Abstract
[...]the amicus brief contends that "AAPI women are more likely to become targets of criminal prosecution as a result of racial profiling" ("Brief of Amici National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum" 25). Using an Asian American feminist lens to analyze Ai's 1973 dramatic monologues, "Abortion," "The Country Midwife: A Day," and "But What I'm Trying to Say Mother Is," this essay argues that Ai's dramatic monologues-poems or performances on the page written in a voice other than the author's- utilize these different discourses that circulated around abortion and women's health care to construct images of the treatment of dispossessed women that emphasize the importance of access to safe, affordable, and legal reproductive care due to the medical and cultural apparatuses that imperil women's lives. [...]close readings of Ai's three texts illuminate the ways in which her work representationally recognizes her understanding of difference as a mixed-race poet. [...]this paper moves beyond merely highlighting the coalitional connections and differences among reproductive justice feminisms: an examination of Ai's monologues alongside the work of 1970s Asian American activists, scholars, and journalists fighting for reproductive rights also exposes the intra-racial differences within Asian American communities.2 Grounded in the Asian American feminist praxis of remembering, this essay applies an Asian American feminist lens when examining Asian American and Women of Color discourses by underscoring coalitional differences or what Grace Kyungwon Hong calls the strategies and analytics of "intersectionality and incommensurability"-that is, "the idea of founding movements on rather than in spite cf difference, an idea that many have observed is foundational to Women of Color feminism" (28). [...]reproductive justice moves beyond the pro-choice / pro-life debate that is often the focus of white, mainstream feminism's discourses on abortion rights.