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Published: September 17, 2007

Beyond Zen

San Diego’s premier Catholic university conference to feature one of the “few trailblazers of the reproductive rights movement.”

Besides featuring Zen Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh as keynote speaker on Oct. 2, the Catholic University of San Diego’s 18th Annual Social Issues Conference will showcase a speaker associated with an organization that promotes “reproductive rights.”

Andrea Smith will give the 2007 Labovitz Lecture on Oct. 5. Smith is co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and the Boarding School Healing Project. She will talk on “Human Rights, Social Action, and the Path to Peace.”

According the group’s web site, Incite! “is a national activist organization of radical feminists of color advancing a movement to end violence against women of color and their communities through direct action, critical dialogue and grassroots organizing.” The group says it links “liberation struggles which oppose racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism and all other forms of oppression.”

Incite! is pro-abortion. A poster, downloadable from its web site, assails the Hyde Amendment, which forbids federal funds to be spent for abortion services. “American Indian women who receive health services through a federal agency, such as Indian Health services, do not have the same access to abortion services as other women,” the poster complains. “Women of color are more likely to receive health care through federally funded programs, giving us less access to abortion services than white women.”

The Pro-Choice Public Education Project lists Andrea Smith (along with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger) as one of a “few trailblazers of the reproductive rights movement to know about.”

However, a review of Smith’s 2005 book, Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, found on Humanities and Social Sciences Online, notes that, in her book, Smith decries as a violation of women’s reproductive rights the fact that (in Smith’s words) the "Indian Health Services initiated a fully federally funded sterilization campaign in 1970." Smith’s book criticizes (in the reviewer's words) “the effects of strong contraceptive campaigns that do not fully disclose the ramifications of using birth control, both on a physical as well as a spiritual level.” Another review by Brian Trautman, a doctoral student at Fielding Graduate University, says Smith’s book attacks planned population control mechanisms used with Native American women, such as Depo-Provera and Norplant, because they threaten “the ability to reproduce the next generations of communities of color.”

Smith is an anti-violence and Native American activist. A scholar, she has a B.A. from Harvard University in the comparative study of religion, a Masters of Divinity from the Union Theological Institute, and a PhD in the history of consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Smith is an assistant professor in the Native American Studies department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

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