Reproductive Justice: a "Herstory"
At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, feminists of color articulated the failures of the the white, middle-upper class movement for reproductive “choice”. These feminists formed the “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice” and created the term reproductive justice.
Later, in 1997, this coalition of feminists became known as SisterSong, the Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. A comprehensive “herstory” of SisterSong can be found on their website here. Though SisterSong’s work centers women of color, their members include white cis-men among other allies. SisterSong remains the “largest national multi-ethnic Reproductive Justice coalition”. They organize conferences, produce and publish analysis on reproductive justice, represent a voice for reproductive justice in policy-making spaces, and continue the work of consciousness-raising in communities.
Today, they define reproductive justice as:
“The human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
Reproductive justice blends reproductive rights and social justice. Their radical new understanding calls for a move away from thinking of such justice as simply the expansion of medical services and access or a question of individual autonomy. Instead, it contributes an intersectional and nuanced framework which demonstrates an attention to systems of power outside of medical and legislative institutions that threaten bodily agency. Reproductive justice takes into account a history of forced sterilization in communities of color where people were stripped of their right to have children. When we only think of reproductive healthcare as access to preventing pregnancy, we are leaving out the specific histories and fights of women of color. Reproductive justice asks us to reimagine bodily agency as not only personal choice but as a right that is affected by other power structures in our society. The language of “safe and sustainable communities” necessarily implicates sexual assault, mass incarceration, economic justice, police brutality, and many other issues in the purview of reproductive justice advocacy. These issues affect the relationship one has with their body just as much as medical intervention in contraceptive access, for example. The paradigm shift from reproductive “choice” to reproductive justice forces white and/or middle-upper class feminists to think beyond the limited view of reproductive agency as abortion rights, contraceptive access, and the pro-choice framework.
Though the term has become popularized in mainstream discourse of reproductive health access, SisterSong and these women of color have received little to no recognition. This is no surprise. The work of women of color (including indigenous/native women), trans/queer women, disabled women, poor women, and other marginalized folks is often excluded or co-opted by the white, middle-upper class women who continue to dominate the face of reproductive rights. In the spirit of Black History Month, this blog post aims to remind feminists of the roots of reproductive justice and to continue discourse on why the term is so important.
I wrote this post because I frequently use the term reproductive justice and only learned of its origins in the last few years. I hope this blog post can be a step in the right direction towards remembering its history, true meaning, and the women of color who imagined it. Uterish self-critiques often as we strive to be an ally and advocate for those most affected by the constant threat to bodily autonomy. One product of these efforts was the launch of our issues page, which lists the ever-growing number of related political issues to reproductive health access.
SisterSong reminds us that the question of reproductive agency is ultimately more than a conversation about us and our bodies; it is also one of how those bodies exist in a matrix of racist, trans/queerphobic, ableist, settler, capitalist, normative sites of power that exercise control over our health and lives. Reproductive justice imagines a radically free world where true bodily agency exists for everyone. In envisioning the possibility of this future, we must keep in mind those who paved the way for us to get here, especially the Black feminists at SisterSong!
