The Poverty of Privacy Rights

The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights, including the right to privacy, equally on all persons. Yet, the poor are subject to invasions of privacy that those who are not poor would likely perceive as gross demonstrations of governmental power without limits. Courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of the privacy invasions that states impose on those in poverty. Accordingly, legal scholars typically have understood marginalized populations to have "weak versions" of the privacy rights that everyone else has.

The Poverty of Privacy Rights makes a simple, controversial argument: Poor mothers in America do not have the right to privacy. They have been deprived of this right. Khiara M. Bridges challenges readers to rethink the way we understand our rights. Bridges investigates poor mothers' experiences with the state?both when they receive public assistance and when they do not. This investigation presents readers with a holistic view of just how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers' privacy and how the Constitution has not been interpreted to bestow these women with family, informational, and reproductive privacy rights. Bridges shows how poor mothers don't "give up" rights in exchange for state benefits; they lack these rights even when they do not receive state assistance. Bridges seeks to turn the current popular thinking on its head: Poor mothers' lack of privacy is not a function of their reliance on government assistance?rather it is a function of their not bearing any privacy rights in the first place. She concludes that poor mothers will continue to be denied this right until we disrupt the cultural narratives that equate poverty with immorality.

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).