Body sovereignty and second-class citizenship: House Bill 178

Rep. David Eastman, R-Wasilla, filed legislation this week to make abortion – dubbed the “murder of an unborn child” – illegal, punishable by 30 to 99 years in prison. The bill, House Bill 178, was a painful reminder that women and gender-diverse persons do not experience full citizenship in Alaska. We know that we do not live freely in a variety of nuanced and complex ways but, most plainly, we know that we do not live freely because we do not live free of excessive, tyrannical control over our sovereign bodies.

Many breathed a sign of relief at the HB 178 protest on May 18 when Rep. Ivy Spohnholz, the co-chair of the House Health and Social Services Committee, said she will not hear the bill. I thank her for that; I also caution that we must remain vigilant about whose rights have yet to be realized in Alaska.

On May 11, 2018, Salley Rooney astutely observed the following in the London Review of Books: Pregnancy, entered into willingly, is an act of generosity, a commitment to share the resources of life with another incipient being. Such generosity is in no other circumstances required by law. No matter how much you need a kidney donation, the law will not force another person to give you one. Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between foetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse.

So, when we consider HB 178, we should be considering it through the lens of classes of citizenship, that is those second and third-class citizens whose rights have yet to be realized. This requires us to trace the historic trajectory of U.S. imperialism in Alaska to identify the different but intersecting ways in which gender, race and sexuality have regulated women, Alaska Natives, and queer and two-spirit persons to the peripheral of citizenship rights. Eastman’s explicit racist, colonialist and sexist attitudes may appear shocking but they represent the various ways that the Alaskan government has trespassed on sovereign bodies.

Seared in our minds should be Eastman’s comment that many [Alaska Native] women located in remote villages are “glad” to become pregnant in order to have a Medicaid funded trip to Seattle or Anchorage for an abortion. Allegations of this nature dually demonstrate his repulsive disregard for the sovereign citizen, for the Alaska Native body and for the female body. It is importantly to identify these factors in tandem: “For bodies are never simply and literally bodies, they are always inscribed within a system of value differentiation,” (Sarah Ahmed, 1995). Let it be clear: this bill represents a hatred of women and gender-diverse persons able to become pregnant evident in the demand we be imprisoned for exercising our full citizenship rights. It also displays a particular animosity toward those bodies whose sovereignty is under threat in other, intersecting ways such as class, race and indigenous status. Simply put, while Eastman hates all women and gender-diverse persons, he especially loathes low-income, remotely-located, Native women who utilize Medicate to exercise bodily sovereignty. In order to be in meaningful solidarity to fight for reproductive justice in Alaska we must understand that in our collective fight for the realization of our citizenship rights, we are differentially positioned.

As such, while we continue to fight against House Bill 178, I beg that we enter into public discourse a call to remind us that fighting for women’s rights means fighting for Native rights, LGBTQ rights, prisoner rights, and migrant rights, to name a few. We must ask: what are the conditions which make our domination and our regulation to second-class citizenship possible? How do we abolish them?

Delaney Mitchell is an independent gender and sexuality scholar based in Matanuska-Susitna, Alaska.