INCITE! on LaBruzzo and the economy

Check out this response to Representative LaBruzzo (the rep I wrote about yesterday who wants to sterilize poor women) from the New Orleans Women’s Health and Justice Initiative and the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic. (affiliates of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence) It breaks down the scapegoating of Black and poor women as a distraction from the real issues that force people into poverty in the first place:

Even if sterilization is voluntary, POVERTY IS NOT! Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of sustainable livelihood can cause a woman to consider this aggressive sterilization incentive a viable option.

LaBruzzo talks about poverty as though it were an infectious disease—a though poor people will eventually make everyone poor—rather than a condition people are condemned to by Louisiana’s lack of investment in education, employment, affordable housing, and quality health care programs, services, and resources.

LaBruzzo uses a myth of scarcity to argue that if economic resources are shared with everyone, no one will have enough.  The reality is that if the lion’s share of our economic resources stopped being used for unnecessary military spending and corporate welfare, such as the Wall Street bailout, then all our communities would have access to the resources and opportunities they need to survive and thrive!

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We are basically witnessing a two front war against poor and working class black communities right now. On one hand, we have the Bush administration fighting to push an economic corporate welfare bailout plan to save Wall Street, and on the other, we have an elected official blaming the bodies and reproductive decisions of poor black women for the social conditions caused by corporate greed. 

Advocating for the sterilization of poor black women, and publicly demonizing their motherhood under the cloak of reducing the number of people on welfare, masks the complex causes of poverty and inequality that permeate our society.  If Mr. LaBruzzo is really serious about addressing the problems plaguing our communities right now, he would be focusing his attention on creating legislation to end corporate greed, end the War in Iraq, holding corporations accountable for the toxins that they continue to put into the environment, funding our failing education system, providing people the health care they need now, and supporting affordable housing initiatives in the city.