Our contribution to‘ Abortion: decriminalise, destigmatise, demedicalise’
Doctors for Choice x Abortion Talk Conference, 8th June 2024
Hello everyone,
My name is AZ and I am the founder and one of the community doulas at the Ad’iyah Collective. We’re a Reproductive Justice collective run by and for Muslims navigating pregnancy ending journeys, such as abortion, miscarriage and stillbirth. We do this by stewarding community support spaces for Muslims who have experienced or are considering abortion, healing circles for folk navigating reproductive trauma, monthly teach-ins on topics around Islam and Reproductive Justice, and community developed resources. We also provide free 1-2-1 doula support for marginalised people who would typically be excluded from doula support.
There’s so many things I could say about my beautiful community, but I’d like to focus on Reproductive Justice and its significance to our work. I’d also like to name the fact that Reproductive Justice was born out of SisterSong – an organisation founded by Black and Indigenous women that was radical and transformational in its origins but has since been heavily criticised for its shameful response to Israeli settler colonialism and Israel’s current genocide on Palestine. RJ is the best language we have at the moment and it is necessary to credit the women who coined this term, but it isn’t without its flaws and I wanted to begin by naming this.
Ad’iyah is just over two years old now and the grounding of reproductive justice in our work was more instinctual and common sense, than it was a decision or a stance we had to take. RJ was the only thing that made sense to us, as Muslims, because it was the only framework that actually acknowledged the failings in rights and choice-based models of reproductive health.
There’s two things I’d like to discuss here. The first being the logistical and practical failings of choice. The second will speak to the theoretical and conceptual shortcomings of a solely rights-based approach for Muslims and for other marginalised groups who are averse to the idea that European or British law is the only vehicle we have for justice.
First things first, it’s fundamental to acknowledge that choice isn’t universally accessible to all of us. If you were to ask me about choice – as someone who exists in this country as a Muslim, brown person, I would first ask you to explain what choice actually means for someone like me.
I would ask you about prevent and the policing of my communities. I would ask you about the hostile environment and about the fact that 18% of the prison population are Muslim, even though we are 6% of the general population. I would ask you about European colonialism and its indoctrination of my people that has caused entire nation states to believe that homosexuality and queerness is a white import, instead of an essential thread in our history. I would ask you about the housing situation for Muslims in this country, I’d ask you about the fact 50% of Muslims in this country live in poverty. I’d ask you about so many more things that impact me, my people, and the perception of my body, before I even began to ask about the choices I can and cannot make about my body, my sexuality and reproductive experiences. Before reproductive choice even comes into the conversation, I would ask you to look at all the different ways in which bodily autonomy is denied from me and my communities. From what we wear and how we speak, to where we go and where we’re allowed to feel safe - choice is a white woman’s fantasy that was crafted without us in mind, and is only now being retrofitted to include us.
And this why the pro-choice rhetoric falls so flat for so many of us. This is why the idea of reproductive rights falls so flat for so many of us. Why would and should I care about improving the rights of others at the expense of mine? What difference does changing the law make when the law is fundamentally oppressive in the first place? And perhaps most importantly, why is the focus specifically on the acts of reproduction, staying pregnant and ending a pregnancy, instead of whether or not we have what we need in our communities to parent our children in the ways we want.
I’m sure people will rush to defend the language and intentions of pro-choice – and that’s fine – but I’d like to touch on the post and graphic shared earlier this year by BPAS, one of the largest abortion providers in the UK. A lot of people were shocked by this graphic and rightfully so – it’s disgustingly Islamophobic and racist – but for many of us at Ad’iyah it perfectly captures the experience of being in the pro-choice space when you’re not a cishet, white woman. Our experiences and our pain – which was caused by colonialism and continues to be reinforced by neoliberalism – is the punch line. We’re thrown under the bus at the earliest opportunity for white women to further their reproductive rights, at the expense of ours.
And I suppose this is why so many Muslims find solace in the terminology of reproductive justice. Through RJ, the fullness of our identities is not separated from our healthcare experiences, and whilst the fight for RJ is long and arduous, it provides us for a vision of the future where we aren’t afterthoughts but are genuinely cared for.
The other aspect of RJ I’d like to discuss is the spiritual and theoretical aspects of it, specifically grounded in Islam.
Contrary to popular belief, abortion isn’t mentioned in the Quran. Ideas of sin, permissibility, God punishing us for having abortions, can’t and don’t find their grounding in our holy text. Certain schools of thought do indeed have their own beliefs on abortion, and certain Hadiths, interpretations or recollections of the Prophet (pbh) do speak on abortion and the permissibility of it. But ultimately, the thing that unites all Muslims in their practices of Islam is the Quran, which says absolutely nothing about abortion whatsoever.
What we are told, however, is la ikraha fid deen, which roughly translates to ‘there is no compulsion in religion.’
Because I am Muslim, free will and bodily autonomy are my god given right.
People make swooping statements about religious peoples’ thoughts on abortion, but the common tropes of life beginning at conception or the unborn child’s life being more valuable than the pregnant person’s cannot be found in the Quran. So asking us to map our views on abortion into this binary of pro or anti-choice - which again is rooted in white, evangelical thought - really does not make sense for us.
My reading of Islam is fundamentally abolitionist. And to add to this, I would say that the true understandings of justice and accountability in Islam can never be found in the the aftermath of colonialism and capitalism and the structures they have created. Governments deciding what we can and cannot do with our body has been the norm for as long as we’ve been alive, but that isn’t how its always been. Requiring permission from the state to do what we want didn’t happen by chance.
These things are intentional, in the same way that all manifestations of oppression. Abortion restrictions happened at the same time as white supremacy became the default setting in society, when white male doctors realised that controlling our wombs was a great way to ensure our subjugation. Abortions became restricted and controlled, first through medical practice and then through laws.
Flash forward a few hundred years, and our abortions are now excessively medicalised, industrialised and politicised, with the legal system serving as a key driver of this.
The ‘Muslim objection’ to tightening our laws or seeking protection through institutions isn’t just a matter of common sense - why would we support racist laws when we have better examples in our faith - but also of spiritual misalignment.
In Islam we say, la ilaha illa Allah. There is no God but Allah.
Placing governments and laws in the place of God, giving them power to decide what we can and cannot do, is shirkh. It’s blasphemy. It’s fundamentally un-islamic. We view Allah as the most merciful, the most loving, and the most just. Quite frankly, our legal systems couldn’t compete.
The reason you don’t see Muslims in pro-choice spaces isn’t because – as contemporary media would have you believe – we’re backwards and oppressive. It’s because rights-based models encourage us to co-sign structures that directly contradict what we believe in. They encourage us to exist on a binary of justice, in this case pro-choice and anti-choice, when actually our beliefs on justice are so much broader than this.
We believe in a justice that is so great and so expansive and irrefutably ours, that no borders or policy makers or politicians could ever take away from us.
The idea of nation states and governments deciding what we can and cannot do with our bodies is a recent phenomenon. And I think that framing is crucial, because it actually allows us to imagine what life would look like if these things didn’t exist. Herein lies the true spirit of abolition – not just envisioning how we tear systems down, but daring to dream of what the world could look like with collective liberation.
