In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, BC Voices is proud to highlight Peggy Saika, an Asian American feminist activist involved in many social justice causes, including the fight for reproductive justice.
Peggy Saika was born in an Arizona internment camp in 1945, where three generations of her family were incarcerated because of their Japanese ancestry. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, in her hometown of Sacramento, Saika helped set up the first Asian community organization which focused on the needs of seniors and immigrants. In 1978, she moved to New York City, worked at Chinatown Health Clinic, and joined the Organization of Asian Women, a multigenerational collective of API feminists. During this seminal time, she was among feminist API activists who lived the contradiction of working against sexism in the API movement, and struggling with racism in the women’s movement.
She returned to California in 1983 to become the Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of the pre-eminent legal and civil rights organizations serving API communities. During this period, Peggy co-founded Asian Pacific Islanders for Choice (APIC), later named Asian Pacific Islanders for Reproductive Health (APIRH) and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), organizations that provided what she called “an explicitly pro-choice vehicle to inject [API] voices into the movement.”
These organizations have not only given API women a presence in the pro-choice movement, they have also used a reproductive justice framework to organize around a multitude of issues that particularly affect API women. Some of these issues include immigrants’ rights, sex trafficking, affordable and adequate health insurance, medical services in the language of the patient, traditional birthing practices, and the impact of the environment on women’s reproductive health.
Continuing to bring an API perspective to social justice work, but always through a gender lens, Peggy was co-founding director of Asia Pacific Environmental Network, served as Executive Director of Asian Americans/ Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy and has been CEO of Common Counsel, which focuses on community-oriented philanthropy for progressive social movements.
We honor Peggy Saika’s decades-long fight for women in the API community, which encompasses more than 60 ethnic and national groups. With language and cultural barriers still in place, poverty, and limited access to health care and health information, recent threats to reproductive rights in the U.S. leave some API women especially vulnerable.
This makes it all the more important that we heed the voices of AAPI women in our conversations on reproductive healthcare in the U.S.
In Stand UP, Speak OUT Episode 3: Reproductive Rights – Birth Control, two Asian American women, Patria Baradi Pacis and Ivee Cruz, share their experiences with contraception. We hope you’ll take the time to watch the video now.
