American Civil Liberties Union Research Articles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Photo by niu niu on Unsplash ABSTRACT Shackling prisoners has been implemented as standard procedure when transporting prisoners in labor and during childbirth. This procedure ensures the protection of both the public and healthcare workers. However, the act of shackling pregnant prisoners violates the principles of ethics that physicians are supposed to uphold. This paper will explore how shackling pregnant prisoners violates the principle of justice and beneficence, making the practice unethical. INTRODUCTION Some states allow shackling of incarcerated pregnant women during transport and while in the hospital for labor and delivery. Currently, only 22 states have legislation prohibiting the shackling of pregnant women.[1] Although many states have anti-shackling laws prohibiting restraints, these laws also contain an “extraordinary circumstances” loophole.[2] Under this exception, officers shackle prisoners if they pose a flight risk, have any history of violence, and are a threat to themselves or others.[3] Determining as to whether a prisoner is shackled is left solely to the correctional officer.[4] Yet even state restrictions on shackling are often disregarded. In shackling pregnant prisoners during childbirth, officers and institutions are interfering with the ability of incarcerated women to have safe childbirth experiences and fair treatment. Moreover, physicians cannot exercise various ethical duties as the law constrains them. In this article, I will discuss the physical and mental harms that result from the use of restraints under the backdrop of slavery and discrimination against women of color particularly. I argue that stereotypes feed into the phenomenon of shackling pregnant women, especially pregnant women of color. I further assert that shackling makes it difficult for medical professionals to be beneficent and promote justice. BACKGROUND Female incarceration rates in the United States have been fast growing since the 1980s.[5] With a 498 percent increase in the female incarceration population between 1981  and 2021, the rates of pregnancy and childbirth by incarcerated people have also climbed.[6],[7] In 2021, over 1.2 million women were incarcerated in the United States.[8] An estimated 55,000 pregnant women are admitted to jails each year.[9],[10] Many remain incarcerated throughout pregnancy and are transported to a hospital for labor and delivery. Although the exact number of restrained pregnant inmates is unclear, a study found that 83 percent of hospital prenatal nurses reported that their incarcerated patients were shackled.[11] I.     Harms Caused by Shackling Shackling has caused many instances of physical and psychological harm. In the period before childbirth, shackled pregnant women are at high risk for falling.[12] The restraints shift pregnant women’s center of gravity, and wrist restraints prevent them from breaking a fall, increasing the risk of falling on their stomach and harming the fetus.[13] Another aspect inhibited by using restraints is testing and treating pregnancy complications. Delays in identifying and treating conditions such as hypertension, pre-eclampsia, appendicitis, kidney infection, preterm labor, and especially vaginal bleeding can threaten the lives of the mother and the fetus.[14] During labor and delivery, shackling prevents methods of alleviating severe labor pains and giving birth.[15] Usually, physicians recommend that women in labor walk or assume various positions to relieve labor pains and accelerate labor.[16] However, shackling prevents both solutions.[17] Shackling these women limits their mobility during labor, which may compromise the health of both the mother and the fetus.[18] Tracy Edwards, a former prisoner who filed a lawsuit for unlawful use of restraints during her pregnancy, was in labor for twelve hours. She was unable to move or adjust her position to lessen the pain and discomfort of labor.[19] The shackles also left the skin on her ankles red and bruised. Continued use of restraints also increases the risk of potentially life-threatening health issues associated with childbirth, such as blood clots.[20] It is imperative that pregnant women get treated rapidly, especially with the unpredictability of labor. Epidural administration can also become difficult, and in some cases, be denied due to the shackled woman’s inability to assume the proper position.[21] Time-sensitive medical care, including C-sections, could be delayed if permission from an officer is required, risking major health complications for both the fetus and the mother.[22] After childbirth, shackling impedes the recovery process. Shackling can result in post-delivery complications such as deep vein thrombosis.[23]  Walking prevents such complications but is not an option for mothers shackled to their hospital beds.[24] Restraints also prevent bonding with the baby post-delivery and the safe handling of the baby while breast feeding.[25] The use of restraints can also result in psychological harm. Many prisoners feel as though care workers treat them like “animals,” with some women having multiple restraints at once— including ankles, wrists, and even waist restraints.[26] Benidalys Rivera describes the feeling of embarrassment as she was walking while handcuffed, with nurses and patients looking on, “Being in shackles, that make you be in stress…I about to have this baby, and I’m going to go back to jail. So it’s too much.”[27] Depression among pregnant prisoners is highly prevalent. The stress of imprisonment and the anticipation of being separated from their child is often overwhelming for these mothers.[28] The inhumane action has the potential to add more stress, anxiety, and sadness to the already emotionally demanding process of giving birth. Shackling pregnant prisoners displays indifference to the medical needs of the prisoner.[29] II.     Safety as a Pretense While public safety is an argument for using shackles, several factors make escape or violence extremely unlikely and even impossible.[30] For example, administering epidural anesthesia causes numbness and eliminates flight risk.[31] Although cited as the main reason for using shackles, public safety is likely just an excuse and not the main motivator for shackling prisoners. I argue that underlying the shackling exemplifies the idea that these women should not have become pregnant. The shackling reflects a distinct discrimination: the lawmakers allowing it perhaps thought that people guilty of crimes would make bad mothers.  Public safety is just a pretense. The language used to justify the use of restraint of Shawanna Nelson, the plaintiff in Nelson v. Correctional Medical Services, discussed below, included the word “aggressive.”[32] In her case, there was no evidence that she posed any danger or was objectively aggressive. Officer Turnesky, who supervised Nelson, testified that she never felt threatened by Nelson.[33] The lack of documented attempts of escape and violence from pregnant prisoners suggests that shackling for flight risk is a false pretense and perhaps merely based on stereotypes.[34]  In 2011, an Amnesty International report noted that “Around the USA, it is common for restraints to be used on sick and pregnant incarcerated women when they are transported to and kept in hospital, regardless of whether they have a history of violence (which only a minority have) and regardless of whether they have ever absconded or attempted to escape (which few women have).”[35] In a 2020 survey of correctional officers in select midwestern prisons, 76 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with restraining pregnant women during labor and delivery.[36] If a correctional officer shackles a pregnant prisoner, it is not because they pose a risk but because of a perception that they do. This mindset is attributed to select law enforcement, who have authority to use restraints.[37] In 2022, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill prohibiting the use of restraints on pregnant inmates. However, legislators amended the bill due to the Tennessee Sherriff Association’s belief that even pregnant inmates could pose a “threat.”[38] Subjecting all prisoners to the same “precautions” because a small percentage of individuals may pose such risks could reflect stereotyping or the assumption that all incarcerated people pose danger and flight risk. To quell the (unjustified) public safety concern, there are other options that do not cause physical or mental harm to pregnant women. For example, San Francisco General Hospital does not use shackles but has deputy sheriffs outside the pregnant women’s doors.[39]  III.     Historical Context and Race           A.     Slavery and Post-Civil War The treatment of female prisoners has striking similarities to that of enslaved women. Originally, shackling of female slaves was a mechanism of control and dehumanization.[40] This enabled physical and sexual abuses. During the process of intentionally dehumanizing slaves to facilitate subordination, slave owners stripped slave women of their feminine identity.[41] Slave women were unable to exhibit the Victorian model of “good mothering” and people thought they lacked maternal feelings for their children.[42] In turn, societal perception defeminized slave women, and barred them from utilizing the protections of womanhood and motherhood. During the post-Civil War era, black women were reversely depicted as sexually promiscuous and were arrested for prostitution more often than white women.[43] In turn, society excluded black women; they were seen as lacking what the “acceptable and good” women had.[44] Some argue that the historical act of labeling black women sexually deviant influences today’s perception of black women and may lead to labeling them bad mothers.[45] Over two-thirds of incarcerated women are women of color.[46] Many reports document sexual violence and misconduct against prisoners over the years.[47] Male guards have raped, sexually assaulted, and inappropriately touched female prisoners. Some attribute the physical abuse of black female prisoners to their being depicted or stereotyped as “aggressive, deviant, and domineering.”[48] Some expect black women to express stoicism and if they do not, people label them as dangerous, irresponsible, and aggressive.[49] The treatment of these prisoners mirrors the historical oppression endured by black women during and following the era of slavery.  The act of shackling incarcerated pregnant women extends the inhumane treatment of these women from the prison setting into the hospital. One prisoner stated that during her thirty-hour labor, while being shackled, she “felt like a farm animal.”[50] Another pregnant prisoner describes her treatment by a guard stating: “a female guard grabbed me by the hair and was making me get up. She was screaming: ‘B***h, get up.’ Then she said, ‘That is what happens when you are a f***ing junkie. You shouldn’t be using drugs, or you wouldn’t be in here.”[51] Shackling goes beyond punishing by isolation from society – it is an additional punishment that is not justified.           B.     Reproductive Rights and “Bad Mothers” As with slaves not being seen as maternal, prisoners are not viewed as “real mothers.” A female prison guard said the following: “I’m a mother of two and I know what that impulse, that instinct, that mothering instinct feels like. It just takes over, you would never put your kids in harm’s way. . . . Women in here lack that. Something in their nature is not right, you know?”[52] This comment implies that incarcerated women lack maternal instinct. They are not in line with the standards of what society accepts as a “woman” and “mother” and are thought to have abandoned their roles as caretakers in pursuit of deviant behaviors. Without consideration of racial discrimination, poverty issues, trauma, and restricted access to the child right after delivery, these women are stereotyped as bad mothers simply because they are in prison. Reminiscent of the treatment of female black bodies post-civil war and the use of reproductive interventions (for example, Norplant and forced sterilization) in exchange for shorter sentences, I argue that shackles are a form of reproductive control. Justification for the use of shackles even includes their use as a “punitive instrument to remind the prisoner of their punishment.”[53] However, a prisoner’s pregnancy should have no relevance to their sentence.[54] Using shackles demonstrates to prisoners that society tolerates childbirth but does not support it.[55] The shackling is evidence that women are being punished “for bearing children, not for breaking the law.”[56]  Physicians and healthcare workers, as a result, are responsible for providing care for the delivery and rectifying any physical problems associated with the restraints. The issues that arise from the use of restraints place physicians in a position more complex than they experience with regular healthy pregnancies.           C.     Discrimination In the case of Ferguson v. City of Charleston, a medical university subjected black woman to involuntary drug testing during pregnancy. In doing so, medical professionals collaborated with law enforcement to penalize black women for their use of drugs during pregnancy.[57] The Court held the drug tests were an unreasonable search and violated the Fourth Amendment. Ferguson v. City of Charleston further reveals an unjustified assumption: the medical and legal community seemed suspicious of black women and had perhaps predetermined them more likely to use drugs while pregnant. Their fitness to become mothers needed to be proven, while wealthy, white women were presumed fit.[58] The correctional community similarly denies pregnant prisoners’ medical attention. In the case of Staten v. Lackawanna County, an African American woman whose serious medical needs were treated indifferently by jail staff was forced to give birth in her cell.[59] This woman was punished for being pregnant in prison through the withholding of medical attention and empathy. IV.     Failure to Follow Anti-Shackling Laws Despite 22 states having laws against shackling pregnant prisoners, officers do not always follow these laws. In 2015, the Correctional Association of New York reported that of the 27 women who gave birth under state custody, officers shackled 23 women in violation of the anti-shackling laws.[60] The lawyer of Tracy Edwards, an inmate who officers shackled unlawfully during her twelve-hour labor stated, “I don’t think we can assume that just because there’s a law passed, that’s automatically going to trickle down to the prison.”[61] Even with more restrictions on shackling, it may still occur, partly due to the stereotype that incarcerated women are aggressive and dangerous. V.     Constitutionality The Eighth Amendment protects people from cruel and unusual punishment. In Brown vs. Plata, the court stated, “Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons.”[62] In several cases, the legal community has held shackling to be unconstitutional as it violates the Eighth Amendment unless specifically justified. In the case of Nelson v. Correctional Medical Services, a pregnant woman was shackled for 12 hours of labor with a brief respite while she pushed, then re-shackled. The shackling caused her physical and emotional pain, including intense cramping that could not be relieved due to positioning and her inability to get up to use a toilet.[63] The court held that a clear security concern must justify shackling. The court cited a similar DC case and various precedents for using the Eighth Amendment to hold correctional facilities and hospitals accountable.[64] An Arkansas law similarly states that shackling must be justified by safety or risk of escape.[65] If the Thirteenth Amendment applied to those convicted of crimes, shackling pregnant incarcerated people would be unconstitutional under that amendment as well as the Eighth. In the Civil Rights Cases, Congress upheld the right “to enact all necessary and proper laws for the obliteration and prevention of slavery with all its badges and incidents.”[66] Section two of the Thirteenth Amendment condemns any trace or acts comparable to that of slavery. Shackling pregnant prisoners, stripping them of their dignity, and justification based on stereotypes all have origins in the treatment of black female slaves. Viewed through the lens of the Thirteenth Amendment, the act of shackling would be unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the Thirteenth Amendment explicitly excludes people convicted of a crime. VI.     Justice As a result of the unconstitutional nature of shackling, physicians should have a legal obligation, in addition to their ethical duty, to protect their patients. The principle of justice requires physicians to take a stand against the discriminatory treatment of their patients, even under the eye of law enforcement.[67],[68] However, “badge and gun intimidation,” threats of noncompliance, and the fear of losing one’s license can impede a physician’s willingness to advocate for their patients. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) finds the use of physical restraints interferes with the ability of clinicians to practice medicine safely.[69] ACOG, The American Medical Association, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, and other organizations oppose using restraints on pregnant incarcerated people.[70] Yet, legislators can adopt shackling laws without consultation with physicians. The ACOG argues that “State legislators are taking it upon themselves to define complex medical concepts without reference to medical evidence. Some of the penalties [faced by OBGYNs] for violating these vague, unscientific laws include criminal sentences.”[71] Legislation that does not consider medical implications or discourages physicians’ input altogether is unjust. In nullifying the voice of a physician in matters pertaining to the patient’s treatment, physicians are prevented from fulfilling the principle of justice, making the act of shackling patients unethical. VII.     Principle of Beneficence The principle of beneficence requires the prevention of harm, the removal of harm, and the promotion of good.[72] Beneficence demands the physician not only avoid harm but benefit patients and promote their welfare.[73]  The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation states that physicians must work with other professionals to increase patient safety and improve the quality of care.[74] In doing so, physicians can adequately treat patients with the goal of prevention and healing. It is difficult to do good when law enforcement imposes on doctors to work around shackles during labor and delivery. Law enforcement leaves physicians and healthcare workers responsible not only to provide care for the delivery, but also rectify any ailments associated with the restraints. The issues arising from using restraints place physicians in a position more complex than they experience with other pregnancies. Doctors cannot prevent the application of the shackles and can only request officers to take them off the patient.[75] Physicians who simply go along with shackling are arguably violating the principle of beneficence. However, for most, rather than violating the principle of beneficence overtly, physicians may simply have to compromise. Given the intricate nature of the situation, physicians are tasked with minimizing potential harm to the best of their abilities while adhering to legal obligations.[76] It is difficult to pin an ethics violation on the ones who do not like the shackles but are powerless to remove them. Some do argue that this inability causes physicians to violate the principle of beneficence.[77] However, promoting the well-being of their patients within the boundaries of the law limits their ability to exercise beneficence. For physicians to fulfill the principle of beneficence to the fullest capacity, they must have an influence on law. Protocols and assessments on flight risks made solely by the officers and law enforcement currently undermine the physician’s expertise. These decisions do not consider the health and well-being of the pregnant woman. As a result, law supersedes the influence of medicine and health care. CONCLUSION People expect physicians to uphold the four major principles of bioethics. However, their inability to override restraints compromises their ability to exercise beneficence. Although pledging to enforce these ethical principles, physicians have little opportunity to influence anti-shackling legislation. Instead of being included in conversations regarding medical complexities, legislation silences their voices. Policies must include the physician's voice as they affect their ability to treat patients. Officers should not dismiss a physician's request to remove shackles from a woman if they are causing health complications. A woman's labor should not harm her or her fetus because the officer will not remove her shackles.[78] A federal law could end shackling pregnant incarcerated people. Because other options are available to ensure the safety of the public and the prisoner, there is no ethical justification for shackling pregnant prisoners. An incarcerated person is a human being and must be treated with dignity and respect. To safeguard the well-being of incarcerated women and the public, it is essential for advocates of individual rights to join forces with medical professionals to establish an all-encompassing solution.   - [1] Ferszt, G. G., Palmer, M., & McGrane, C. (2018). 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(2010). The Birth of Bioethics. Oxford University Press. [77] Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (2019). [78] Amnesty International USA. (1999, March). “Not part of my sentence” Violations of the Human Rights of Women in Custody. Amnesty International USA. Retrieved March 12, 2023, from https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/usa-not-part-of-my-sentence-violations-of-the-human-rights-of-women-in-custody/

The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike

The 1926–27 textile strike in Passaic, New Jersey, is now forgotten. Far better remembered is the Paterson silk strike of 1913, with its lore of the Industrial Workers of the World, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and the Madison Square Garden pageant of John Reed and Mabel Dodge. Paterson will always hold the greater romantic allure, but the Passaic strike nevertheless deserved rescue from obscurity. Jacob A. Zumoff accomplishes that well in The Red Thread. Zumoff's prior book, The Communist International and American Communism, 1919–1929 (2014), established him as a serious contributor to the history of the early American Communist movement. The Red Thread further illuminates that subject while engaging wider histories of working-class radicalism in the 1920s as well as the history of New Jersey, where Zumoff teaches at New Jersey City University.In the winter of 1926, fifteen thousand mass-production workers, many of them Polish and Hungarian immigrants, and half of them women, silenced Passaic's woolen and worsted mills. The mills supplied the garment trades of nearby Manhattan, where the organized needle trades, with their Socialist and Communist memberships, reached out in solidarity. The mainstream unions were no help at all. The AFL was under the leadership of William Green, the uninspired inheritor of Samuel Gompers's legacy; its affiliated United Textile Workers (UTW) was the quintessence of a conservative skilled male craft union. The strike erupted in spite of them and outside their ranks. Only one Communist was working then in Passaic's mills, but the millowners and conservative unionists alike charged that the Passaic strike was Communist-instigated. Zumoff shows that its actual motivations were grievances of low wages, poor conditions, industrial authoritarianism, and such metrics as high rates of infant mortality. Simultaneously, he shows that Communists, though a very small proportion of strike participants, rapidly became central to the leadership of the strike, vigorously helping attract liberals and radicals to its cause.The key leader of the strike, immensely popular among the workers, was Albert Weisbord, a graduate of City College and Harvard Law School who joined the party and became a textile organizer in Massachusetts before moving to Paterson and becoming a silk worker in the year before the Passaic strike broke out. How precisely Weisbord became the leader of the United Front Committee (UFC), the strikers’ organization in Passaic, is not well explained by Zumoff. In the decades after the strike, Weisbord would prove himself a study in raging narcissism and sectarianism, but psychology and biography are not Zumoff's strengths. He focuses instead on demonstrating, convincingly, that the Passaic strike strategy emerged from the national Communist leadership, not Weisbord alone, contrary to Weisbord's later self-centered claims. We must await a future explanation of what made Weisbord so effective in the Passaic moment given his personal shortcomings, later so much in abundance.The Red Thread brings attention to lesser-known Passaic Communist leaders such as the Hungarian worker Gustav Deak. It sheds much light on the implications of the labor policy of the rival Communist Party factions led by C. E. Ruthenberg and William Z. Foster in the 1920s, since Weisbord was aligned with the Ruthenberg group at a time when party labor policy was more heavily influenced by Foster. Informed by materials from Comintern archives, The Red Thread is written from an explicitly revolutionary socialist position, tacitly Trotskyist. This perspective gives the book predictable coordinates: sympathy for the Bolshevik Revolution and the early Communist Party's objective of overturning capitalism; opposition to the Stalinization already underway in the party during the Passaic strike; admiration for James P. Cannon; and criticism of mainstream political parties and liberalism.There is greater originality in Zumoff's analysis of the problem faced by Communists who sought to lead and organize militant striking workers to victory in Passaic without falling into what Foster and others called “dual unionism,” or the creation of new unions antagonistic to the AFL, even as the AFL and UTW took little interest in the struggle. The Communist-led UFC sought to forge an effective strike organization while advocating for the UTW and AFL to admit the Passaic strikers. This proved a difficult needle to thread.The Red Thread is not a narrative history. Chapters cover themes, such as the severe police repression and violence directed against the strikers and their supporters; the involvement of liberals and intellectuals, including the labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse (whom Zumoff proves secretly became a member of the Communist Party in the early 1920s); the campaigns of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and International Labor Defense (ILD) against court injunctions and incarcerations; the creative efforts spawned by the strike, including a silent film inspired by it; and the role of women and gender in the strike. One of the book's best features is its twenty stunning images, including photographs of police clubbing Passaic workers and young women strikers in flapper attire walking saucily through a gunmen's gauntlet.The Passaic strike ended in defeat. Weisbord was forced out of the leadership as a condition for UFC members to be admitted to the UFT. No union recognition was forthcoming from the millowners, nor were contracts, lasting labor organization, or improved pay and conditions. Zumoff lays this abject failure at the feet of conservative trade union leaders. He is entirely persuasive in that, but another historian might have weighed more critically the strengths and weaknesses of the vanguardist left, with its assumption that it was fitting for Communist Party leadership in New York to set the policy of a strike in an adjacent state carried out by workers who overwhelmingly were not party members. Zumoff's brief conclusion casts the Passaic strike as a precursor of the industrial unionism of the 1930s with at least some relevance to immigrant workers in New Jersey today.

Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema by Maya Montañez Smuckler

Reviewed by: Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema by Maya Montañez Smuckler Alicia Kozma Maya Montañez Smuckler, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970 as American Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. In 2015, Hollywood studios made headlines as the as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) accepted a request made by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California to investigate systemic discrimination in the hiring of women film directors. While mainstream media reported the inquiry as a potential watershed moment for gendered labor equality in the industry, little was made of the fact that the EEOC had been down this road with Hollywood before. Thankfully, Maya Montañez Smuckler's Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors & the Feminist Reform of 1970as American Cinema painstakingly narrates the lesser-known history of the intersection between employment oversight, Hollywood guilds, studios, and the fight for women's equal participation in filmmaking. Combining oral history, interviews, and in-depth archival research focused on internal guild publications, press coverage, legal records, and trades, Montañez Smuckler reconstructs the advocacy efforts of three professional unions—the Directors Guild of American (DGA), the Screen Actors Guild of America (SAG) and the Writers Guild of American (WGA)—from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, as the rise of "Women's Committees" within each union fought in various ways against the hiring discrimination of women film workers. These efforts intersected with the federal efforts to diversify the Hollywood labor pool, beginning with a late 1960s EEOC hearing on job discrimination and ending with a devastating mid-1980s ruling that stymied legal recourse for discriminated workers. Intertwined with this history, Liberating Women recounts the rise of women filmmakers in Hollywood during this time of heady time of social, cultural, and political change. The book's prologue traces the impact of the New American Cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s in New York City as a critical creative space for the women directors like Shirley Clarke and Juleen Compton, precursors to the women who would spur on more than a decade of creativity and advocacy in Hollywood. Chapter 1 notes the first attempts of feminist reform as the second wave feminist movement bisected the growing number of women directors vocal about their lack of opportunities in Hollywood. The EEOC makes its first foray into Hollywood in 1969, requiring the industry set measurable benchmarks for hiring minority workers; women film workers were not included in this plan because the EEOC did not consider them a large enough pool of workers to merit protections. In what would become a recurring standard, the EEOC left it up to the studios to enforce hiring benchmarks and protections in good faith. jThey did not live up to their requirements, and with the exclusion of women workers from agreement, it was left to guild women to demand their own seats at the table. Chapters 2 and 3 integrate institutional efforts at gendered labor equality while focusing on the individual women working within and without the Hollywood system as writers, producers, and directors. For many of these women, Liberating Hollywood is the first substantial academic treatment of their work. While Montañez Smuckler does not claim that these women worked in communication with one another, they do represent a cadre of film laborers fighting to produce work in a system that was openly hostile to their inclusion. Many of these women may have [End Page 67] not been professional colleagues, but they exist in camaraderie with one another. While both chapters provided professional biographies and overarching critical filmic and industrial analysis, Chapter 2 chronicles women directors through their "cultures of production" (77) and Chapter 3 through the rise of the "new women's film" (159). Chapter 2, then, traces the studio, art house, and/or exploitation work of Elaine May, Barbara Loden, Karen Arthur, Joan Micklin Silver, Penny Allen, Stephanie Rothman, Beverly and Fred Sebastian, and Barbara Peeters. Chapter 3 includes Joan Darling, Jane Wagner, Joan Tewkesbury, Joan Rivers, and Claudia Weill. While these two chapters primarily concentrate on individual filmmakers, Liberating Hollywood does not lose the thread of its larger spotlight on...

Not Policies. People

Navigating literacy and policy during an era of polarization Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books. Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not water but kerosene. ~ Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 ~ (Bradbury, 2013). My heart is heavy. In 2022, I wish I were using a Bradbury quote to launch a lesson on author's craft, or perhaps as an example of the power of speculative fiction to comment on contemporary issues. Instead, I offer the quote as a warning, as vital now as when it was penned, around 70 years ago. Much like a viral pandemic rising from the pages of speculative fiction to upend our individual and collective realities, so too have threats of censorship and control in the classroom (Schwartz, 2022). In both cases, as speculation turns into our lived experiences, the questions we ask ourselves shift from “What if?” or “When?” to “How did this happen?” and “What now?” In this article, I will address those questions as they pertain to the current moment at the intersection of literacy and policy. Because much of what I will discuss is controversial, I emphasize that the views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of this journal. Starting with a review of state-level politics, I will briefly describe the potential consequences of literacy policies for students and educators. I will also offer advice on how to navigate such a fraught landscape during an era that is not only politicized, but extremely polarized. But first, a bit of personal history. As an educator, I never intended to wade into the intersection of literacy and policy. Like so many others who work in schools, I was always vaguely aware of shifting policy trends: the rise of No Child Left Behind in 2001 and the subsequent increase in high-stakes testing, changes in supports for students with identified learning disabilities, the spread of school report cards and teacher accountability systems. But such trends were always at the periphery of my day-to-day focus on the students in my classroom and getting from one lesson to the next. Eight years ago, that all changed. During my initial year as a third-grade classroom teacher in Denver, the state instituted the READ Act (Colo. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 22-7-1201), Colorado's version of a third-grade trigger law. Rooted in concerns about literacy achievement, the law suggested retention for third graders identified as 1 year or more below grade level in reading. For 3 years, I complied with the requirements of the law, including creating READ Plans and meeting with the families of my students flagged for retention. In 2016, I moved to Michigan to begin my doctoral studies. Imagine my surprise when, a few months after arriving, nearly the same law passed (Mich. Comp. Laws Ann. § 380.1280f). A key difference was that Michigan's version of the law mandated retention, with the first round of retention decisions scheduled for spring 2020. Although certain exemptions were possible, Michigan's stricter reading law had the potential to impact thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of third graders (Higgins & Tanner, 2016). Worried about the consequences for all of those children, and with a window of time to act before the law took effect, I co-founded the Don’t Leave Us Behind campaign to advocate for amending the retention portion of the reading law. Working with fellow students, local teachers, educational activists, and others, we have had a 5-year crash course in state-level politics. What follows are some of our lessons learned, which I hope will prove beneficial to others. Early in our campaign, I was struck by the similarity in language between Michigan's new law and Colorado's existing law. As I researched the issue further and looked to other states with similar reading laws, I noticed that they all sounded similar (DellaVecchia, 2022). This is not a coincidence. The educational system in the United States is unusual. Whereas most developed nations have a strong centralized department of education, which guides curriculum and policies, those responsibilities in the United States are held by each state (U.S. Const. amend. X). Therefore, the route to policy introduction and implementation runs straight through state legislatures. The vast majority of states are represented by a political trifecta: a single party in control of both chambers of the legislature, as well as the governorship. As of this writing, the Republican Party has 23 state trifectas and the Democratic Party has 14, leaving only 13 states with divided governments (Ballotpedia, 2022). As a result, the party in control of the trifecta can introduce and pass bills that are consistent with their policy priorities, and the priorities of their donors, regardless of public opinion. Acknowledging that both parties take advantage of this situation, Republican politicians have become particularly adept at swiftly lining up behind specific issues (e.g., Caughey et al., 2017). Part of their efficiency is a result of ready-made legislation prepared by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a long-standing network for conservative politicians to share template bills with one another (Penniman, 2002). “Model Policies” currently hosted on their website, freely available to all, include the American Civics and History Act (ALEC, 2021), which prohibits public schools from “forcing” students to agree with any given point of view on a controversial topic, and the Academic Transparency Act (ALEC, 2022), which requires schools to post all of their learning materials and lesson plans for review by the public. Policy priorities are also advanced by Heritage Action for America (n.d.-a), the lobbying arm of the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation (n.d.). Although they do not publicly publish template legislation in the same way as ALEC, a leaked video released by Mother Jones revealed the executive director of Heritage Action admitting to writing the language for a voter suppression bill and distributing it to sympathetic politicians in key states (Berman & Surgey, 2021). In addition, the Heritage Action website hosts “issue toolkits” on a variety of hot-button topics, including a suite of materials to “reject critical race theory” (n.d.-b). These topic examples likely sound familiar, as conservative networks are currently using a state-by-state playbook to spread them across the country. Since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or other measures to control material taught in classrooms, with materials concerning racism or LGBTQ+ content subject to particular scrutiny, and in 17 states such policies have already become law (Schwartz, 2022). In an alarming development, many of these laws transfer policy enforcement from the hands of the state to individuals, allowing citizens to sue if any “prohibited content” is taught (Greene, 2022). Looping back to third-grade reading laws, decades of research indicate detrimental effects for children forced to repeat a grade (Holmes, 1989; Holmes & Matthews, 1984; Jackson, 1975; Jimerson, 2001). That being said, while recognizing that the mandatory retention component is unnecessarily punitive, third-grade reading laws are essentially pro-literacy. Grounded in a concern for literacy achievement, reading laws in many states include beneficial supports like targeted professional development, plans for working more closely with families, and hiring additional literacy interventionists. On the other hand, we are now witnessing a wave of anti-literacy policies: if the fundamental role of literacy is to foster communication, these new bills are about silencing, erasure, and control. Anti-literacy policies can be divided into three broad categories. As a reaction to the widespread protests against police brutality sparked by the murder of George Floyd, one basket of bills seeks to silence conversations about race, racism, and the lasting structural impacts of chattel slavery on life in the United States (Greene, 2022). Rather than reckon with the violent and inhumane aspects of our shared national history, these bills propose silence as a solution. A second basket of bills seeks to prohibit the teaching of any material that references the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals (King, 2022). By centering heterosexual and cisgender identities as normal, and by banning the mention of LGBTQ+ lives, these bills seek to erase their realities. The third category of bills follows from the other two. This group of bills requires teachers and districts to make their curricular materials and lesson plans available for public display, so that they can be monitored (ALEC, 2022). The proliferation of anti-literacy policies is dismaying, but not a surprise. Repressive legislation is a tactic often used by those in power who are threatened by change. In educational systems, more often than not, this manifests as literacy policies. Because words are how we think and communicate, they are also a route to control. We have seen this before. Prior to 1865, teaching enslaved individuals was illegal, as a way to prevent access to information and the spread of plans to win freedom (Maddox, 2021). Despite the consequences, enslaved people found education and educated themselves, as they understood the power of literacy. This fear of literacy as power has fueled the intentional underfunding of schools that serve Black students from the Reconstruction era to the present day (Mendelsohn, 2017). Taking a wider view, one positive cultural shift over the past few years has been the promotion and use of person-first language. We now speak of a person who is unhoused or a student with a learning disability. This is a humanizing change. I advocate for a similar change when it comes to speaking about policies. For too long, our history books have talked about “Jim Crow Laws,” as if the laws had their own volition. We need person-first language here, too: White supremacists who passed Jim Crow Laws. Similarly, the subject of a sentence should not be “anti-CRT legislation,” but rather politicians trying to erase history who pass anti-CRT legislation. As a profession, and as a nation, we cannot allow our language to cloud the fact that anti-literacy policies are intentional acts. Who is trying to change our social contracts? Not policies. People. Policy has the power to cause instant and drastic change in our social landscape. However, the changes cascading from a new law are often gradual. Because humans have difficulty observing gradual changes over longer spans of time, we have a hard time recognizing who has been harmed as a result of policy implementations. We can use the retention component of third-grade reading legislation as an example. Looking at Florida as the starting point for such laws in 2002, nearly 28,000 students were retained in the first year of implementation alone (Florida Department of Education, n.d.). That rate soon fell, but that was before we had any information about the emotional, social, or academic implications for those tens of thousands of young people (Jasper, 2016). In the two decades since the passage of Florida's law, the retention rate has been about 5% in all states that mandate retention for struggling readers (DellaVecchia, 2022). Considering that 17 states currently require retention, and assuming about 5,000 students per state, that is somewhere around 85,000 students who are being retained every year. Although some researchers have conducted longitudinal studies (Jimerson et al., 1997; Jimerson & Ferguson, 2007; Silberglitt et al., 2006), tracking young people over time is complex, so we have very little collective knowledge about how these particular reading policies are impacting the lives of these tens of thousands of children over the long term. If we do not have a clear picture of the implications of third-grade reading laws after decades of implementation and research, then we truly have no idea of the consequences of these recent waves of anti-literacy policies. But we can speculate. When it comes to laws dealing with race and racism, we know how important it is for students of color to see themselves reflected in the curriculum (Dover, 2009). Part of that reflection is an acknowledgment of all history: the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the harassment of immigrants, the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals. That reflection must include recognizing more than 400 years of human slavery in the Americas (Waxman, 2019). Hiding the past does a disservice to the experiences of millions of people and ignores how the past lives on in the present. Do we really want to live in a country where this paragraph alone would disqualify this very article from being discussed in a classroom? It is not only students who are harmed by policies that seek to censor and control but also educators as well. For educators of color, educators who identify as LGBTQ+, and those who identify as both, their humanity is affronted. They receive the same message as their students: that their story is less than, other than, and something so harmful that it needs to be kept away from “innocent” children. These policies also have a chilling effect on the classroom. According to a recent report by the RAND Corporation, nearly a quarter of teachers have been told to limit conversations about potentially controversial issues, a ratio rising to 1 in 3 for states with an anti-literacy law on the books (Woo et al., 2022). As a society, we do not benefit from silence and erasure. Who is harmed when these types of restrictive laws pass? Not policies. People. The rise of anti-literacy policies may feel overwhelming and, depending on the composition of your state government, may be very difficult to prevent from being voted into law. Defying these laws also carries risk, as penalties vary from personal repercussions to your district being denied some percentage of state funding. However, all is not lost. What follows are my suggestions for standing up and pushing back against anti-literacy policies. I cannot overstate the importance of voting. Because of national narratives and controversies, much of the conversation around voting focuses on the presidency and other federal offices. But, as I have highlighted in this article, the policies that affect us on a daily basis are state-level. State-level elections receive far less attention, but have a dramatic impact when it comes to education. Participation in national presidential elections in the United States is already low: 66.8% in 2020 (U.S. Census, 2021). Participation in midterm elections, which often include state-level offices, is lower (McDonald, n.d.), and turnout for midterm primaries is incredibly low (Desilver, 2016). As an illustrative example, Detroit is dominated by a single party, so the winner of the primary is all but guaranteed to win in the general election. Turnout in the city during the most recent primary was only about 15% (City of Detroit, 2022). It is tough to make a case that the winners truly represent the people when so many of the people have opted not to participate. In another example from the same Michigan primary, a local public library fell only 36 votes short of passing a proposal to fund needed renovations (Lester, 2022). Every vote counts. Blocking a bill is easier while it is still pending in the legislature than trying to amend or overturn it once it has become law. So, it is useful to be aware of the content of bills in the pipeline to know when to intervene. Your state legislature likely has an education committee in each chamber. This small handful of people wields tremendous influence on the direction of educational policy in your state. If possible, register to receive their agendas by email, which will list the bills under consideration that week. Monitor those emails and keep an eye out for issues that concern you. Part of why the work of your state's education committee is disconnected from the people is that they meet during the day, during the workweek. Visiting the state capitol at 9:00 AM on a Tuesday is not easy for most families, so it is no wonder that the audience usually includes more paid lobbyists than concerned citizens. However, if a consequential bill is up for discussion and you are able to attend, providing a comment in-person will carry more weight than an email or a phone call. If visiting in-person is not possible, you may be able to watch a livestream or a recording of the education committee hearing. When participating remotely, you will not be able to interact in quite the same way, but it is still a useful strategy for keeping track of issues that may or may not be covered by the local news. A lesser-known way of interacting with state legislators is to attend the coffee hours many hold at locations around their district. Now that pandemic restrictions have eased, keep an eye out for these intimate events. In most cases, only a handful of people will be there, so you will have the chance for a one-on-one conversation. Of course, coffee hours are a wonderful opportunity to meet and speak to your own state senator or representative. Even more importantly, this is a way to have a conversation with politicians on the other side of an issue from you, who would be unlikely to respond to your emails or phone calls. This was the way I was able to speak to the chairs of the education committees for both the Michigan Senate and House; rather than traveling to the state capitol, I attended coffee hours in their home districts. This may not guarantee that the legislator will act on what you say, but it is an excellent way to make your voice heard. As ordinary citizens, we often do not have access to the funding available to corporations or political action committees. What we do have is numbers. Referring back to the state-by-state playbook that I mentioned earlier, it may not be a surprise that states with Republican trifectas, including Michigan and Wisconsin, used their power to systematically dismantle unions (Grier, 2012; Johnson, 2021). By voting to become so-called “right-to-work” states, educators no longer have to join a union. This results in a smaller membership, which dilutes the union's strength (Schneider & Berkshire, 2020). The teaching profession is already “cellular” in nature; we may be a large profession by numbers, but we do the majority of our work in our own classrooms, in isolation from one another (Lortie, 1975). Unions are one way for us to speak with a single voice. So, if you are not already a member of a union, you might consider joining one. Since unions often provide legal protections to their members, your union may be able to provide legal guidance or representation if you are challenged for something you have taught in your classroom. If you are displeased with the direction of your local union, you might consider starting a faction on your own. In most states, teachers in any given school are members of their district's affiliate of the state teachers' union. This leads to another form of separation; each local is often turned inwards, concerned with district issues, rather than coordinating with other locals to address statewide concerns. In response to this disconnect, a group of progressive educators across the state founded the Michigan Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (MI CORE). This grassroots effort connects union members with similar concerns across districts. For those of you who are not in a union-covered position, or who are not interested in joining a union, consider connecting with a citywide or a statewide educational justice group. Again, looking to Michigan for examples, these could include groups like 482Forward, based in Detroit. They have chapters in various neighborhoods to make sure they are nimble and responsive to the different needs of different communities. They have developed a relationship with the local school district, and they are a regular presence at school board meetings. Most importantly, they have a Legislative Action Workgroup, recognizing that policy change is the only surefire way to address the root causes of problems. They organize regular visits to the capitol, organize buses to transport as many citizens as possible, and arrange meetings with legislators. A similar organization on the statewide level is the Michigan Education Justice Coalition. Nationally, the American Civil Liberties Union is already organizing against anti-literacy policies on First Amendment grounds, and is always looking for volunteers. If you are unable to locate an organization in your state that is addressing issues of concern to you, consider founding your own! After all, what is the answer to all of these tangled issues? Not policies. People. I have no known conflict of interest to disclose. PEN America Index of Educational Gag Orders https://bit.ly/EdGagOrders UCLA School of Law: Critical Race Theory Forward Tracking Project https://crtforward.law.ucla.edu/ Brooklyn Public Library: Books Unbanned https://www.bklynlibrary.org/books-unbanned Michigan Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (MI CORE) https://www.facebook.com/COREmichigan/ 482Forward https://www.facebook.com/482Forward Michigan Education Justice Coalition https://www.facebook.com/miedjusticecoalition/ Gabriel P. DellaVecchia recently received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA; email [email protected].

The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade by Samantha Barbas David G. Dalin (bio) The Rise and Fall of Morris Ernst, Free Speech Renegade. By Samantha Barbas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 424 pp. Morris Ernst was one of the best-known liberal lawyers and most celebrated civil libertarians in America, serving for many years as chief legal counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and achieving fame as an opponent of literary censorship and representative of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood. He was born in Uniontown, Alabama, in 1888, and moved to Manhattan with his family two years later. After attending the Horace Mann School, he graduated from Williams College and three years later from New York Law School, which he attended as a night student. In 1915, together with one of his Williams classmates, Ernst co-founded the New York City law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, with which he remained associated until his death in 1976. During the 1920s, influenced by the landmark free speech jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who would become his friend, Ernst began to add free speech cases to his growing legal practice. In 1927 Ernst joined the ACLU board and would remain one of the best known and most successful ACLU attorneys for the next forty years. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst became the "preeminent law firm for the left," as the law firm's "tremendous commercial practice allowed it to represent liberal causes at reduced rate or pro bono" (79). It "was also gaining a reputation as a literary law firm," becoming counsel for several major magazines … including the New Yorker and the Nation, which shared many board members with the ACLU" (79). As a civil liberties lawyer, Ernst achieved national prominence and notoriety in 1934 when he successfully defended James Joyce's highly controversial novel Ulysses against charges of obscenity. As Barbas notes, "Joyce's novel had a long history of suppression in the United States," with the post office confiscating and burning copies, though that did not stop Ulysses from being widely read (152). Ernst, a brilliantly flamboyant attorney whom Barbas describes as "a civil liberties lawyer who adored controversy," declared that Ulysses was the "only volume of literary importance still under a ban" in the country (1). He persuaded the judge that Ulysses was not obscene – that it would not corrupt even those members of society "whose minds are open to such immoral influences" (1). Following his 1934 court victory, Ulysses became [End Page 305] a best seller, and the case, while a triumph in the battle against literary and artistic censorship, also was personally enriching for Ernst, who had made a deal with Random House that if he won he would earn a royalty on every copy sold. A liberal Democrat, throughout his legal career Ernst received major political appointments from Democratic Party leaders, which enhanced his prominence and influence in American politics and public life. In 1929, Ernst, who was considered one of the state's outstanding insurance experts, was appointed by New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the state insurance commission charged with regulating all insurance business in New York. Three years later, FDR appointed Ernst to the New York State Banking Board, a powerful board established in 1932 to set rules for the regulation of the state's financial institutions. By the late 1930s, Ernst was being mentioned by the columnist Drew Pearson as a candidate for mayor of New York. In 1946, Ernst was appointed by President Harry Truman to the newly established President's Commission on Civil Rights. Though Barbas claims that Ernst remained proud of his Jewish heritage, there is almost no discussion of it in this book. Ernst apparently followed in the footsteps of his parents who were mostly religiously nonobservant, and he became estranged from Judaism as a teenager, never again setting foot inside a synagogue and holding a lifelong conviction that religion was irrational. As Barbas discusses in the second part of this book, Ernst was a man of stark contradictions, waging an intensely personal battle against communism and publicly supporting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's...

Advocating for Transgender Immigrants in Detention Centers: Cisnormativity as a Tool for Racialized Social Control

Despite public concern over immigration enforcement, little attention has been given to transgender immigrants, who are disproportionately at risk for arrest and deportation. Organizations dedicated to protecting LGBT people’s rights and immigrant rights have been working to address this issue and shape policy decisions to better protect transgender immigrants in detention centers; however, research has not investigated how these organizations frame transgender immigrant detainees and their experience in detention to accomplish their goals. This current study uses a content analysis of public documents spanning 2009–2021 from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Transgender Law Center (TLC) to investigate how two legal advocacy organizations frame the issue of transgender immigrants within detention centers. The ACLU rarely discusses transgender immigrants and thus upholds cisnormativity. When they do discuss transgender immigrants, their transgender identity is referenced as a singular issue in isolation from other facets of their identity. The TLC, on the other hand, frames immigration detention for transgender immigrants as part of a larger web of oppression. Through a comparison of the ACLU and TLC, this study underscores the role of cisnormativity as a tool for racialized social control. Findings highlight the importance of a critical, intersectional approach to immigration advocacy and scholarship that challenges the cisnormative assumptions guiding the current immigration system. Implications for future research and service provision are discussed.

Police body‐worn camera policies as democratic deficits? Comparing public support for policy alternatives

AbstractResearch SummaryPolicies that govern the use of body‐worn cameras (BWCs) by police vary widely between American cities. However, it is currently unclear whether citizen preferences for these policies vary in a similar manner. More specifically, do BWC policies reflect citizen preferences or are existing policies disfavored by a majority of the public? To investigate these questions, we randomly sampled 1000 respondents for each of the three representative metropolitan areas, Los Angeles, CA; Seattle, WA; and Charlotte, NC, in addition to a further 1000 Americans across the country to inquire about policy preferences. We found that most respondents prefer the BWC policies recommended by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to those currently implemented in their regional police departments. In other words, elements of the BWC policies in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Charlotte do not reflect residents’ preferences.Policy ImplicationsThe policy stating that footage access should be given to parents of minors, a deceased subject's family members, or anyone filmed in an encounter, a model promoted by ACLU, is a clear favorite in the United States at large, but also in the three cities we studied. The policy stating that footage access should not be given to superior officers to find disciplinary infractions, also backed by the ACLU, is less popular among Americans at large and residents of Seattle. Beyond the high support for BWCs within the American population, decision makers need to make sure that the policies that govern the use of this tool respect democratic principles. Therefore, the voice of citizens needs to be heard to avoid a democratic deficit.

Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in Hague v. CIO

In the pantheon of petty American tyrants, Frank Hague (1876–1956) holds a prominent place. In the history of the Great Depression, his name is often used as shorthand for bad bossism and police brutality as workers sought to fashion a new deal for themselves and their families. Donald R. Rogers sets out to provide a historiographical corrective by situating Hague and his legal battles with the Committee for Industrial Organization / Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) within the larger contexts of the era. In Rogers's treatment, Hague remains the recalcitrant bully mayor who used the police to harass, beat, and chase unionists and organizers out of the city. Rogers argues, however, that “the grand economic, political, and legal realities of the 1930s [were] as much responsible for the CIO-Hague conflict as were the mayor's abuses and the CIO-ACLU efforts to stop him” (6).The origin of the precedent-setting US Supreme Court ruling in Hague v. CIO (1939) was an organizing struggle in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1937. Like many such efforts, the CIO's fight in Jersey City took place in an ethnically and racially diverse city governed by a political machine that used patronage and billy clubs to get its way. When he was first elected in 1917, Hague was the archetype of the second-generation machine boss, who combined Progressive reforms with business boosterism. Early in his career, Hague proved himself to be quite malleable, changing his governing style to accommodate new immigrants, runaway businesses from New York City, and the growth of the American Federation of Labor in the late 1910s and early 1920s. At the advent of the New Deal, in 1933, Hague won reelection, solidifying Jersey City as another urban, Democratic stronghold. But although Hague had been able to change with the times in the 1910s and 1920s, his political outlook eventually ossified, and he could not adapt quickly enough to meet the transformations of the Great Depression.The Battle of Jersey City started in late 1937. Unionists from the Committee for Industrial Organization gathered early on November 29 to stage a march through the city as part of the CIO's push to organize local and regional factories. Shortly before dawn, marchers with leaflets in hand started down the main thoroughfare, only to be met by police, who under orders from Mayor Hague, broke up the parade, arrested thirteen, and chased the rest back home or out of town. Those arrested were charged with violating the city's 1924 antileafletting ordinance, a 1930 meeting permit ordinance, and a 1935 placard ordinance. Morris Ernst and Arthur Garfield Hays, lawyers for the ACLU, quickly took charge of the case, which eventually wound its way to the United States Supreme Court.In the early stages of the legal battle, when US District Court Judge William Clark received the case, Hague could have dropped his claptrap about outside agitators and communists, relented the legal battle, and compromised, as he had in the past with similar issues. In fact, the city's corporation counsel, James Hamill, began the court proceeding by offering a settlement. At the last moment, however, Hague “balked,” stating that he would never compromise with the CIO organizers or the ACLU (116). Rogers offers no explanation for Hague's recalcitrance; perhaps there was no clear rationale. “Seemingly, with local anticommunist sentiment roiling,” Rogers writes, “Hague chose to stand on, or perhaps decided that he could not back down on, his reputation for defending the city from outside radical agitators” (117). Yet Hague, as Rogers correctly points out, had made a severe miscalculation.As Rogers details, since 1925, the US Supreme Court had been reinterpreting civil liberties with a more expansive and permissive view. Hague's lawyers, who had counseled compromise, knew the balances were tipping away from them, given the precedents set by Gitlow v. New York (1925), Stromberg v. California (1931), DeJonge (1937), Herndon v. Lowry (1937), and especially Lovell v. City of Griffin (1938). Nonetheless, given their client's preferences, they sought to use the playbook from the Industrial Workers of the World cases after the Great War to show how CIO organizers had violated public order and fomented anarchy. The legal strategy failed, as Judge Clark ruled in favor of the CIO and the ACLU and ruled that not only had Hague and his police acted illegally but also that the local ordinances from 1924, 1930, and 1935 were all unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court ruled on the appeal in 1939. The 5–2 decision, with Justice Owen Roberts writing for the majority, was in concert with the string of rulings upholding civil liberties as embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment. Rogers skillfully explains, though, that Hague v. CIO produced an ambiguous, even ironic outcome. “Hague did not benefit worker rights to picket, organize, and bargain collectively—nearly as much as it helped popular movements to rally and speak in public places” (180). Furthermore, the ruling did not end Hague's career: he made peace with the CIO and ACLU afterward and remained in office until 1949.Workers against the City is an excellent, nuanced, and timely history of Hague and the fight for free speech. Rogers is more skillful at describing the alterations of the legal, economic, social, and political landscapes than at explaining why Hague resisted those changes for so long. His careful analysis of free speech and civil liberties before the era of FDR is appropriately grounded in the Reconstruction and World War I periods. His clear-eyed treatment of Hague v. CIO is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Great Depression, the union movement, the free speech movement, and American urban politics.

APA Files Another Amicus Brief in Ongoing Texas Case on Banning Trans Care for Youth

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Government & LegalFull AccessAPA Files Another Amicus Brief in Ongoing Texas Case on Banning Trans Care for YouthKatie O'ConnorKatie O'ConnorSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:4 Apr 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.05.5.60AbstractAfter the Texas governor classified gender-affirming care as child abuse and directed health care professionals to report parents of transgender youth, APA joined in the battle to reverse his directive.In early April, a Texas appeals court reinstated a district court injunction blocking the state of Texas from investigating gender-affirming care as child abuse. After that decision, Texas filed an appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, and APA signed on to an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs. The brief is substantively similar to briefs that APA had filed in earlier stages of the case.The rulings stem from a nonbinding opinion issued in late February by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stating that gender-affirming care of children, such as surgical interventions or puberty-suppressing drugs, “can legally constitute child abuse” under Texas law. The next day, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS), which is responsible for investigating charges of child abuse.“Texas law … imposes a duty on DFPS to investigate the parents of a child who is subjected to these abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” he wrote. The same day, DFPS announced that it would comply with Abbott’s letter and commence investigations of families of transgender youth.The medical treatments that Abbott claims are child abuse “are part of the widely-accepted treatment guidelines for adolescents suffering from gender dysphoria, and are supported by the best available scientific evidence,” wrote APA and more than 20 additional physician organizations, including the AMA and the American Academy of Pediatrics, in the amicus brief. “Denying these treatments to adolescents who need them would irreparably harm their health.”The lawsuit against the governor’s ban was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Texas, and Lambda Legal on behalf of Jane and John Doe, the parents of a 16-year-old transgender girl identified as Mary Doe. The suit claims that, three days after Abbott sent his letter, a child protective services worker visited the Doe family, telling the parents that the sole allegation against them is that they have a transgender child who is “currently transitioning from male to female.”Jane Doe is a DFPS employee. “We are terrified for Mary’s health and well-being, and for our family. I feel betrayed by my state and the agency for whom I work,” Jane Doe wrote in a declaration filed with the lawsuit. (APA has also signed an amicus brief in a case involving an Arkansas law that bans gender-affirming therapy (Psychiatric News.)On March 11, a Texas judge issued an injunction in the case, blocking the state from investigating the parents of transgender youth at least until after a trial that is set to begin in July. Shortly after the judge issued the injunction, Paxton appealed the decision, and APA refiled its amicus brief with the appeals court.Texas Directive Harmful, Says APAAPA and its partner organizations issued a statement shortly after Abbott issued the directive to DFPS. “All patients must have access to evidence-based health care, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation,” the statement by the Group of Six reads. “Our organizations will not stand for any efforts that discriminate against transgender and gender-diverse individuals and cause harm to their health and well-being.”The Group of Six includes APA, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Physicians, and the American Osteopathic Association.“This directive will create a climate of fear that will cause conflicts within families who aren’t able to support their children’s identities.”—Gabrielle Shapiro, M.D“This directive will create a climate of fear that will cause conflicts within families who aren’t able to support their children’s identities.”—Gabrielle Shapiro, M.D.“The impact of this directive is going to be disastrous,” said Gabrielle Shapiro, M.D., chair of APA’s Council on Children, Adolescents, and Their Families and clinical professor of psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Families with means will be able to move out of Texas, or take their children to another state for treatment, but socioeconomically disadvantaged families don’t have those options,” she said. She pointed out that the directive will especially impact immigrant families in Texas, who may avoid treatment for their children due to fears of how a child protective services investigation may affect their immigration status. “Children will go untreated, and adolescents will experience untreated depression and anxiety. This directive will create a climate of fear that will cause conflicts within families who aren’t able to support their children’s identities.”The directive has already had significant impacts on transgender youth throughout the state. Texas Children’s Hospital, the country’s largest pediatric hospital, stopped prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies. The Washington Post reported on March 8 that the hospital had said in a statement that the decision was made “to safeguard our health care professionals and impacted families from potential legal ramifications.” On March 1 The New York Times reported that, according to the parent of a transgender teenager in Houston, a local health clinic suspended all prescription medications for transgender minors. District attorneys in some of Texas’s most populous counties, however, have stated they will not prosecute anyone under the directive, which they called “un-American.”Texas Physicians in Untenable PositionIn his letter to DFPS, Abbott specified that Texas law includes reporting requirements for all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children “who may be subject to such abuse,” including doctors and nurses. The law also “provides criminal penalties for failure to report such abuse,” Abbott wrote.The directive puts health care professionals in Texas “in an impossible position,” APA and the other organizations wrote in the amicus brief. “These providers are required to falsely report adolescent patients receiving these treatments as victims of child abuse even though such reporting would inflict serious harm on their patients, thereby violating these providers’ professional codes of ethics. On the other hand, if these providers do not report their patients, they face severe legal consequences, including potential civil and criminal penalties and the loss of their professional licenses.”The physician’s relationship with patients and families is private, and compromising that relationship is an affront to the Hippocratic oath, Shapiro said. “I imagine we will see an exodus of child and adolescent psychiatrists, as well as pediatricians, from the state, which already has a shortage of child and adolescent psychiatrists,” Shapiro said.In a statement, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra called Abbott’s actions “dangerous to the health of transgender youth in Texas.” HHS took several actions in response to Abbott’s directive, including releasing guidance to state child welfare agencies through an information memorandum that makes clear that states should use their child welfare systems to advance safety and support for LGBTQ youth, including ensuring access to gender-affirming care. HHS also released guidance on patient privacy, clarifying that physicians in Texas are not required to disclose private patient information, as well as guidance emphasizing that denying health care based on gender identity is illegal.Shapiro encouraged physicians to be proactive in speaking to families who may be impacted, and to have honest conversations about how they can support their children through advocacy.“These children and families feel they have no voice, and we need to empower them so that they know they do have voices and that we can all work together to combat this discriminatory policy.” ■The amicus brief is posted here.“Physicians Oppose Texas Efforts to Interfere in the Patient-Physician Relationship and Criminalize Gender-Affirming Care” is posted here.“Statement by HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra Reaffirming HHS Support and Protection for LGBTQI+ Children and Youth” is posted here.The Doe v. Abbott lawsuit is posted here. ISSUES NewArchived

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

No series of analyses, papers, discussions, and books will stop the slaughter in our streets, or children from having children, or men from beating up women. The role of intellectuals is limited; excessive expectations will only produce disappointment. But that limited role is crucial, and fears of disappointment should not serve as an excuse for continuing along the current course. (Rivers, 1995, p. 18) Some 25 years ago, Edward Said claimed that “the world is more crowded than it ever has been with (…) intellectuals” (Said, 1996, p. 15). Yet Black intellectuals continue to be sidelined, marginalized, and ignored in public discourse. As Jeffrey Watts contends, there has been a “longstanding racist marginalization of African American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses” (Watts, 2004, p. 2). However, this “came under intense attack during the 1960s and 1970s, at least within black intellectual circles” (Watts, 2004, p. 2). In recent decades, this attack has slowly permeated into the wider/Whiter discourse in the United States, but has by no means been fully accomplished yet. Bolstering the Black archive is a crucial task to allow new generations of scholars to draw on a wider set of contributions from key Black intellectuals. Recovering Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III's interventions for our days is an important contribution to this task. Debates about the causes of Black suffering in America usually fall into one of two camps. According to Cornel West in Nihilism in Black America, “liberal structuralists” focus on the structural and societal constraints facing Black Americans while “conservative behaviorists” focus on the decline of the Protestant ethic and a growing crisis of anomie (West, 1994, p. 13). While Rivers falls most clearly in the latter group, his combined attention to structural constraints and individual morality places him idiosyncratically in relation to the two camps. As West urges, the “debate must go far beyond the liberal and conservative positions” (West, 1994, p. 12). Rivers’ essay provides an important contribution to going beyond this dichotomy. I develop three main lines of argument from within Rivers’ thought. First, that he seeks to bridge the disconnect between intellectuals and social struggle. Second, that he envisages a role of the intellectual between the vanguard activist intellectual and disinterested scholastic academics—resembling Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ idea of the rear-guard intellectual. Third, that Rivers provides the basis for distinguishing between two types of responsibility: the responsibility for and the responsibility to, with the responsibility of Black intellectuals falling into the latter, not the former, category. I therefore (re)consider the role of intellectuals under conditions of systemic racism. In September 1992, Reverend Rivers from Dorchester, Boston, MA, played a major yet underappreciated role in debates among leading Black thinkers by publishing the essay “The Responsibility of Black Intellectuals in the Age of Crack” in the Boston Review (BR) (Rivers, 1992). Drawing on the rich yet hitherto untapped historical archive centered around this essay, Rivers’ essay provides an interpretive key for theorizing the role of the intellectual today. The decline of the public intellectual, the unrealized promise of a rational democratic public sphere, the siloing and disciplining of academia, and growing racial and economic disparities all demand going beyond the classic texts on intellectuals. The relationships between theory and practice, race and class, as well as religion and politics are all crucial for social scientists presciently raised in the essay. The idiosyncrasy, controversy, and intellectual rigor of Rivers’ thought means he can and should be considered a key Black thinker, despite being overlooked in the academic literature. Moving these questions of race with widespread implications for society as a whole from the periphery of African American studies to the mainstream of history and political science is an urgent and major task. For instance, Michael Hanchard contends that “attention to black political thought might expand and complicate our understanding of modern politics and the conceptualization of the political in contemporary political theory” (Hanchard, 2010, p. 510). Most urgent according to Rivers, evident from the title of his opening call, was the crack epidemic harrowing working class and poor Blacks in the 1980s and 1990s. This speaks closely to W.E.B. Du Bois’ evolution from academically defending the ‘‘talented tenth’’ and the way the Sam Hose lynching in 1899 threw him into a dual scholar-activist role, later revising his theory of intellectuals into the ‘‘guiding hundredth’’ of struggle, sacrifice, and solidarity (Rabaka, 2016). Famously, Du Bois purchased a shotgun after the 1906 Atlanta Massacre and moved to a more confrontational line to resist White supremacy, foreshadowing many of Rivers’ concerns. In one sense, Rivers sought to bridge this disconnect and link intellectuals to social struggles. Rivers’ arguments and the ensuing debate contribute a rich set of resources for theorizing and conceptualizing the role and responsibility of intellectuals in today's political reality. Excavating this debate thus implies a dual contribution: as part of a larger effort to recenter the underappreciated theoretical contributions of Black thought and as a fresh intervention in long-standing debates on the role and responsibility of intellectuals. I develop the analysis across five sections. Section 1 introduces Eugene Rivers. Section 2 maps dominant understandings of the role of the intellectual, focusing on Antonio Gramsci as well as Rivers’ direct inspiration, Noam Chomsky. Section 3 contextualizes Rivers’ essay, including the specific and wider reasons for its emergence. Section 4 reconstructs Rivers’ essay, arguing that he theorizes a specific role for Black intellectuals, not just as Black intellectuals but also as Black intellectuals. Section 5 argues that Rivers successfully bridges the disconnect between the hermitic individual intellectual and the need for collective responses to collective problems. Moreover, he constructs a middle-way between the unrestrained vanguardism of the activist intellectual and the disinterestedness of the ‘impartial’ academic. At a time when both distrust of experts and the politicization of academia is high, Rivers offers a compelling conceptual solution. This involves shifting from a model of responsibility for to responsibility to. Rivers is a Black pastor, social activist, and founder of the Pentecostal Azusa Christian Community in Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts. Although Rivers dropped out of Harvard, he established an enduring friendship with Cornel West and returned as a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life in the 1990s and was thus reunited with West at Harvard Divinity School. Evidence of a difficult upbringing despite college-educated parents, he joined the Somersville street gang in Philadelphia, and in his adult life founded the Ten Point Coalition, a successful intervention attempting to solve gang problems in Boston. The Ten Point Coalition came about as a direct result of frustration among Boston's clergy with gun violence following the death of 20-year old Robert Odom and the shooting by gang members of a young man named Jerome Brunson at Odom's funeral. The Coalition brought together around 300 church ministers with Rivers taking a lead in formulating a 10-point plan for ending gun and gang violence in Boston. Rivers was featured on the front page of Newsweek for his efforts and gained recognition in both Boston Magazine and the New Yorker (D. Kennedy, 2001). Eugene Rivers frequently collaborates with his wife, Dr Jacqueline C. Rivers, a Harvard PhD mentored by Orlando Patterson whose concept of social death is a recurring theme in Eugene Rivers’ thought and something of a Rosetta stone through which to interpret the dominant themes of black discourse in the 1990s. Jacqueline Rivers’ thought is likely to have had a major impact on his, particularly given the many cases of wives and women partners playing key roles in the development of the thought of (officially) single-authored texts by men. Jacqueline Rivers is a Harvard sociology lecturer, a frequent public speaker, and a Christian thought leader who like her husband is against equal marriage and abortion. Yet it is Eugene Rivers who is the more prolific writer and a more public figure. Although it would be an important task to map her thought as well as how it has influenced Eugene Rivers, I limit my inquiry to considering his thought and practice. Writing in a long tradition of Black religious intellectuals who variably have attracted controversy in the public sphere including Calvin O. Butts, West, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Jeremiah Wright, Rivers is a contentious figure to the American establishment. In his wide-ranging history of Black intellectuals, Charles Banner-Haley says Rivers is “like Cornel West only without the overtly Marxist perspective” (Banner-Haley, 2010, p. 81). Indeed, Rivers characterizes his own practice as speaking “with the mind of an intellectual but with the heart of a pastor” and in a recent Fox News interview considered himself “a pastor of the poor and an intellectual” (Okholm, 1997; Rivers, 2020a). He served as an advisor to George Bush Sr., and appealed for Black Americans to engage in bipartisanship. He endorsed George W. Bush Jr.’s faith-based social policy initiatives, to the extent that the New York Times called Rivers the “point man for the Bush church-state collaboration” (Niebuhr, 2001), which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) claimed was unconstitutional (Formicola & Segers, 2002). What is more, influential far-right conspiracy theorist and convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza used Rivers’ essay to argue for abolishing the (limited) social welfare programs that exist in the United States (D'Souza, 2016). Rivers had a strained relationship with Reverend Jesse Jackson who Rivers considers a relic of an outdated model of Black activism based on partisanship, affirmative action, and civil rights. In an interview with the Boston Phoenix, Rivers summarized his objectives as “cultivating a new, younger black leadership that understands that politics is not about rhetoric or merely protest. Sometimes it is protest and direct action, but those activities are simply part of a multifaceted strategy, with the end game being programs, policies, and results” (D. Kennedy, 2006). He thus explicitly seeks to depart from the civil rights movement of MLK and Jackson. Yet Rivers also castigates Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam as a dead-end for Black emancipation, claiming that “Farrakhan exploits our indifference to the poor” (Okholm, 1997, p. 15). Interestingly, both of Rivers’ parents became members of the Nation of Islam. Rivers likewise criticizes Black Lives Matter (BLM) for being a mistaken ideological project. While lauding the collaboration of Black and White people in fighting police violence, he simultaneously rejects BLM: “Although I have fundamental disagreements with the Black Lives Matter organization and its agenda, these young people have been able to exhibit a level of interracial solidarity that we haven't seen in the churches since Martin Luther King” (Rivers & Rivers, 2020). He specifically calls for “agape love” as the kind of love for all humankind that is unconditional, transcendental, and decontextual. Yet his disagreement with BLM concerns its support for LGBTQ rights and what he considers to be a Marxist ideology underpinning it (Rivers & Rivers, 2020). Rivers favors self-help and self-reliance in a clearly Protestant vein of thought, a running theme in his thought is thus the importance of industriousness and antimaterialist frugality characteristic of Protestantism. This seems to be the limit to his collective and nonmoral vision of the intellectual. There are therefore several ambiguities and ambivalences in his thought that mean his argument cannot simply be accepted at face value. The starting point of Rivers’ thought is a concern for the poor—ending poverty, especially the poverty haunting Black Americans. This speaks to the realism of his thought, grounded in the reality of existence and in the politics of race and racism, which is irreducible to a moral question alone. In a recent lecture, Rivers summarizes his intellectual position as “taking a political theology of Pentecostalism and applying it as a form of liberation theology with an emphasis on serving the poor concretely” (Rivers, 2020b). Yet he is not speaking from a position of Black nationalism or ‘racial capitalism.’ Rather, he begins with a critique of capitalism tout court: “Western civilization itself is saturated, not merely with racism, but with the elementary gesture out of which racism is constructed, binary opposition: the splitting of the world into the dominated and the dominant” (Okholm, 1997, p. 17). This is not to say that White supremacy does not play a central role for him—it absolutely does: as evidenced in the claim that “the conceptual foundation for economic inequality is the ideology of white supremacy,” to the extent that “every other form of oppression and domination is mediated through the lens of white supremacy” (Okholm, 1997, p. 17). Rivers subscribes to the position that racism is embedded so centrally in the English language that it goes beyond merely conscious racist expressions but is preconsciously reproduced in the very basis of the language (the use of Black and White as modifiers, for instance), akin to Robert B. Moore's and David R. Burgest's arguments (Burgest, 1973; Moore, 1976). The relationship between theory and practice is a central pillar in debates within critical circles (Habermas, 1991; Rossi, 2015; Verovšek, 2018). The roles and responsibilities of intellectuals play a major role in these debates. Broadly speaking, whereas realists focus on speaking about and with real emancipatory political practices like social movements or radical political parties, idealists focus on speaking about truth, understanding, and normativity in more abstract and moral terms. Realists, like Raymond Geuss, frequently scorn the idealists for apolitical status quo-abetment (Finlayson, 2015a; Geuss, 2008). Idealists, like Jürgen Habermas, focus on how the realization of a rational, democratic public sphere could help solve political disagreement (Habermas, 1991). Beyond such more fundamental and principled disagreement, Alice Baderin identifies the strategic task of negotiating “democratic restraint” whereby intellectuals adjust their theorizing to better align with public attitudes (Baderin, 2015). Compatible with recent attempts to complicate the neat separation between realists and idealists (Verovšek, 2021), Rivers provides a compelling formulation of a middle-ground that negotiates between these two outer positions. The starting point for Rivers’ conceptualization of intellectuals as collectively embedded emerges with Gramsci and Chomsky, however. Rivers refers to Gramsci at several points in his work (Rivers, 1992, 1995). He even goes so far as to say that he accepts Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual (Rivers, 1992). Warning against the dangers of speculative philosophy, Gramsci proposes a new agenda for how to theorize the intellectual vis-à-vis social movements and political organizations. Speculative philosophy refers to unreflexive philosophy that does not take its point of origin in the really-existing social problems of its time (Gramsci, 1971, p. 370). He first conceptualizes intellectuals not just as a specific subsection of the dominant class, which philosophers mostly are, but as a social practice undertaken by a range of different thought-workers: teachers, journalists, policy advisers, or party cadres are just some of the figures who count as intellectuals on such a conception. Thus, on his view, everyone is an intellectual, but not everyone has the function of a professional intellectual. Second, Gramsci distinguishes between traditional and organic intellectuals. The former are those with formal training as intellectuals, akin to the conventional speculative philosopher, often removed and abstracted from social conditions. Organic intellectuals, on the other hand, are characterized by belonging to and directing the ideas of their social class (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 5–23). This is what Rivers is against: a conception of intellectuals as those concerned with questions outside immediate social relevance: answering the big, enduring questions of humanity around art, science, and metaphysics. The organic intellectual, by contrast, emerges from the subordinated class and thus not only knows but both feels and understands the plight of their class (Gramsci, 1971, p. 418). Even as the organic intellectual secures a certain amount of social and cultural capital, they remain committed to (class) struggle (Celikates, 2018). While Rivers is influenced by Gramsci's account, the linchpin for his argument is Chomsky's writings on intellectuals (Chomsky, 2017). Chomsky specifies a special normative responsibility and moral duty of intellectuals. According to him, “opportunity confers responsibility” (Chomsky, 2017). He elicits suspicion about experts and intellectuals because they furthered rather than countered the war effort in the case of the Vietnam War (Chomsky, 2017). While he embraces Gramsci's collective account, Rivers simultaneously writes in tradition of pessimistic conceptions of the intellectual coalescing with Chomsky's essay. This is a fairly long tradition that emerges with the 1940s postwar writings of socialist Dwight Macdonald who sardonically mocks leading wartime reporter Max Lerner for his ascription of wartime guilt to incapacitated working class Germans. Macdonald claims that holding individuals “morally responsible for the deeds of the ‘historical entity’ he gets himself born into” should be abandoned (cited in Chomsky, 2017). What Macdonald offers is therefore a first move from individual moral responsibility, qua unbounded agency, toward an account of responsibility more sensitive and attuned to structural forces that negotiates vis-à-vis the peculiar scope for agency among intellectuals. Macdonald's position implies that intellectuals like Lerner fail to understand the structural and systematic characteristics of domination that prevent the formation of radical social alternatives (cited in Chomsky, 2017). What intellectuals ought to be doing is challenging power through a class-based comradely critique, not abetting it (Slothuus, 2021a). However, this is difficult if dominant intellectuals are traditional, rather than organic, intellectuals, since they might know the subordinate position but neither feel nor understand it. Rivers’ essay concurs with such a view. This point is elaborated by Chomsky. He specifies how intellectuals have a unique ability in seeing through ideological distortions and mystifications, as well as “unique privileges” which gives them the ability and responsibility to “speak the truth and to expose lies,” as well as a duty to “see events in their historical perspective” (Chomsky, 2017). Along a Gramscian line of thought, this is not an intrinsic quality or characteristic of a particularly gifted section of society, but emergent thanks to particular individuals’ social function as intellectuals. However, a central recurring theme in Chomsky's essay is the perceived failure of intellectuals to criticize and challenge the status quo. Rather, intellectuals largely perform a status quo-abetting role, justifying and defending existing forms of domination and exploitation. In contrast to this view, Michael Walzer claims that social criticism should take the form of interpretation, and that this is not necessarily status quo-abetting (Walzer, 1993). Chomsky's critique is a result of their social function, and works bidirectionally—only those with a powerful enough standing can meaningfully challenge the status quo, yet only those who pose no significant threat to the status quo can rise to become powerful. Arguably, however, the influence of Chomsky seems to suggest precisely the opposite. According to Chomsky, as powerful intellectuals become affluent, their principles erode and the challenge they can pose to power consequently weakens. This suggests that social movements and subordinate people should not have very much faith in the emancipatory function of intellectuals. Yet Chomsky's dichotomy falls short of providing a sufficient conceptualization of intellectuals as well as strategy for their role and responsibility in effecting radical social change. By taking the negative effects of intellectuals on the American war effort in Vietnam specifically and the Cold War generally, he focusses too narrowly on the role intellectuals can have in reinforcing and justifying the status quo. To be sure, many intellectuals do this. There is nothing inherently progressive or radical about intellectuals, indeed they might generally defend the existing social order. One of the most famous contemporary intellectuals, Jordan Peterson, is a good example of this. Chomsky does not devote enough attention to the role of intellectuals in radically transformative social movements and is contextually blinded by the impotence of antiwar intellectual efforts. For example, the role played by intellectuals in the emergence of the new social movements and the new left in the 1960–1970s points to a significant role intellectuals can play. Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis were both instrumental in providing the theoretical backbone for a wide range of social struggles. Lenin, Mao, and Kwame Nkrumah are further examples. Likewise, Jerome Karabel demonstrates how intellectuals were instrumental in undermining the foundations of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (Karabel, 1996). A major similarity between Macdonald and Chomsky, which foreshadows the position of Rivers, is a concern with individual morality and responsibility. Despite Macdonald's contextualization and attention to structural forces, he nevertheless consolidates an individualist model when claiming that “only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster” (Chomsky, 2017). Yet this is a model of responsibility that anchors the strategic role of intellectuals in a moralistic and individualistic framework. One of many problems with this is that it incapacitates and depoliticizes by focusing the conversation and judgment on the moral standing of the person, their virtuousness, and the possibility of hypocrisy. This leaves little scope for agency because the focus is on the characteristics and personal identity of the writer and does not think of intellectuals as in symbiosis with movements and social struggles. As will soon be evident, Rivers was directly inspired by Chomsky's essay on intellectuals. Prior to Rivers’ intervention, the question of not just the role and responsibility of the intellectual tout court but specifically the Black intellectual had surfaced a number of times. After Du Bois’ formulation of the talented tenth, the vision of a tenth of Black Americans rising to a sufficient social status to function as the intellectual and spiritual leaders for Black emancipation, Harold Cruse's 1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual is the most crucial contribution to discussions among Black intellectuals (Cruse, 1967). In a nutshell, Cruse's argument is that Black emancipation requires an amalgamation of Black intellectuals and ordinary Black people, akin to Gramsci's conception of organic intellectuals. On its 25th anniversary, Cruse's influential text was reconsidered in an edited volume by one of the foremost scholars of Black intellectuals, Jerry Watts (Watts, 2004). Yet here there is also no mention of Rivers or the debates by any of the authors, despite the timely and important interventions they otherwise provide. What makes this even more peculiar is that Rivers invited Watts to the initial debate, yet Watts did not participate. Neither did Orlando Patterson, who was also invited (Rivers, 1992). Despite the urgency Rivers appeals to, as well as the enduring contemporary topicality, it seems that the debates have been overlooked or ignored by scholars, possibly because of Rivers’ controversial and unorthodox positions, which can now be explicated. Rivers is suspicious of partisanship and as a community activist sees little prima facie benefit in unconditionally supporting progressive movements. “In the absence of a program or a mobilization of intellectuals around the needs of the poor, what is the functional, political difference between such conservatives as Alan Keyes or Thomas Sowell and such progressives as Henry Louis Gates or Cornel West?” (Rivers, 1992, p. 4). Both conservatives and progressives can speak the language of caring about the poor, and without tangible action, Rivers draws an equivalence between them. The role of theory and of intellectuals is predicated upon a program of action rather than empty talk. This conception of intellectuals can be called movement intellectuals because it develops a definite space that is nonetheless not vanguardist—intellectuals can use their particular resources to aid and accelerate social movements rather than conceive of or direct them. This is a process of legitimation, justification, and enunciation, all processes that (organic) intellectuals are particularly suited to fulfilling. This is closely related to the conception of intellectuals as a rear-guard, an idea developed for instance by Boaventura Sousa dos Santos (de Sousa Santos, 2016). The rear-guard intellectual in this context provides rich ideas for how White intellectuals can aid Black intellectuals in a meaningful way. Sousa dos Santos defines rear-guard intellectuals as those “intellectuals that contribute with their knowledge to strengthening the social struggles against domination and oppression to which they are committed” (de Sousa Santos, 2018, p. 9). This means stepping away from the limelight of vanguard intellectuals with their risk of condescension and power-grabbing and, without becoming a passive spectator, legitimating and supporting struggles. Rather than directing these social struggles, the rear-guard intellectual therefore uses their social, cultural, and academic capital to defend social movements against reactionary and status-quo biased criticism. The critical theorist is engaged in “the struggle of which his own thinking is a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle” (Horkheimer, 2002, p. 216). What really matters here are “the experiences of large, marginalized minorities and majorities that struggle against unjustly imposed marginality and inferiority” where the critical rear-guard theorist should serve the purpose of “strengthening their resistance” (de Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 9). While this might conceivably be rebuffed by questioning the extent to which this requires dispensing in full with the enlightenment concepts recalibrated above, de Sousa Santos is keen to dismiss such a claim: He does not want to dismiss “the rich Eurocentric critical tradition and [throw] it into the dustbin of history, thereby ignoring the historical possibilities of social emancipation in Western modernity,” he simply wants to go further than remain locked in place within the Western tradition (de Sousa Santos, 2014, p. 44). Because White rear-guard intellectuals qua being self-reflexive are attuned to the horrors of the exploitation and enslavement of Black Americans, they ought to maintain a healthy distance from the kind of White vanguardism that can smuggle in another set of oppressive norms under the guise of emancipation. Beyond the initial essay, the debates comprised two roundtable discussions at Harvard and MIT, alongside about a dozen subsequent commentaries in BR. A dress rehearsal for the Rivers debates took place in 1986 under the auspices of the Harvard W.E.B. DuBois Society's Graduate Colloquium, in which Harold Cruse, Cornel West, and Jeffrey Howard participated alongside a number of Harvard graduate students. The first roundtable, spurred on by the call to action, took place at Harvard on 30 November 1992 and involved bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Glenn Loury, Margaret Burnham, and moderator Anthony Kwame Appiah. The second, held at MIT on November 17, 1993, involved Regina Austin, Selwyn Cudjoe, Randall Kennedy, and bell hooks, as well as moderator Margaret Burnham. Several written commentaries intervened in these debates, too, by Eugene Genovese, Eric Foner, Cathy J. Cohen, Noel Ignatiev, Harvey Cox, Clyde N. Wilson, Askold Melnyzcuk, Robin D.G. Kelly, Tony Martin, and Martin Kilson. Many Black intellectuals who could have enriched these debates did not participate, for instance Adolph Reed, Jr. and Patricia Hill Collins, despite the latter's publication (Hill Collins, 2005, 2013). Black women intellectuals were severely underrepresented in the debates, part of a larger issue of marginalization (Guy-Sheftall, 2004). Rivers’ immediate motivation for the essay was the rapidly rising deaths by homicide in Boston, including his own Dorchester neighborhood. These more than trebled between 1987 and 1990. Not only were most victims poor Black men, the rising homicide figures increased their proportion relative to the total number. As David M. Kennedy et al. note in the landmark US Department of Justice report Reducing Gun Violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire, “crack cocaine trafficking had almost surely sparked t

Reproductive Injustice at the Southern Border and Beyond: An Analysis of Current Events and Hope for the Future.

Recent accounts of unconsented hysterectomies in detained immigrants give modern relevance to a history of government-sanctioned reproductive control in the United States. In September 2020, Dawn Wooten, a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, reported reoccurring instances of medical neglect and medically unnecessary and unconsented sterilizing procedures in immigrant women in ICDC custody. The initial report included five women who reported hysterectomies between October and December 2019. The women held in U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody received inadequate and misleading information about the hysterectomy procedure in language that was not their own, invalidating informed consent (Cuffari et al., 2020Cuffari J.V. Quinn C. Giles T.P. Paulk D. Cuffari D. Lack of medical care, unsafe work practices, and absence of adequate protection against COVID-19 for detained immigrants and employees alike at the Irwin County Detention Center.https://projectsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/OIG-ICDC-Complaint-1.pdfDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Since this initial report, dozens more women have come forward reporting medically aggressive and/or unconsented gynecological procedures. Investigation of these reports by U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and patient medical and psychological follow-up evaluations, have been compromised by deportation (McEvoy, 2020McEvoy J. Report: U.S. Is Deporting Women Who Alleged Surgical Abuse At Georgia Detention Center.www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/11/11/report-us-is-deporting-women-who-alleged-surgical-abuse-at-georgia-detention-center/?sh=15cce02810e7Date: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The events described by Ms. Wooten represent another manifestation of a disquieting historical narrative that immigrants, incarcerated, poor, mentally and physically disabled, and Black and Brown individuals are reproductively controllable and disposable. The founders of the Reproductive Justice (RJ) framework recognized that the reproductive rights movement was created largely by and for White women, some of whom were active in anti-immigration movements (Kulish and McIntire, 2019Kulish N. McIntire M. Why an heiress spent her fortune trying to keep immigrants out.www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.htmlDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The RJ framework centers individuals who have been historically denied the full range of reproductive health services and protections, and recognizes the inextricable link between reproductive health, social justice, and the health systems’ role in maintaining inequity. The tenets of RJ detail the right to 1) maintain personal reproductive autonomy, 2) have children or to not have children as one desires, 3) parent those children with dignity in a safe environment, and 4) dissociate sex from reproduction (Parker, 2020Parker W.J. The moral imperative of reproductive rights, health, and justice.Best Practice and Research: Clinical Obstetrics and Gynaecology. 2020; 62: 3-10Crossref PubMed Scopus (4) Google Scholar). Our analysis outlines violations of the first three tenets. The unconsented hysterectomies at ICDC are only the most recent transgressions against immigrants’ personal reproductive autonomy by immigration authorities. In 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed lawsuits regarding multiple instances of unaccompanied immigrant minors in Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody being refused abortion services despite residing in a state that would otherwise allow them to exercise this request (American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2018American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)Court orders Trump administration to stop blocking abortion for young immigrant women in U.S. custody.www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-orders-trump-administration-stop-blocking-abortion-young-immigrant-women-usDate: 2018Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The ORR oversees the care of unaccompanied minors immigrating to the United States. Former federally appointed ORR Director Scott Lloyd upheld his reputation as an antiabortion activist over his tenure, using coercive techniques to deter abortion requests, even for pregnancies resulting from sexual assault (American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2018American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)Court orders Trump administration to stop blocking abortion for young immigrant women in U.S. custody.www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-orders-trump-administration-stop-blocking-abortion-young-immigrant-women-usDate: 2018Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). ORR immigration staff were directed to refuse minors seeking judicial bypass for abortion laws, told to restrict access to meetings with attorneys (American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2021American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)J.D. v. Azar (formerly Garza v. Azar and Garza v. Hargan) - Challenging Trump administration’s refusal to permit teenage immigration detainees to access abortion services.www.acludc.org/en/cases/jd-v-azar-formerly-garza-v-azar-and-garza-v-hargan-challenging-trump-administrations-refusalDate: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar), and instructed that they “should not be supporting abortion pre- or post-release; only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling” (Messing et al., 2020Messing A.J. Rosen J.D. Fabi R.E. Reproductive injustice at the US Border.American Journal of Public Health. 2020; 110: 339-344Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar). Previous protections under the Obama Administration allowed a pregnant minor in ORR custody to receive abortion services, although federal funds could only pay for services when the pregnancy resulted from a rape or cases of medical emergency. However, the Trump Administration granted additional privileges to the ORR Director to personally decide whether abortions were in the best interest of the teens, leading to the denial of abortion services (S. Ehrlich, JD, Interview, July 1, 2020; American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 2018American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)Court orders Trump administration to stop blocking abortion for young immigrant women in U.S. custody.www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-orders-trump-administration-stop-blocking-abortion-young-immigrant-women-usDate: 2018Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Deplorable holding conditions and a lack of access to comprehensive obstetric and gynecological services directly undermine migrants' reproductive rights. Detained asylum seekers frequently experience shackling during labor and inadequate health care, resulting in poor maternal and neonatal health outcomes (Messing et al., 2020Messing A.J. Rosen J.D. Fabi R.E. Reproductive injustice at the US Border.American Journal of Public Health. 2020; 110: 339-344Crossref PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar). The Obama Administration's “presumption of release” policy ordered detention centers to release, or undertake expedited removal of, pregnant women from federal custody except under extraordinary circumstances (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). However, this protective regulation was revised under the Trump Administration's new policy, which took effect in December 2017. Under the new directive, pregnant women were no longer exempt from detention, and reporting guidelines that mandated timely centralized tracking of all people in detention by ICE Health Services Corps Headquarters, the overseer of health care in detention facilities, were removed (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians voiced their opposition to the policy change, arguing that “all pregnant women and adolescents held in federal custody, regardless of immigration status, should have access to adequate, timely, evidence-based, and comprehensive health care” (American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), 2018American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)Letter from medical professionals to ICE against inhumane detention policies for pregnant women.www.aila.org/infonet/medic-professionals-against-ice-deten-policies?utm_source=aila.org&utm_medium=InfoNet SearchDate: 2018Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Policies designed to protect detained migrants are continuously underused or distorted. The ICE Performance-Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS) (2016) (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 2016U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)Performance-based national detention standards 2011.www.ice.gov/doclib/detention-standards/2011/pbnds2011r2016.pdfDate: 2016Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar) and the ORR Guide: Children Entering the United States Unaccompanied (2015) (Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), 2015Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)Children entering the United States unaccompanied.www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/policy-guidance/children-entering-united-states-unaccompaniedDate: 2015Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar) were established under the Obama Administration. The updated 2019 standards require adherence to more comprehensive medical care (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 2019U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)National detention standards for non-dedicated facilities.www.ice.gov/doclib/detention-standards/2019/nds2019.pdfDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). However, more than 70% of ICE detainees reside in subcontracted detention centers such as ICDC, leading to inevitable gaps in effecting these policies. Eighty percent of facilities use outdated guidance lacking critical information on women's health and comprehensive care (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). This lack of standardization causes the quality and availability of care to vary greatly by location, and makes it extraordinarily challenging to monitor care across facilities. Families seeking asylum navigate the risks of physical and sexual violence, and psychological trauma, in an effort to escape precarious conditions in their home countries. Women and gender minorities seeking asylum are particularly vulnerable to gender-based violence during migration. A study conducted by Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontieres [MSF]) found that 68.3% of migrants and refugee populations reported being victims of violence during migration, and nearly one-third of women had been sexually abused during their journeys (Médecins Sans Frontieres, 2017Médecins Sans FrontieresForded to flee Central America’s Northern Triangle: A neglected humanitarian crisis.www.msf.org/sites/msf.org/files/msf_forced-to-flee-central-americas-northern-triangle_e.pdfDate: 2017Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Many migrants continue to experience sexual violence and harassment within detention centers, with the majority of perpetrators reported to be guards and detention officials (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). From January 2010 to September 2017, there were 1,224 complaints of sexual abuse reported in DHS custody, including in ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Only 43 of these complaints were investigated. LGBTQ immigrants, particularly transgender women, experience sexual violence and assault at even higher rates (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Although two-thirds of assaults on transgender women are perpetrated by guards, transgender women also face further risk of assault by being housed with men in detention (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The Prison Rape Elimination Act aims to prevent, identify, and respond to reports of sexual assault and harassment (National PREA Resource Center, 2003National PREA Resource CenterPrison Rape Elimination Act.https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/about/prison-rape-elimination-actDate: 2003Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). However, these standards have been inadequate in ensuring the safety of detained migrants owing in part to loopholes that undermine their efficacy, such as a religious exemption allowing providers to deny care to LGBTQ survivors or comprehensive reproductive care (Ellmann, 2019Ellmann N. Immigration detention is dangerous for women’s health and rights.www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/10/21/475997/immigration-detention-dangerous-womens-health-rights/Date: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The bottlenecks in the processing of asylum seekers at the southern border as a result of “metering” and the Trump administration's Migrant Protections Protocol (MPP) program—which forced over 68,000 asylum seekers to “remain in Mexico” pending their asylum court hearings—have left dozens of thousands of asylum seekers exposed to violence and limited access to health services, including abortion, in Mexican border towns (Totenberg, 2021Totenberg N. Supreme Court cancels arguments in Trump-era immigration cases.www.npr.org/2021/02/01/962997274/biden-administration-asks-supreme-court-to-delay-considering-2-key-trump-policieDate: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). In addition to these experiences of violence, rates of gender-based homicides have been rising in Mexico, with more than 41,000 women victims of gender-based homicide in Mexico from 1985 to 2014 (Centro para el Desarrollo Integral de la Muger, A.C. (CEDIMAC), & Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, 2018Centro para el Desarrollo Integral de la Mujer, A.C. (CEDIMAC), & Robert F. Kennedy Human RightsAlternative report on violence against women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico ninth periodic report of Mexico Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women seventieth session.https://observatoriofeminicidio.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/enviando-informeDate: 2018Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). In 2019, there were reportedly 1,006 femicides, although this is felt to reflect only one-quarter of all women murdered that year, because many of the victims' bodies were never found (Vivanco, 2020Vivanco J.M.V. Mexican government paralyzed in the face of a wave of femicides.www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/03/mexican-government-paralyzed-face-wave-femicides#Date: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Thirty-one of the documented femicides were women located in the Chihuahua State of Ciudad Juarez, a prominent border city near El Paso, Texas (Chin and Schultz, 2020Chin C. Schultz E. Disappearing daughters. Mothers search for justice and embrace fragile memories.https://projects.seattletimes.com/2020/femicide-juarez-mexico-border/Date: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The fear of physical violence is compounded by the emotional and psychological trauma of family separation. Under the Trump Administration's Zero Tolerance Policy, thousands of immigrant families were separated when the program was implemented in 2017. During this period, immigration authorities forcibly removed children from their families or separated children while parents were occupied receiving medical care or in court (Camaj et al., 2020Camaj L. Habbach H. Hampton K. “You will never see your child again.” The persistent psychological effects of family separation.https://phr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PHR-Report-2020-Family-Separation-Full-Report.pdfDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). In a sample of psychological evaluations conducted by Physicians for Human Rights, nearly all children and parents who were separated showed symptoms and behavior associated with major trauma and met the diagnostic criteria for at least one mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and/or generalized anxiety disorder. Children in particular exhibited developmental delays and regression in age-appropriate behavior (Camaj et al., 2020Camaj L. Habbach H. Hampton K. “You will never see your child again.” The persistent psychological effects of family separation.https://phr.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PHR-Report-2020-Family-Separation-Full-Report.pdfDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The experience of family separation likely exacerbated preexisting trauma exposures from migrants' countries of origin and the perilous journey seeking asylum. Four years later the parents of 628 children who were separated at the border still cannot be found; many are believed to have been returned to their home countries (MS. L vs. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2020MS. L vs. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcementhttp://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2020/images/12/02/ms.l.ice.joint.status.report.pdfDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Reunification efforts have been stalled owing to the coronavirus pandemic and left many children in limbo, continuing to have to endure the physical, emotional, and psychological impacts of forced separation. President Biden has created a task force committed to family reunification; however, the timeline and legal procedures to decrease the risk of reseparation for undocumented parents remain undetermined (Sieff, 2021Sieff K. Trump family separations: Biden executive order task force to reunite migrants.www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/family-separation-migrant-biden-executive-order/2021/02/01/ebb6ada8-64bf-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.htmlDate: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Meanwhile, even since the formal end of the Zero Tolerance Policy on June 20, 2018, family separations have continued, because many parents have felt compelled to make the impossible decision to allow children to cross the border alone to be processed as unaccompanied minors as perhaps their only real chance to escape the deplorable conditions in the border towns (Congressional Research Service, 2021Congressional Research ServiceThe Trump Administration’s “Zero Tolerance” Immigration Enforcement Policy.https://crsreports.congress.govDate: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). The Biden Administration, including Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, has a critical window of opportunity to reevaluate policies that violate immigrants' reproductive rights and to reinstate standards and processes that promote RJ. Clear protocols for evaluation, accountability, and policy enforcement are essential to promote justice at the border. Gaps in accountability and policy enforcement exacerbate opportunities for medical neglect and abuse. Findings from a 2019 investigation by DHS found that ICE does not have standards in place to adequately hold contracted detention centers accountable and inconsistently includes the agencies’ quality assurance surveillance plan in contract terms (U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 2019U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)OIG-19-18 - ICE does not fully use contracting tools to hold detention facility contractors accountable for failing to meet performance standards.www.oig.dhs.govDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Quality assurance surveillance plans should be included in all contracts, with clear financial penalties outlined for facilities that are noncompliant. Mandatory data reporting is also essential to monitoring progress and targeting areas for further intervention. The Biden Administration has already begun to dismantle the MPP. DHS began the first phase of rectifying pending cases on February 19, 2021. Migrants with pending asylum cases are required to register with international organizations and undergo coronavirus testing before their hearings. Those who enter through the program may not be placed in detention centers but may still be under security monitoring (U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 2021U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)DHS announces process to address individuals in Mexico with active MPP cases.www.dhs.gov/news/2021/02/11/dhs-announces-process-address-individuals-mexico-active-mpp-casesDate: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar; Hesson and Dwyer, 2021Hesson T. Dwyer M. Biden to bring in asylum seekers forced to wait in Mexico under Trump program.www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-immigration-asylum/biden-to-bring-in-asylum-seekers-forced-to-wait-in-mexico-under-trump-program-idUSKBN2AC113Date: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). In addition to repealing MPP, the Biden Administration should end the so-called Safe Third Country Agreements negotiated by the outgoing Trump Administration with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras (Gil-Bazo, 2015Gil-Bazo M.T. The safe third country concept in international agreements on refugee protection assessing state practice.Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights. 2015; 33: 42-77Crossref Scopus (5) Google Scholar). These Northern Triangle countries constitute three of the top five countries of origin for asylum seekers to the United States. With some of highest femicide rates in the world, these countries do not provide adequate protection or legal processes for those seeking asylum, particularly women fleeing intimate partner violence and gang-related sexual violence (World Vision, 2020World VisionNorthern Triangle: terrifying to live in, dangerous to leave.www.worldvision.ca/stories/child-protection/northern-triangleDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar). Furthermore, we recommend the reinstatement of the “presumption of release,” ordering release or expedited removal of pregnant women from custody to reduce their exposure to physical and psychological trauma. Likewise, providing access, referral, and linkage to care grants the opportunity to receive appropriate medical services. Reconsideration of this policy along with other ratified international human rights protocols that are committed to reducing undue exposure to harm of migrants, providing comprehensive reproductive health education, maternal health care, contraception and abortion access, and reporting procedures for gender-based violence are essential to achieving RJ (International Justice Resource Center (IJRC), 2020International Justice Resource Center (IJRC)Immigration & migrants’ rights.https://ijrcenter.org/thematic-research-guides/immigration-migrants-rights/#Protection_against_Torture_or_Inhuman_TreatmentDate: 2020Date accessed: November 1, 2020Google Scholar). Many existing organizations already fight for RJ and human rights of asylum seekers through the provision of health services and litigation. In addition to advocacy efforts, qualified volunteers can provide clinical support, conduct telephone evaluations, review medical records for detained families, or provide virtual or in-person forensic medical examinations for detainees. Several organizations provide health and legal resources for migrants including the Refugee Health Alliance, 2019Refugee Health AllianceRefugee Health Alliance.www.refugeehealthalliance.orgDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar, RAICES, 2020RAICESTake action. RAICES.https://www.raicestexas.org/take-action/Date: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar, Medecins Sans Frontieres, 2020Medecins Sans FrontieresDoctors Without Borders - USA.www.doctorswithoutborders.org/takeactionDate: 2020Date accessed: November 1, 2020Google Scholar, Doctors For Camp Closure, 2019Doctors For Camp ClosureWhat’s next? Three things you can do.https://d4cc.nationbuilder.com/take_actionDate: 2019Google Scholar, Al Otro Lado, 2020Al Otro LadoGet involved.https://alotrolado.org/get-involvedDate: 2020Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar, Families Belong Together, 2021Families Belong TogetherTake action.https://www.familiesbelongtogether.org/take-action/Date: 2021Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar, Border Angels, 2020Border AngelsVolunteer..www.borderangels.org/volunteer.htmlDate: 2020Date accessed: November 1, 2020Google Scholar, Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), 2019Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC)The Estamos Unidos Asylum Project offers legal guidance to migrants waiting to ask for protection.https://cliniclegal.org/issues/estamos-unidosDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar, and Global Response Management, 2019Global Response ManagementVolunteer.www.global-response.org/volunteerDate: 2019Date accessed: February 28, 2021Google Scholar. Strong advocacy efforts and on-the-ground and virtual participation coupled with U.S. government enforcement of immigration policies and procedures that protect migrants’ rights are critical steps to empowering individuals to make reproductive decisions for themselves. All people, regardless of citizenship, who flee to the U.S. deserve comprehensive reproductive care free from coercion and with respect of full bodily autonomy. Medical and public health professionals must remain informed about the current events in reproductive health for asylum seekers to prevent further violations of RJ for our most vulnerable communities. The authors thank Katherine Peeler, MD, Medical Director of Harvard Medical School's Asylum Clinic, pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital, as well as Shoshanna Ehrlich, JD, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts, for their contributions to the preliminary development of this work. Kalifa J. Wright, MPH, is a research analyst at the Center for Health Information and Analysis, and former Connors Center for Women's Health & Gender Biology affiliate with professional expertise in health policy, global health, and reproductive health for adolescents and young women. Lydia E. Pace, MD, MPH, is the Director of Women's Health Policy & Advocacy at the Connors Center for Women's Health & Gender Biology, Associate Physician in the Brigham and Women's Hospital Division of Women's Health, and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School. C. Nicholas Cuneo, MD, MPH, is Assistant Professor in Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with a joint appointment at the Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Public Health and Human Rights and expertise in migrant health, human rights, and global health research. Deborah Bartz, MD, MPH, is the Director of Education at the Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology. She is an obstetrician-gynecologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School.

Legitimation and Textual Evidence: How the Snowden Leaks Reshaped the ACLU’s Online Writing About NSA Surveillance

Scholars in discourse studies have defined legitimation as the justification (and critique) of powerful institutions and their practices. In moments of crisis, legitimation tactics often shift. This article considers how such shifts are incited by unauthorized information leaks. Leaks, I argue, constitute freshly available texts that reveal privileged institutional information presented in a specialized rhetorical style. To explore how leaks are harnessed by institutional critics, I examine the 2013 Snowden/National Security Agency (NSA) crisis. Combining corpus analysis with discourse analysis, I explore how Snowden’s NSA leaks affected the online writing of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). I also consider overlaps between the rhetorical patterns in the leaked NSA documents and those in the ACLU’s post-leaks writing. Findings from my analysis of legitimation and style categories suggest that, prior to the leaks, ACLU writers primarily used a character- and narrative-based style to delegitimize the NSA’s policies as illegal and secretive, and to push for their reform. After the leaks, though, the ACLU mainly used an informationally dense style rife with academic terms and vocabularies of strategic action, portraying NSA surveillance as massive and complex. As the documents moved from the NSA’s secret, technical discourses to public, critical discourses, the latter came to resemble the former rhetorically. These findings raise crucial questions about how critics can make use of leaks without necessarily relegitimizing institutional power.

Jail may force methadone patient to detox when she goes in next week

Christine M. Finnigan, after 20 years with untreated opioid use disorder (OUD), entered treatment with methadone in August 2019. Next week, she is due to enter DuPage County Jail in Illinois for 30 days for a 2016 DUI conviction. The jail and Sheriff James Mendrick have not indicated that they will let her continue her methadone treatment — in fact, the jail's policy and practice is to refuse to provide medication‐assisted treatment (MAT), under its “de facto Mandatory Withdrawal policy.” So the Legal Action Center (LAC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have sued to make sure she does get the treatment.

The Mind of RGB

The Mind of RGB Toni Messina (bio) The Way Women Are: Transformative Opinions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Cathy Cambron, ed. Welcome Rain Publishers https://www.amazon.com/Way-Women-Are-Transformative-Opinions/dp/1566494044 304 Pages; Print, $11.99 The cover of The Way Women Are, a book containing "the transformative opinions and dissents" of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sleek, smooth, and inviting. It pictures the judge's favorite white jabot collar woven from tiny white beads set again a black background. That's all we need to recognize who this book will be about. The book, though, is not about RBG's life, background, secret desires, or even a day in the life. It's about how she thought, as detailed through her decisions and briefs written over the decades she's been a litigator arguing in front of the Supreme Court and as a sitting justice. The editor, former lawyer Cathy Cambron, has compiled and excerpted what she believes are Justice Ginsburg’s most ground-breaking decisions and dissents in addition to sections from briefs she argued on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). While they cover a variety of subjects as diverse as women's abortion rights and separation of church and state, what they share is a clear-headed, fearless view that the constitution should be applied fairly across the board for Jew, Muslim, female or male. Her writings depict the mind of a judge unafraid to upbraid her brethren's logic and ruffle feathers when an important point needs to be made. Legal opinions don't make for easy reading. The book is not a synopsis of her greatest hits, but excerpts of actual decisions and briefs which by their very logic-favoring nature do not make for engrossing prose. It's the kind of dense read that pushes law students to develop eight-cup-a-day coffee habits. Yet in spite of the formality—point A leads to point B which leads to point C—each opinion includes a nugget as memorable as any quotable-quote from Shakespeare. The brief introduction (10 pages of the 284-page book) outlines the trajectory of Ginsberg, nee Joan Ruth Bader, from her birth in Brooklyn in 1933 to her rise through Cornell in the 1950's, to Harvard Law School where she met her husband, to teaching at Columbia law and Rutgers law schools, to volunteering at the ACLU where she co-founded the Women's Rights Project, to her tenure at the U.S. Supreme Court. Hers was not an easy road, confronted with the death of her mom at age sixteen, dealing with her husband's diagnosis of testicular cancer while both were law students, struggling to find a good law job or judicial clerkship upon graduation. According to the book, in 1971, the year she argued her first case in front of the US Supreme Court (Reed v. Reed), only 3% of all attorneys in the country were women. But information on her stellar rise through the ranks and eventual appointment as the second woman ever on the Supreme Court (after Sandra Day O'Connor) has already been thoroughly explored in books, documentaries, Hollywood movies (On the Basis of Sex [2018]), and through the many interviews she's given. (RBG is not one to shy away from giving her opinion.) What this book adds, however, is a sampling of her actual words, taken from her decisions, dissents and briefs. It's an up-close view of how her mind works, the acuity of her thinking, the sharpness of her wit, and the ultimate reality that Supreme Court decision-making is a product of nine justices that requires compromise and collegiality. Because of the book's scope, starting with briefs she wrote fighting for the equal treatment of men and woman in the 1970s through current times with the present Supreme Court make-up, it's often startling and, in my mind, sad to see how her role changed from being that of a leader on issues such as worker's rights, abortion access, equal protection...

Anthropological Perspectives on Anti‐Immigrant Policies and Food System Precarity in the Trump Era

As we go to print with this issue at the end of October 2020, the November 3rd presidential election and the indeterminate end of the COVID-19 pandemic weigh heavily on our minds. The results of this election and decisions about how to deal with the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic will affect us all for years to come. In a moment when essential workers are honored as heroes, perhaps the most essential workers in our labor system—immigrant workers who cultivate, pick, and pack food—are made more vulnerable by policies and rhetoric designed to dehumanize them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the U.S. Justice Department recently announced that the parents of 545 migrant children who were separated from family members by officials at the U.S. border between 2017 and 2018 cannot be found. We would like to think that a change in administration in the White House could result in a dramatically different approach to immigration policy in the United States, but this result is not guaranteed. Consistent and relentless pressure for reform will always be necessary. The articles in this special issue reflect the central role played by anthropologists and social theorists in bringing to light the issues facing immigrants, especially farmworkers, during (before, and likely, after) the Trump era. In her introduction, guest editor Teresa M. Mares pulls together the central threads that run through these articles—the forms of fear, isolation, and oppression exacerbated under Trump but also the work of various actors involved in caring for those made more vulnerable in this moment and actively resisting immigration enforcement tactics. We hope that the insights provided in this special issue collection will inform the creation of better policies that honor the critical importance of immigrants in our labor system and our communities. Also in this issue, Nicole Peterson and Andrea Freidus investigate in detail what food security looks and feels like for American university students in More than Money: Barriers to Food Security on a College Campus. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork involving undergraduate research assistants and food bank staff, Peterson and Freidus explore the many barriers that make it difficult for students to secure adequate amounts and types of food. They argue that conventional analyses of food security often overlook these non-financial barriers, which include time, transportation, and other factors described by the students participating in the study. Together with the articles in this special issue, this contribution reminds us of the many forms of precarity within the U.S. food system.

Covid-19: Women's health campaigners sue FDA over access to medical abortion pills.

A group of prominent women’s health organisations are suing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for preventing telemedicine prescribing of mifepristone, one of the drugs used in early abortions and miscarriages. It is the only prescription drug with such a restriction. The plaintiffs argue that the prohibition on telemedicine prescribing and mail delivery of mifepristone puts both the patient and the provider at risk of exposure to covid-19 during the current pandemic. Public health authorities have urged people to stay home as much as possible and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised people to fill prescriptions by mail. Those behind the action are the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Council of University Chairs of …

Abortion-Specific State ‘Conscience Laws’ Reflect Need to Balance M.D., Patient Rights

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ProfessionalFull AccessAbortion-Specific State ‘Conscience Laws’ Reflect Need to Balance M.D., Patient RightsMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Jan 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.1a10AbstractMore than half of state abortion-specific conscience laws offer no restriction or limitations on a physician’s right to refuse to provide an abortion.Every state in the nation has “conscience” laws allowing physicians to opt out of providing services they deem to be antithetical to their conscience, and 46 states have such laws specifically related to abortion services, according to a survey of state conscience laws by Nadia Sawicki, J.D., of Loyola University. The findings were published as a research letter on November 19, 2019, in JAMA.iStock/ChristianChanMany of the abortion-specific conscience laws include a variety of exceptions to the right to opt out of providing abortion services (such as emergencies or ectopic pregnancies), and some laws also include various requirements, such as the duty to provide a referral to another health care professional. But more than half of the states with abortion-specific conscience laws have no limitations whatsoever, according to Sawicki.Citing previous reports from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Sawicki stated in JAMA that “there is evidence that some patients have been injured because they were denied abortions, arguably in violation of the standard of care.” She added that in many states, such patients have no legal recourse.In 2015, the ACLU filed suit against Trinity Health Corporation and Trinity Health Michigan. The suit alleged that hospitals within the Trinity Health system, which adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, systematically failed to provide emergency care to women with pregnancy complications as required by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.“In fact, in the span of one year, a public health educator found that at just one of Defendants’ hospitals alone, several women suffering pregnancy complications were denied the care they needed and to which they were entitled under federal law,” the suit stated. “As a result, pregnant women seeking emergency care at Defendants’ hospitals—including at least one of Plaintiffs’ members—have become septic, experienced hemorrhaging, contracted life-threatening infections, and/or unnecessarily suffered severe pain for several days at a time.” (The case was dismissed in 2016.)A May 2016 ACLU report entitled, “Health Care Denied: Patients and Physicians Speak Out About Catholic Hospitals and the Threat to Women’s Health and Lives,” detailed stories of women denied abortion services. “Today, one in six hospital beds in the United States is in a Catholic hospital,” the report stated. “In some places, such as Washington State, more than 40% of all hospital beds are in a Catholic hospital, and entire regions have no other option for hospital care. … These hospitals should not be permitted to turn away patients seeking emergency medical care, to discriminate against women by refusing to provide critical reproductive health services, or to force their values on patients who may not share them.”In the JAMA Research Letter, Sawicki wrote, “State legislators seeking to strike a balance between conscience rights and patient safety have achieved this goal in a variety of ways. Some states, for example, limit rights to refuse abortion in cases of emergency, miscarriage, or ectopic pregnancy. Others do not limit refusal rights but provide some safeguards for patients by preserving their right to seek compensation for injuries in such cases.”Sawicki and her team used Westlaw, a databank of state laws, and state legislative webpages to identify conscience laws in the 50 states and District of Columbia (see chart). “As of December 2018, 46 states had one or more laws that protect clinicians and institutions, as well as other individuals and entities, from adverse consequences that may arise as a result of their conscientious refusal to participate in abortion. While the scope of protections varied by state, these laws frequently established immunity from adverse actions by employers, government entities or officials, and educational institutions.”“Laws impacting physician speech and behavior can raise a number of issues, and it is important for us to be aware of evolving dialogue in the areas they address,” says Debra A. Pinals, M.D.David Hathcox(In addition to the District of Columbia, the four states that do not have abortion-specific conscience laws are Colorado, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and Vermont.)Sawicki found that the most common protection was a prohibition on civil lawsuits against conscientious refusers. Of the 37 states that provide immunity from civil liability, 34 states protect broad categories of individuals from liability: their statutory text protects all “persons,” all “health care providers,” or all health care facility “staff” or “employees.”Thirty-two states provide civil immunity to some select health care facilities. Rights of refusal and/or civil immunity are limited in cases of emergency (13 states), miscarriage (four states), and ectopic pregnancy (three states).Some states explicitly require that the objecting individual or institution notify the patient of the refusal (eight states), provide a referral (two states), provide information regarding access to services (two states), return a prescription (two states), or make informed consent disclosures (one state).“Return a prescription” refers to pharmacies, hospitals, or health professionals that refuse to fulfill an abortion-related prescription and a requirement to return the prescription so the patient may take it elsewhere.Illinois is the one state that includes a requirement to “make informed consent disclosures.” The state’s Health Care Right of Conscience Act protects conscience rights relating to any form of health care, but specifically enumerates abortion, contraception, and sterilization as among the protected procedures. The law states, “Nothing in this Act shall relieve a physician from any duty, which may exist under any laws concerning current standards of medical practice or care, to inform his or her patient of the patient’s condition, prognosis, legal treatment options, and risks and benefits of treatment options, provided, however, that such physician shall be under no duty to perform, assist, counsel, suggest, recommend, refer, or participate in any way in any form of medical practice or health care service that is contrary to his or her conscience.” Twenty-six states imposed no conditions on rights of refusal.APA Opposes State Laws Requiring ‘Scripts’ When Counseling Patients About AbortionA position statement approved by the APA Board of Trustees in 2013 titled “Legislative Intrusion and Reproductive Choice” states that “a growing number of state legislatures have enacted or are considering legislation requiring physicians who are counseling and treating pregnant women to follow specific scripts and protocols in communicating with their patients and providing medical care to them.”The position statement continues, “These required scripts include inaccurate statements about the effects of abortion on the woman’s health and well-being. Prescribed examination protocols typically include mandated ultrasound procedures that women are encouraged or required to view. Although it is appropriate for states to require disclosure of material information regarding the risks of any recommended treatment and to obtain informed consent, these statutes are not designed to assure informed decision making; instead they represent an unprecedented effort by the government to use physician communications as an instrument for discouraging pregnant women from exercising their constitutional right to make their own reproductive choices. These laws intrude into the privacy of physician-patient communications and, in so doing, compromise the rights of both patients and physicians. They are strongly opposed by the American Psychiatric Association.”Last May, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have expanded the right of health care professionals who receive federal funding to refuse to participate in abortion, transgender health care, or any other service to which they object for religious or moral reasons. In November, the rule was struck down by two federal courts (Psychiatric News).The state laws referenced in JAMA would not, in any case, have been affected by the proposed federal rule; however, the proposed rule speaks to the Trump administration’s intention to preserve and expand conscience laws allowing physicians to opt out of providing some services. More than a dozen federal statutes, more limited in scope than the rule proposed last May, already aim to accommodate religious and moral objections to providing certain health care services by those receiving federal fundingA position statement titled “Legislative Intrusion and Reproductive Choice,” approved by the APA Board of Trustees in 2013 and retained in 2018, opposes state laws that would require physicians to follow a “script”—including questionable or inaccurate information about effects of abortion on a woman’s health—when speaking to patients about abortion (see box above).Debra A. Pinals, M.D., chair of the APA Council on Psychiatry and the Law, said the issue of physician conscience requires balancing physician and patient rights. “Physicians have historically had some protections related to conscience objections to provision of services on religious or moral grounds,” she told Psychiatric News. “These come up most often with abortion, sterilization, and end-of-life type issues. The balancing test in these scenarios requires physicians who would object to also let patients know what their treatment options are and to refer to a health care professional able to provide the full medical care to the patient.“The balance between protecting physicians who have conscience-based objections and protecting patients is part of the current debate that will be important to track as it unfolds,” Pinals said. ■ “Protections From Civil Liability in State Abortion Conscience Laws” is posted here. The ACLU Report, “Health Care Denied” is posted here. A description of the ACLU lawsuit against Trinity Health is posted here. ISSUES NewArchived

‘Neither citizen nor alien’: Migration, Territoriality, and Malfunctioning Empire in the US Virgin Islands

Author(s): Flood, Amelia | Abstract: In 1924, Leander Holder, an Afro-Danish housewife living in New York City, attempted to buy a steamship ticket home after a visit to the US Virgin Islands. The steamship company refused to sell her passage, arguing that she lacked the needed documents to prove her American citizenship. The snafu sent a flurry of letters, cables, and memos circulating through the islands–mainland circuit. As Virgin Islands activists, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), federal officials, and Holder’s family became embroiled in a debate over how she might return to the mainland, their conundrum became indicative of how migrating imperial subjects revealed the reach and limits of American power. This article considers Holder’s predicament through the lens of territoriality and migration to reveal the deficiencies of not only America’s territorial regime but also how the movements of ordinary women and men across, to, and from imperial spaces lay bare the way empire exerts power through incoherence. Opening with the facts of the case, the article then explores how rapid changes in conceptions of territoriality and citizenship influenced its events. It then considers migration as the key malfunction point in the increasingly racialized context of American empire in the early twentieth century. The article ends by examining the ways that Holder’s story speaks to the function of dysfunction in the history of American empire, a migrant’s ability to disrupt empire’s assumed efficiency, and the ways empire wields power even as its judicial congruency fails, its bureaucracies bicker, and its processes malfunction.

Recovering the "Most Neglected Feminist Leader of the Twentieth Century": Crystal Eastman, Historical Memory, and the Bequest of an Intersectional Inheritance

At the time of her death in 1928, Crystal Eastman was one of the most conspicuous political women in the United States. A cofounder of the National Woman's Party, the Woman's Peace Party, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Eastman also drafted the nation's first serious workers' compensation law and has been credited as a coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Yet nearly a century later, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. Over time, she has become a strangely elided figure—commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This article explores Eastman's political identity, connecting it to the question of her complex legacy in historical memory today. I argue it was her intersectional imperative—her drive to bridge multiple social justice movements all under one emancipatory rubric—that destabilized her historical standing and intelligibility. By reexamining her public life and career in light of new sources and frameworks, I aim to redefine the transgressive nature of her politics for a new generation of women's studies scholars.

Why face recognition accuracy varies due to race

The varying accuracy of face recognition across race and gender has attracted a good deal of media attention. Publications ranging from the New York Times to Wired have carried headlines like ‘Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You're a White Guy’ and ‘The best algorithms still struggle to recognize black faces equally’ 1, 2, 3 . Press releases by organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology 4, 5 have spurred some of this media coverage – which at times has been more sensationalised than well-informed about the technology.