The Law and Politics of Life and Death: AIDS, COVID, and Abortion
Guest Blogger
For the Balkinization Symposium on Death and Legal Scholarship
Aziza Ahmed
How we gather and mobilize data has
consequences for the material distribution of resources, including access to
health services. Legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry names a similar
phenomenon in article Measuring the World:
Indicators, Human Rights, and Global Governance
in which she describes the power of indicators to produce and construct the
knowledge that we then use to govern the world. In her beautiful forthcoming
article, An
Uncountable Casualty: Ruminations on the Social Life of Numbers,
Mary Dudziak similarly describes the power of statistics in service of a
political projects.
The power of the knowledge/governance effect, the importance of being counted
and known, been a central theme in my work on AIDS, COVID, and abortion.
In my forthcoming book, Feminism’s Medicine:
Law, Science, and Social Movements in the AIDS Response, I tell the story of how women in the 1980s and 1990s, invisible
to public health researchers, demanded that they be counted among people living
and dying with AIDS. Many of these women were Black and Latina, and many
from Bedford Women’s Prison in New York. They fought to demand that the
CDC alter the definition of AIDS being used at the time (the late 1980s), which
did not include gynecological illnesses. If the definition did include
gynecological illnesses they would be able to access social security disability
benefits which were presumptively given to people then living with
AIDS.
A woman named Katrina
Haslip is an instrumental person in the fight to change the CDC definition of
AIDS. A former sex worker, Black, Muslim, and in prison, she became a
leader in this struggle. But her story, unlike many of the others I
am writing about, is written largely from secondary sources and interviews of
people who knew her. Like many of the other Black and Latina women whose
stories I hoped to find and tell, as well as the women of the third world, they
are dead. Their deaths are not necessarily recorded as AIDS deaths. In
other words, their deaths nearly erased them from the record on AIDS – it us up
to scholars and historians to resurrect their memory for action. (Here I
have drawn great inspiration from the work of Sadiya Haartman in thinking about Black women in the archive).
The CDC pushed back
against activist demands to expand the definition of AIDS. They argued that it
was too risky to expand the definition of AIDS, because the vast numbers of
people suspected to have HIV that would need services would crash the
system. For feminists crashing the system was worth the recognition that
women were dying also, acknowledgement of their deaths, and the attempt to
alleviate their sickness.
As our current pandemic
teaches us, systems can crash. This is to be expected from a public health
system that has been gutted through chronic underfunding of public health
systems. As with prior pandemics, data collection
immediately became an issue which revealed the struggling public health
infrastructure. Who was actually getting sick and dying? It turned out we
didn’t know. Issues with COVID testing and reporting led to skewed data on COVID, and data was often not disaggregated based on race and gender.
New organizations,
including Data
for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter, called out public health entities for failing to account for
numbers of people of color, particularly Black and Latino, impacted and a
response that ignored structural concerns and a failure to collect the relevant
data. This data could drive better policy decisions. Black Lives
Matters sought to highlight the many aspects of life that render an individual
more likely to contract the coronavirus from being an essential worker to
having a pre-existing health condition often more present in the lives of Black
people. “We are the essential workers who keep the country going; we are
the mail carriers, delivery personnel, transportation providers, and hospital
workers. We cannot just #stayhome.
The politics of death
and dying aren’t only a feature of pandemics. Abortion access continues
to be a public health crises as laws including Texas law SB8 – which bans a
person from seeking an abortion 6 weeks after their last menstrual period –
make abortion essentially unavailable to most women in the state. In
Whole Women’s Health and June Medical, which found laws targeting
abortion providers to be unconstitutional, the Supreme Court which once seem
swayed by data suggesting that lack of access to abortion would harm women’s
lives, seems no longer concerned about reality.
Outside of the United
States, in legal jurisdictions that prioritize the fetus over the pregnant
person, like SB8, it was a woman’s death, sometimes two or three that finally
inspired change. One example is Ireland, in which Savita Halappanvar was left dying as she became septic because a fetal cardiac
activity was detected and the hospital refused to intervene. Her death
inspired a national movement that led to the liberalization of abortion
laws. We already see a similar
abdication of duty towards women in Texas as physicians face decisions about prioritizing an unviable fetus
over a woman’s life and health.
How many deaths and how
much mortality and morbidity will it take to sway the political atmosphere on
abortion? Will those deaths even be counted in the register of lives taken and
harmed by restrictive abortion laws? From the cost-benefit analysis that will
certainly be mobilized to decide if the mortality and morbidity of abortion are
worth it, what will the benefits be?
We don’t have the
answers to these questions, yet. But for now, with abortion rights hanging in
the balance, and a pandemic raging, the Supreme Court seems willing to
entertain the possibility that no amount of death and dying will matter.
Posted
10:00 AM
by Guest Blogger [link]