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Womanhood is not a monolith, and yet policy makers-and the legislation they champion-treat women as if they are all of one race, class, and sexual identity. While political, public rhetoric around women's empowerment may rally the masses, it also projects a naive idea that all women's experiences are the same. True solidarity among women and allies requires a critical analysis of how power and hierarchy impact women differently. Only by achieving this understanding will dismantling patriarchal systems become a real possibility, rather than an abstract vision. Fortunately, there already exists a framework for this type of analysis: intersectionality.
Systemic public-policy issues require an intersectional feminist framework. Without intersectionality, policy makers fail to recognize the complexity of the communities they serve, and their solutions are unsustainable.
Abortion access in the United States today epitomizes both challenges and opportunities in intersectional policymaking. The reproductive rights movement-specifically the role women of color play in that movement-offers a powerful example of how intersectional feminism can pave the way for a new generation of decision makers to topple systemic barriers to equality and empowerment in our society.
Intersectional Feminism and Reproductive Health
Intersectional feminism, as opposed to mainstream feminism, examines how gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, physical and mental ability, and immigration status (among other experiences) overlap. Mainstream feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, who were mostly White, middle-class women, fought tirelessly for anti-discrimination policies in the workplace and for abortion rights. However, their platforms often ignored the experiences of low-income women, transgender and gender nonconforming people, women of color, and disabled women. The legacy of this erasure is embedded in the limits of abortion access today.
The term "intersectionality" was originally coined by lawyer and theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to explain how Black women experience compounded violence based on their race and gender. Crenshaw defines intersectional as "a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It's not simply that there's a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things."1
In the present day, intersectionality has evolved into an analytical framework for addressing the invisibility of...