort of a capitalist class

project. Before we jump into that, can you just maybe explain what Roe did and also like, yeah, the slow chipping away of it and the backlash against it that has sort of steadily arisen since it was first passed. So basically Rose said states can't restrict abortion in the first trimester and they can restrict it in the second trimester only to protect women's health. And then later decisions like Webster and Casey in the late 80s, early 90s weaken that. But we never won the right to abortion, mostly because we don't have a national healthcare system. Like, okay, as a contrast in Argentina when they won the right to abortion

in 2020, the movement demand was, they have to give it to you within five days. The law was a compromise with what the movement wanted and the law says they have to give it to you within 10 days. So that's like a totally different terrain than we ever have been able to win in the United States because we don't have a national health system. And then three years after a row, the US Congress overwhelmingly democratic passed the high amendment introduced by our Republican with a Democratic president support Jimmy Carter.

And basically, it's been a writer on the budget ever since, and it bans federal funds for abortion, which means that Medicaid, which had been paying for about 300,000 abortions a year, suddenly stopped, so people who had Medicaid as their insurance could not get it paid for, but also military women independence, federal prisons, the Indian health service, Peace Corps, any federal funds, if you get your health care through federal funds, you

can't get abortions through it. Some states now do cover it through Medicaid with their own state funds, like that's true in New York. But basically what it meant was if you can't afford it, you can't get an abortion. So, and then we also have had increasingly stringent time limits. Of course, nobody who wants an abortion wants to stay pregnant, it's uncomfortable,

and usually you're throwing up all the time. The reason you're waiting to get an abortion is you're trying to raise the money to pay for it or find the time off from work or whatever abortions cost like $530 on average in the US. So the time limits work to block people from getting the abortions they want. And like by contrast in Canada, there's no time limit and it's paid for through their national health system.

And then another huge setback was Supreme Court approval of state laws that have made it hard for young people to get abortions without their parents consent. You basically have to go to before a judge in many states. And then there have been enormous barriers for clinics to operate both violence from the anti-abortion right, but also state crackdowns basically making it very difficult to provide abortions and provide health care. Yeah, thank you so much for walking us through all of that. Really rich history, really important to set some context and orient us to sort of what's going on now.

And just a quick note for listeners, the high-demandments, essentially bipartisan and from what I know, it's just tacked onto the budget every year. And so it's just continues to be law. And one of the main reasons why folks like Elizabeth Warren have been talking about potentially making federal land and national parks, for example, places where folks in states that have outright banned abortion may be able to access abortions. But that

ain't going to happen if the Hyde Amendment is still around. So just wanted to bring that up. But, okay. So moving forward here, out of sort of the history and that conversation, and maybe starting with you, Deanna, another topic that I really wanna get into is this idea that abortion is about control, and of course controlling women's bodies, right? But it's sort of not just that, right?

It's also this idea of like coercive reproduction being part of, as was mentioned earlier, like a racist capitalist class project. And so I'm wondering, can you talk about that? Certainly. Well, just from Jenny's rich history that she shared, just listening to that and then framing abortion as a choice at all. I mean, we can clearly see that it hasn't even been a choice for so many, especially poor women in this country, right?

And so obviously abortion is a class issue and abortion is a labor issue. And part of that is because they're reproductive labor that women and folks who get birth do not just walk pregnant and giving birth, but also like raising children is generally labor that they do for free without any support from the government.

And it also is what creates new workers for our capitalist machine to continue running, right? And I think as an immigrant rights scholar, as an immigrant rights activist, I'm also well aware of the way that poor people from other countries come and fill some of that gap here in the United States. And I think I want to really give credit to Jenny and Jenny's book to help me sort of

reframe the way that I think about immigration because, again, we are propagandized to think that immigrants and immigrant workers are sort of burdens in society that they come and take from, you know, the public services and take up space in public schools and they're a drain in our economic system. When, in fact, it is women in other countries that do the free labor of birthing and raising these workers who then come to our country and work for so little without having full rights. So the way that that is related to abortion and the abortion debate is the fact

that in our white supremacist, capitalist country, the ruling class doesn't really want, especially black and brown immigrants, right? They don't really want for them to be full parts of our society. As you saw in the news, Representative Mary Miller from Illinois, recently went introducing Donald Trump at a rally to sort of brag about this row of victory for them.

She called it a victory for white life. And so this is such a blatant example of the way that the ruling class, especially the right-wing ruling class abortion, and banning abortion as a means to increase native born babies, especially white babies, and replace American born workers. And that's something that it's an idea that I had to come around to quite frankly because it sounds a little bit conspiratorial at first, at least it did to me, but after reading Johnny's book and having conversations with feminist comrades around this issue, and also learning the way that politicians and the ruling class talk about this in other countries, it becomes pretty apparent that they really

care about the birth rate. They really care about how many workers are being born to replace workers now. And I thought it was really interesting, interesting actually to see that even Elon Musk, right, this capitalist billionaire, his pin tweet, the tweet that is pinned to his Twitter account with the millions of followers that he has is a graphic of the declining birthrate in the US, right? Billionaires care about this because again, the capitalist machine cannot run without the labor of workers. And they will use some short-term solutions or some gaps like immigrant labor.

But again, they're not interested in giving immigrants full rights as is evident by the fact that they have failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform for over 30 years now. They want to keep people like me, immigrants from other countries, relegated to a second-class citizenship status to take advantage of our labor without having to give us full rights. You're listening to an upstream conversation with immigrant rights activist

and organizer Diana Moreno and Jenny Brown, author of Without Apology, The Abortion Struggle Now and Birth Strike, The Hidden Fight Over Women's. We'll be right back. I don't ever want to talk that way again. I don't want to know people like that anymore. As if there was an obligation. As if I owed you something, black me out. I want to piss on the walls of your house I wanna chop those grass-rays

I feel bad fucking fingers And if you're a king-maker Lassy, fascy, fascy, fuck me out I wanna piss on the walls of your house I wanna chop those fast brakes I'm just that fucking finger Just if you're a kingmaker Let's hit back, hit back, hit back, yeah Oh, the Amazement of the past It's filled on the best of my life So bright it's the best

Oh, the erase is on the best of my life So bright it's the best Oh, body high, I Never come and go, black me out. That was Black Me Out by Against Me. Now back to our conversation with immigrant rights activist and organizer, Diana Moreno and Jenny Brown, author of Without Apology, the abortion struggle now, and birth strike, the hidden fight over women's work.

And so before the break, Tiana, you were talking about the capitalist or the ruling classes need for steadily replicating workers, and you were tying that into immigration. And I really have to credit you and I guess, indirectly through you, Jenny's work, because when I first saw your tweet, which I mentioned at the top of the conversation, I also had some skepticism as to, like, okay, are the capitalists that coordinated? Is this really birth rates something that they're so hyper focused on? And, you know, it's really starting to seem to me like it's a part of the explanation. And you think about the great replacement theory, right? Like, sure, most of the folks listening are

familiar with the great replacement theory, the idea that non-white people are slowly replacing white people in the United States and, you know, from the perspective of a lot of the right-wing ghouls out there like Tucker Carlson, this is like the main problem with the country right now. And Jenny, in your book, you cited Iowa Congressman Steve King, who's like a vigorous opponent of abortion and immigration. He tweeted, in 2017, he tweeted, culture and demographics are our destiny. We can't rebuild our civilization with somebody else's babies. And so yeah, and you mentioned Mary,

Krungus Roman Mary Miller's statement recently, Deanna, and you know, yeah, it's all just really sort of obvious and really disgusting and sickening when you think about it in terms of what these folks are actually advocating for and how they're thinking. And yeah, I'm wondering, Jenny, did you want to jump in and unpack some of this and just sort of add any of your thoughts to the conversation? Yeah, I mean, I'm always struck by how this racist part is an echo of the 1860s, right? The employing class wants immigrants here, but then it favors laws that make it easy to port anyone who speaks up about bad working conditions,

and we saw that with deportations in the 20s of any radicals who were trying to get better working conditions on the job. But I think it's also important for us to be clear that it's not that the employing class loves white working people, right? They're happy to kill us off for a few bucks, as we can see from like the secular family pushing

the opioid crisis and the slaughterhouses that are factories. But white people in the US from the room classes perspective are better because they've been so heavily propagandized and tend to see their interests along race lines. So they identify their interests with white rich people, whether than seeing their interests along class lines, not universally, but this is a tendency. And so usually the way people eventually get class consciousness, especially white people in the US, and start to identify their interests with other workers of all colors is through

union struggle. But I think people will color start with fewer illusions, as you can see from the voting patterns and organizing efforts. So I think that's something that we need to think about. There's this political reality. Texas and California are both majority of people of color states at this point. In California, that has due to a lot of immigrant organizing, especially Latinx community organizing, has really changed the state with higher minimum wages, more labor rights, regulation on business, taxes on business.

And then it takes us, like to take the other example, there is a right wing legislature and it's been maintained through like extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, and basically military occupation level policing in immigrant communities. So the right wing sees these two paths that they can take, right? And what they would like to take the Texas path, right? But of course, that's really hard if people are organizing against them. And so obviously, we want an organized working class that can fight against all of this stuff, which California obviously has a lot of problems, is not our paradise, but they have been able to actually mobilize communities to win some of the things that we need. And then it's interesting when you look at like capitalist think tank materials, they're actually worried that sending countries like Mexico now have

lower birth rates. And they also worry that there's a book, for example, by Jeb Bush and Clint Bullock called immigration wars, where they worry openly about this. And they also worry that if the US is too hostile to immigrants, then people that are deciding to go somewhere, would go somewhere other than the US. So that's another area where it's kind of interesting what they're thinking about. The other thing that really convinced me about this birthright thing is you read stuff from other countries where the birth rate has been low. So throughout the last 30 years in Europe and parts of Asia, like Japan and Korea and China,

especially, the birth rate has been below replacement level. So usually around 2.1 children per woman. So it's been significantly below replacement level in a lot of those countries and the response if they have a strong labor movement or a labor or left party has been to make it easier to have kids. And they're open about this. We want to have more kids so we're going to give you long paid leave, vacation, childcare, child allowances. They already have national health care systems in all these countries. And in some countries like Turkey, they openly say, well, it's because we want more Turks and fewer Kurds. We're afraid of the Kurdish birth rate.

And then in there are like racist undertones in Germany and France occasionally. We want more French babies and fewer foreigners. So you can definitely see that there's the racial aspect, but they're also just worried about general growth of the economy, which relies on population growth to a great extent. Here, what we see in response to the lower birth rate, they don't talk about the birth rate,

and the reason that they don't talk about it is because it sounds really bad to say, oh, the birth rate's really low, we're gonna force you to have babies, we going to make sure contraception is very difficult to get. But the policy has basically been what's left over when you can't win any of these rights that I've been talking about, like paid leave or universal child care, is what's left over is just the coercive aspect. So that has been getting rid of abortion slowly now quickly, right? Making it harder to get contraception.

You know, if they fought tooth and nail in the Obamacare thing to make sure contraception wasn't included, the forms that they could manage to get taken out of there. And then the general policy has been to push the work and expense of raising and caring for children and bearing children into families to be paid out of our declining wages, right? Force everything back under the family. You don't have any supports. And when they do try to, this takes really extreme forms like hunting down low-wage dads to extract child support and locking them up if they don't pay and in most cases they don't have

any money to pay. They're already making barely enough to survive, you know, and then the welfare system is constantly trying to promote, spends a lot of money instead of helping poor people at promotes marriage, which is to basically make people pair up so they can be kicked off the welfare roles. So the whole capitalist class project is extracting our unpaid labor of raising and burying children, not contributing anything to it. And because the birth rate is a record low now in the United States, the response has been to make it harder for us to control our reproduction. Yes, capitalism, of course, traditionally loving to see social reproduction as an externality,

right? I want to read a somewhat lengthy, not super long, just a couple paragraphs from your book with apology that I think is just very well written and really compliments a lot of what you just said, but just want to quote it because I really appreciate how you how you put it here, quote, from the standpoint of the 99 percent lower birth rates are a phony crisis, but from the standpoint of the establishment, the problem is real. Their profits and capitalist economic growth in general rely on a continually growing workforce replenished with ever larger cohorts of young people to work and consume and pay taxes and serve in the military and to provide for older workers when they retire, either individually through family ties or collectively through social security. Immigration has compensated somewhat as US birth rates have slumped below replacement, but immigration carries its own political liabilities for the employing class,

which cannot entirely be overcome by marginalizing and terrorizing immigrant communities to prevent them from acting politically. This may explain why, while other cultural issues, such as same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, and you put cultural issues in scare quotes there, have been making progress. We have gone backwards significantly on abortion. This is because abortion is being misclassified as a cultural issue. In fact, the production of children, and who will pay for it, is a key economic battlefront. So yeah, I'm wondering maybe and Deanna, maybe if you want to just begin with this one, I'm wondering coming back explicitly

now to the overturning of row, like, who will abortion bands impact the most? Yeah, thank you. Well, first, I really just want to say that Jenny makes such a compelling argument for the ruling class interest here, right? That helps us really think about abortion and reproductive lever as an economic issue, as a class issue. And it also helps us question and make sense of why abortion is framed as this cultural issue

that a small sect of Christian right-wing fanatics really, really care about, right? It's sort of framed as this religious moral issue about, you know, the sanctity of life. When, in fact, if it were an issue of morality, maybe we would have an investment in contraception and sect education and things that clearly prevent abortion. But when viewed as an economic issue, it's also very clear that connection of why those are actually things that are also under attack, things that actually materially would prevent abortions like comprehensive sex ed, like contraception, those things are also under attack. And so I just want to mention that because essentially the whole idea of like pro life

and sanctity of life is bullshit, right? Like the rule of law does not care about that at all. If they cared about babies, if they cared about children, they would maybe do something about baby formulas shortages and the fact that people can't even feed their babies. They would probably do something about the mass murder of children by out of control gun loss, but they don't. And so it's so clear and it makes sense when you view it as this economic issue, as this class issue.

And for me, it was very clarifying and eye-opening because otherwise, it doesn't make sense. Otherwise, the hypocrisy of it is really difficult to grasp. And of course, this also means that as any oppressive practice, it's poor people, it's women of color, it's immigrant women who will suffer most. Raising children, birthing children is such a light-changing, vulnerable experience that really ties you to vulnerable economic and social conditions. When you are forced to bring children into the world, raise children, you are going to be in more exploitative and more likely to be abused both at home and at work.

And as Jenny said, already, you know, poor women had a difficult time accessing abortion, now it's going to get even worse. And that's why this is an issue of class that socialists have to organize around. And of course, I also want to mention, right, that this is also why I think the framework of reproductive justice is also really helpful for me because reproductive justice is a framework that women of color feminist organizers came up with. In the 70s, I really credit LaRetta Ross

and her work on reproductive justice, her book on reproductive justice of helping me understand how many women of color haven't just had to fight for the right to abortion, for the right to not be parents, but also for the right to parent, right? Because through slavery, through incarceration, through forced derlization, which is a horrific, but very real part of our history, think back to like the way that Puerto Rican women were sterilized

against their will without their knowledge in the 20th century, part of the terrible colonial project. These are issues that are tied together and we have to fight them together, right? So just as we fight for abortion rights, we have to fight for people's right to parent and to parent in a way that they have the full resources and the support of a social safety net to help us do so because it is a social good, right? Children should not be fodder for the capitalist machine to be ground down as workers, you know, as socialists we believe and the inherent value of human life, which is the irony, right? It's like we're actually here calling for the value of human life and to give people the power to actually parent with the resources that they need to raise humans to

their full potential so that they can thrive, not just work, work, work until they don't have enough to retire on or they die of mass shooting, right? So unfortunately it is, as always, poor women, immigrant women, and women of color who will suffer most under this abortion bands. And I really appreciate that you brought up the history of sterilization in this country country because it has been so, so frustrating to see, like, just for example, so many folks good intentioned, but bringing up things like the handmaid's tail as like an example of, you know, what this country might look like if we keep going down this path. And it's like, you realize that this country already looks like this, right? Like the history of black and indigenous.

And as you're saying, Puerto Rican, and other women of color, other people of color have just, I'll have experienced this already. Like it's, you don't have to reference a TV show based on a book in order to illustrate how fucked up this has been for so long and how much more fucked up it could potentially get. Like there's historical precedence for this. But anyways, that's kind of a little bit of a tangent, just something that frustrated me recently. And I guess maybe this is potentially a somewhat of a transition point. Robbie, can I add something here?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Please do. Yeah, I mean, I too think that the reproductive justice framework is really important, and you really see it when liberals start talking about poverty and why abortion is necessary. I mean, Janet Yellen, who's secretary of the Treasury now, is just the latest one to articulate this hearing recently. I mean Janet Yellen, who's Secretary of the Treasury now, is just the latest one to articulate this hearing recently. She said, well, abortion is necessary if you can't afford to have children, which is

basically if you can't afford to have children, don't have them. And I'm sitting here thinking, okay, well, Janet, you were head of the Fed, and now you're Secretary of the Treasury. Why didn't you explain to us why working class people in the United States do not have enough money to afford to have children, which is basic aspect of life. And the liberals are always coming at working class and poor people with birth control or trying to make welfare contingent on not having more kids, or basically because they don't

want to do any of the things that would make working class life tenable, like raise our wages, tax corporations to provide child care, universal health care is always off the table because that would give workers more power to all their bosses to shove it. So that's what reproductive justice, that framework leads us to think about how bankrupt that whole liberal argument is when they come at us

with, well, the reason you need reproductive rights is because it'll mean that you can control your reproduction, but only because you can't afford to have kids, right? And look, people should not be not having kids because they can't afford to have kids. They should be not having kids because they don't want to for other reasons. But if money is the reason that you are not having kids,

the system is definitely bankrupt. Absolutely. Yeah. No, thank you so much for adding that really, really important point there. And okay, so I do think that we would be remiss if we did not take a second to acknowledge the absolutely dog shit response

on behalf of the Democrats to all of this. They had months to respond to this and what do we get? We get a Zionist poem read by Nancy Pelosi that ends with the lines, my country has changed her face speaking of Israel, of course, and I think we all know what that's sort of referring to. And we've also gotten calls to vote harder and Biden condemning any violent responses, like one of the first things he did. And of course, you know, demanding more money for fundraising, right? And so I'm just wondering,

either one of you Deanna and Jenny, whoever wants to take it first, feel free. Yeah, just how do you see the democratic response? And just if you want to share with us your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean obviously the initial response is just average and just, you know, anger at their spinelessness and how cowardly they are and how incompetent they are, right? But to me whenever I take a step back after, you know, I curse to myself after I see the the level of incompetence that I see and I think about the Democrats as just another wing of the ruling class then again it starts to make sense right and then I think that I can start organizing from there

because when we expect for the Democrats to actually be like of fighting up a decision party double fight for our rights we are continuously disappointed but when we expect for the Democrats to be who they are, which is a corporate party that serves the interests of the ruling class, then it starts to make sense why they respond the way they do and why they use this as an opportunity to continue to fundraise and to continue to remain in power, even though I really doubt that they'll do so because they're just really good at losing. And I think it's helpful, right,

to sort of like see it in the sober way and to start organizing from there. Obviously, not all Democrats are the same. I think that AOC and others have had courageous responses that include giving us sort of a map on how to actually fight back that I'm sure that the Democrats will probably ignore at their peril, at our peril, but the Democratic leadership has absolutely failed.

And again, not just in the response to a row, but in the opportunities that they had in the past to codify a row, and the opportunities that they had to repeal the height amendment. I mean, you can think back to 1991, who was the person heading the Clarence Thomas confirmation who completely dismissed Anita Hill's call of the fact that Clarence Thomas is a sexual

harasser? It was Joe Biden, right? It was our current president, and it's just so sad to go back to that history and to understand that, yes, Joe Biden and Clarence Thomas, part of the same ruling class, right? And they so they don't serve our interests. And so I think when we look at it in this way, it's helpful a socialist and a feminist socialist to think of a response, right?

And a response has to be rooted in organizing a mass movement. And we can really learn from our sisters in Ireland and in Argentina and how they fought back, how they organized masses and millions of people on the streets to push for abortion rights, right? And I believe that that's really what we must do in the United States as any progress. This has never come from the top.

It has always come from organizing from grassroots movements that power Have to respond to because they had no other choice So we have to make them uncomfortable. We have to show up. I don't care what Biden says. We should be showing up at These justices houses and not giving them a day of peace and we should be organizing in our workplaces in our unions for stronger protections and for unions to be advocates of reproductive justice, we should be out in the streets. Yeah, I love that so much. And all I would add to that is I think that like the going out on into the streets and protesting demonstrations, those are all incredibly important. But I also believe strongly that these things cannot be viewed as like just an individual act of going out and protesting and then wondering,

you know, why the protest didn't achieve the thing that we wanted it to achieve. And I think largely the issue that I see is that there is a whole lot of stuff that needs to come in conjunction with the protests and with the marches, etc. which you touched on Dianna, which is organizing, right? Like, we need to be reading theory, we need to be discussing theory in groups of people, learning from past, revolutions and uprisings, learning where they're successful, learning where they failed, taking that information, sharing it with people, then going out on the streets, then coming back and doing that again, and really building movements that are informed of history

and know the theories that we're working with in terms of change and how to actually effectively create change. And I don't think that comes from just protesting. I think that's one important piece of it. And so I really just want to encourage folks to like, it doesn't matter what your political tendency is. Personally, I learned so much when I read Lenin. I've learned so much from reading Mao, just folks like

Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and Chey and the Cuban Revolution and people like Rosa Luxembourg, like it's almost funny sometimes how similar some of the stuff that like Marx was writing about even in the 19th century is to exactly some of the stuff that like Marx was writing about even in the 19th century is to exactly some of the situations that we're dealing with now. You know, like obviously there are lots of blind spots and everything doesn't map on one to one. You know, a lot of these writers were writing at a specific time with specific historic material conditions, of course, but there are a lot of similarities.

And so find some information out there, find some theoretical frameworks to build on and share with your community because, yeah, I think just going out on the street is important, but it's not going to be enough unless it's situated within a really explicit political framework and a theory of change. And I don't know if Jenny or Diana as well, like, did you all have any further thoughts or did you want to add anything to that or push back on that or anything? Yeah, I know. I would love to respond and say, you know, I think protesting is important.

It's an important sort of valve, right, for our frustration, for our rage in these times. But I completely agree that, you know, without an anchor, without a group for us to organize around, without a theory to ground us, it can be an empty, in a one-time action that doesn't actually lead to building power or to changing anything, right? So I completely agree that we must organize with a group. I choose to organize with Democratic Socialist of America. I formally worked with National Women's Liberation,

which Jenny is still an active part of. And I have to say what I think is so important that I was taught in NWL was that we are the experts of our own lives, and that while I do believe that reading theory and reading history and learning from our ancestors and past revolutionaries is crucial, I also think that there's so much wisdom in our lived experiences and the lived experiences of the working class. And what I love about Jennie's work, right, as she mentioned, she credits the work of feminists, comrades, who came together and like really shared about our lives to essentially ask the questions that she answers so beautifully in her work, right?

So so much of the theory comes from the lived experiences of working people and I think that that's the beauty of also organizing in a group and sharing those tactics and struggling together is that you also come to those solutions and understand that those solutions can come from your life, asking yourself and each other what it is that we need in this moment. So I absolutely agree that it's really important for us to read theory, read history, and I would say to me some of the most powerful ways in which I have really felt revitalized and empowered in my organizing, it's been through struggling with a group,

with people struggling even through conflict, to understand what the right path is, and listening, and asking of ourselves, what it is that we need, what's the path forward because the capitalist class, the ruling class, would like for us to think that we should listen to experts, and that they're the ones who know, and we're just not educated enough on the issues.

But really, it is really from our lived experiences that we can know what the path forward for our movement is because we know what we need. Mm, absolutely. I love that. Thank you so much, Jenny. Yeah, I'm also a member of DSA and a big supporter, and I agree with what Deanna is saying,

and I think it's particularly important to think about this because I don't think we're going to win reproductive freedom, let alone reproductive justice, or other specifically feminist demands without a broad left movement winning power. And one of the victories of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s was that the left is already much more feminist than it was, but we are not going to be able to consolidate our feminist gains. And as we can see, we're going to lose a lot of them without a general left movement to sweep forward and win all these things that we need and beat back the power of corporations and the rich in our society. So I don't think it's enough to just have a feminist movement. I think at this point, we need to have a united general left movement that is feminist to win this stuff.

And you know, this liberal idea, we can just get abortion back to sort of the rose status quo does not address the underlying crisis that we're facing because of the loss of working class power. I mean, you can't address high maternal death rates for black women and babies without addressing that we don't have a right to healthcare in this country, you know, that people don't have a right to have kids because child care is so expensive and jobs don't provide paid leave. You can't fight sexual harassment as long as your survival depends on a job and you can be fired for any reason or no reason, which is this status quo in every workplace in America that doesn't have a union.

So the connection between these general left demands and the feminist demands. We have to understand that really clearly. So, on your thing about studying theory, we have studied guides for both the books that we mentioned. They can be accessed at womenslibrations.org, which is our website for National Women's Liberation. And the other thing we're doing is we have a pledge to aid in a bit abortion, which you can do in many ways from giving money to abortion funds to providing pills to people so they can get abortions. There are a ton of different ways that you can do this. And so we're part of a general, what I think is becoming a general movement in the US to publicly

break the law on abortion and make sure that people can get the abortions that they need. So if you're interested in that, people can go to aidandabitabortion.org or women's liberation.org, both of those sites will lead you to our pledge. And Deanna, was there anything that you wanted to share any resources, any plugs, anything like that? Yeah, definitely. Obviously, I would encourage folks to join Democratic Socialist of America, find a chapter near you

with the largest socialist organization in the United States, trying to build power for working people in the United States. And really what I love about DSA is that we try to organize in different fronts, right? So today, for example, is primary election day in New York. We have a lot of socialist running for office who are going to fight for reproductive justice and algane. And so I'm supporting our socialists late today by trying to get out the vote,

but also of course we have working groups that including a feminist working group, a labor working group that help organize campaign-based socialist projects, including, again, organizing a response to row that is based on the principles that we talked about in this episode around how to really build a socialist movement for free abortion on demand without apology.

And so I would encourage folks to get involved there. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you both so much for coming on, especially on such short notice. I think it's less than 12 hours since we first began our communication. So, you know, we typically do biweekly deep dives on topics and we don't always, you know, generally focus on breaking new stuff. So this is sort of new for us and it's a new episode that, you know, we're breaking

our two week cycle. This is going to be an extra special episode that it's going to be released today. So thank you both again so much for the time, for the wisdom, sharing your thoughts, and yeah, thank you again. Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thank you so much for having us, and yeah, let's fight this together. You know, folks are not alone. I know that there's a lot of rage. There might be a lot of disappointment, but if you consider yourself a socialist, if you're interested in organizing, this is the moment. There are millions of people that right now, their faith and so-called democratic institutions like the Supreme Court are being completely challenged.

The illusion of the ruling class having an interest in their lives is being completely challenged. So this is actually our moment to organize people into socialism, to organize people into feminism, to organize people into feminism, to actually win free abortion on demand. Thank you so much. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Radicalizing moment right now. Super important to get this stuff out there

and to reach people who are ready for real change and looking at systems. So yeah, thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with immigrant rights activists and organizer Diana Moreno and Jenny Brown, author of Without Apology, The Abortion Struggle Now and Birth Strike, The Hidden Fight over women's work.

Thanks to against me for the intermission music, Upstream The Music was composed by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate, and because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit independent arts and media, any donations that you make to upstream are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with ongoing support from the incredible folks at Gorilla Foundation. For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram Foundation. please give us a 5 star rating and review. It really helps get upstream in front of more

eyes and into more ears. Thank you. you you