Khiara M Bridges

The Poverty of Privacy Rights

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Khiara M. Bridges is Professor of Law and of Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011).

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. Juni 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 590g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795456
• ISBN-10: 0804795452
• Artikelnr.: 46474420

Autorenporträt

Khiara M. Bridges is Professor of Law and of Anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This introduction describes this book's thesis: Poor mothers have been
deprived of family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Those
who are empowered to interpret the Constitution have construed the document
to bestow wealthier women with rights that protect their families from
state regulation, prevent their most intimate information from being
collected and disclosed to third parties, and provide them with a space to
decide whether to become mothers without the government influencing their
decisions. Simultaneously, the Constitution has been construed to deny poor
mothers (and those facing the question of whether to become mothers) those
same rights. Because privacy rights are thought to yield specific values,
they are recognized and protected; and because it is assumed that these
privacy rights will not yield these same values when individuals who are
behaviorally and ethically deficient bear them, poor mothers have been
denied these rights.
1The Moral Construction of Poverty
chapter abstract
This chapter documents the ubiquitous voices throughout history that have
rejected structural explanations of poverty and, instead, have argued that
poverty is the result of individual shortcomings. This chapter shows that
the discursive link between poverty and immorality continues to the present
day: One can easily hear a narrative in political or popular discourse that
links poverty with behavioral or ethical deficiencies. This chapter also
shows that the Court's jurisprudence has come to reflect the moral
construction of poverty, examining several cases in which the Court's
rationale for refusing to limit the power of the government vis-à-vis poor
individuals reveals an assumption about the pathology of the poor
person-usually a poor mother-subject to privacy invasions. This chapter
goes on to make the argument that positive rights are not the solution to
poor mothers' predicament.
2The Unconstitutional Conditions Doctrine: Revealing, Yet Misleading
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, which
provides that it is unconstitutional for a state to premise the conferral
of a benefit on the beneficiary's surrender of a constitutional right. The
chapter argues that unconstitutional conditions cases reveal the
justification for the state's denial of privacy rights to poor mothers,
showing that the state denies individuals a right when it disbelieves that
the individual will realize the value that the right is intended to
generate. This chapter goes on to show that poor women lack privacy even
when they do not receive a welfare benefit. It contextualizes the privacy
invasions that poor mothers endure when receiving welfare benefits in a
broader experience of privacy invasions endured by virtue of being poor.
This contextualization demonstrates that poor mothers' lack of privacy
rights is not a function of reliance on government assistance, but a
function of their poverty.
3Family Privacy
chapter abstract
This chapter explores various justifications for the family privacy right
including instrumental, noninstrumental, and pragmatic justifications. It
concludes that the moral construction of poverty counsels in favor of
dispossessing poor mothers of the right because it suggests that poor
mothers will not realize the value that the right is designed to yield. The
chapter goes on to examine the overrepresentation of the poor as subjects
of child welfare investigations and within the foster care system-two
governmental interventions into the family that the family privacy right
purports to allow only when the state suspects child maltreatment. It then
shows that the fact of poverty itself gives the state reason to suspect
child maltreatment. Accordingly, the state always has the authority to
infringe on poor mothers' right to family privacy. The chapter concludes by
suggesting that a right that is always already infringed is not right at
all.
4Informational Privacy
chapter abstract
This chapter explores the justification for the informational privacy right
and concludes that poor mothers have been deprived of it because, as with
family privacy rights, the informational privacy rights will not yield the
value they aredesigned to yield when poor mothers bear them. This chapter
goes on to describe a type of right to informational privacy that has not
yet been conceptualized fully in the literature. This right, absent
compelling circumstances, would prevent the state from coercing those who
are marginalized culturally and socially to perform confessions that might
be taken to justify their marginalization. This right would be the
equivalent of the Fifth Amendment's prohibition against being compelled to
be a witness against oneself, except it would apply in noncriminal
contexts.
5Reproductive Privacy
chapter abstract
This chapter explores reproductive privacy rights and concludes that poor
women have been deprived of these rights because society does not trust
their ability to make competent, moral decisions about reproduction without
state oversight. This chapter documents how Medicaid, through the Hyde
Amendment, intrudes into the domain that reproductive privacy rights are
designed to protect by constraining the decisions that poor women make
concerning abortion. This chapter also discusses how TANF family cap
policies intrude into the domain that reproductive privacy rights are
designed to protect by constraining poor women's decisions about giving
birth to another child. This chapter notes the contradiction of the Hyde
Amendment's pronatalism and TANF's antinatalism. It concludes that this
contradiction reveals that the state is not interested in the precise
decision that poor women make with respect to maternity, but rather is
interested in overseeing that decision as she makes it.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
The conclusion proposes that poor mothers will only enjoy the positive or
negative privacy rights that are formally bestowed to them when an
individual's economic failure is no longer thought to indicate a flawed
character. It examines other historical moments where disenfranchised
groups struggled for rights that had been denied to them, focusing on black
people's struggle for the right to vote and sexual minorities' struggle for
the right to marry. These precedents reveal that formerly disenfranchised
groups were successful in acquiring the rights that they sought not because
they appealed to the Court to interpret the Constitution differently, but
because they shifted the cultural discourse. The law ultimately came to
reflect that transformation of culture. The lesson of history is that poor
mothers will only be granted privacy rights when our culture shifts, and
the moral construction of poverty is unseated from its present discursive
throne.