Tactics for Transformation in Birth Justice
/What is a tactic?
A tactic is “an action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end.” (Websters) The most important thing to know about tactics is that there are many. People often have a go-to tactic that they always think of when confronting obstacles or trying to persuade targets. It’s fine to have favorite tactics, but it is unnecessarily limiting to only use one or two.
The whole point of being tactical is tailoring your approach to a specific goal. Not every situation calls for the same tactic. As you strive to increase your effectiveness you will want to increase your set of tactics. At Elephant Circle we value being multidisciplinary because it means we have more tactics to choose from which can help us choose more effective and efficient tactics. We often use tactics from the fields of education, art, science, the law, and community organizing.
A diversity of tactics is needed because each situation is different, and all tactics might not be available for or effective with each target. For example, many of the harms people experience during birth, from force or coercion to lack of access to midwives, are not easily remedied through traditional means of complaint/resolution or lawsuit/judgment so we have to get creative to effectively confront these things.
What is a target?
The book Politics the Wellstone Way: How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues describes a primary target as “the individuals or groups that actually make a decision about your issue.” And secondary targets are “the individuals are groups that influence the primary targets.” Regardless of the issue at hand it is worth thinking in strategic terms about who is responsible for what, and who holds the levers of power. It doesn’t have to be a legislative or governmental issue to warrant strategy. For example, even racism, which is ubiquitous, can be strategically addressed. Tools like the the lens of systemic oppression provide a way of thinking strategically about problems like racism (and the tool works for other forms of oppression as well).
Once you know the targets you can map their relationships to identify opportunities for influence and change. The process called power-mapping can be a liberating and empowering way to identify and strategize around power dynamics. Check out this great little video on power mapping by former Colorado State Senator, Jessie Ulibarri.
Calling out and calling in
Calling out and calling in are tactics suited to different targets depending on the overall goal. Much has been written about calling out versus calling in. We strongly recommend diving into the great writing on that subject, it’s Googleable and a quick search pulls up several articles including this one by Birth Rights Bar Association Board Member Jenn Mahan. This feature explores Loretta Ross’ efforts to redirect calling out (which can be an overused tactic lacking in strategic value) to calling in (which has movement building and transformational utility).
We are also inspired by the work of survivors who have developed transformative justice strategies that respond to harm and violence without relying on policing, punishment, or incarceration. Policing, punishment and incarceration have negative effects that ripple through society and often negatively impact the same communities we are trying to protect. For more about this, we recommend the book Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. And we are delighted that one of Elephant Circle’s early collaborators, Elisabeth Long, has an essay published in it! We also recommend this series of videos:
· What Does Justice Look Like for Survivors?
· What is Transformative Justice?
· How to Support Harm Doers in Being Accountable?
Collectively these resources illustrate a range of tactics beyond calling out that can be used in a range of scenarios and on a range of targets.
Tactics for Transformation in Birth Justice
Strategy and creativity are needed to bring about transformation and pave the way for birth justice. Birth justice can be overwhelming because there is not just one target, and since racism is everywhere it can seem like anyone and everyone is a potential threat/target at all times. Thinking through tactics and targets is an important step because there are people and organizations with more and less power, and those positions can be revealed and even mapped.
Being strategic about power dynamics is critical to transformation. If you remove a threat without transforming it, another threat will simply fill the void created by removal of the first, like whack-a-mole.
At Elephant Circle we envision a world where every pregnant person has a circle of support and protection during the entire perinatal period. Barriers to that vision are our foes. But – every foe is not an equal target. Someone’s abusive family member might be a big barrier to their circle of support, but as a matter of strategy, we do not aim to eliminate every abusive family member. Instead, we set our sights on people and organizations that have levers to power that influence many more pregnant people at once.
People often aim their firepower at lower-level targets with limited influence, often because those targets are more obvious or accessible (and because of how the human mind perceives threats). Sometimes people aim their firepower at targets who are even on their side. The graphic below illustrates this. The target in red is a target with little power, who leans toward supporting our goals. The target in green has more power and leans toward opposing our goals.
It is possible that both the red and the green target need to be addressed in some way – but probably not with the same tactic. For targets who are near our same level of power, or below, and who are in the supportive portion of the map, we prefer tactics like calling-in. Tactics that preserve and strengthen relationships and create pathways for increased understanding. The following graphic illustrates the range of targets suited to calling-in when you are at the yellow star level on the map.
Other targets on the map may warrant other tactics; tactics individualized for the target and the goal. For example, even the green target may not be suited to a tactic of elimination (punishment, removal), but might be more suited to persuasion that moves them over onto the support side of the map. As the transformative justice movement illustrates, even harm-doers can be called-in, instead of being punished, policed or incarcerated.
Another part of the analysis is to consider: what tactics are generally effective on this type of target? Are there available pathways of redress for this harm? For some harms, the are no effective pathways for redress. Civil disobedience is a good example of a tactic designed for a situation where there are no effective pathways for redress of harms. Often using such a tactic is a strategy in pursuit of more formal pathways of redress, like how the sit-ins eventually led to the Civil Rights Act.
In some scenarios, multiple different tactics are used on the same target successively in increasing intensity, or simultaneously by different strategists. For this approach it is important to think about the whole ecology, what other strategists are out there, and how can your actions compliment, amplify or support theirs. Also, how and with what intensity do your tactics need to be used for the best effect?
Again, when it comes to birth justice, creativity is often required because there are no good formal mechanisms for redress of harms. But not every situation is the same. One of the most common disputes among people, well-developed in our legal system, is the dispute over contracts and money: who paid what to whom and what number was agreed to? For this type of harm there are well-worn pathways that many people can use, even people without a lot of money or time. Consider using a well-worn pathway when it is available and generally effective, like small claims court instead of social-media shaming.
This graphic from the Birth Rights publication illustrates a range of tactics or ways to say that “what happened to me was not okay.” In the narrative of this section the pros and cons of each tactic is discussed. We recommend doing a pro-con analysis before implementing your tactics (and of course we recommend reading the Birth Rights resource available here in English and Spanish).
Because each situation is different, and each person or group will have different values and priorities, having a diversity of tactics to choose from is helpful. No matter how many tactics you know about or use, there are always new things to learn. To expand your thinking about practices that constitute tactics, we also recommend adreienne maree brown’s books Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism.
Like brown, we also think of it ecologically: what kind of environment do our tactics create for all the beings and ideas we want to protect and see thrive? A slash-and-burn tactic might be effective in the short term, but could have undesirable long term effects (as illustrated so many times throughout history). As a result we practice being thoughtful, considerate and strategic about both targets and tactics, in order to maximize the possibility for transformation and minimize the possibility of creating power vacuums that will be filled by more of the status quo.