\n<\/p>\n
Authors Marlene Fried, left, and Loretta Ross<\/span>Mother Jones illustration<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Activist and educator <\/span>Loretta Ross didn\u2019t know she was helping to birth a movement. The year was 1994, the place was a crowded hotel room in Chicago, and the impetus was frustration bordering on rage. Pro-choice activists from around the country had just heard a presentation about the historic health care reform initiative led by then\u2013First Lady Hillary Clinton. But the plan was \u201cvery male-centric,\u201d Ross recalls\u2014and very white-centric. In a futile effort to win over moderate Republicans, it ignored abortion and other basic reproductive care, as well as other health services vital to Black and brown women.\u00a0<\/p>\n Afterwards, Ross and other Black feminists gathered in one of their rooms to vent about the systematic devaluation of women by their own allies and brainstorm about how to fight back. Their first salvo was taking out full-page ad<\/a>s in The Washington Post<\/em> and Roll Call<\/em>. The presentation was buttoned-up, the ideas\u2014\u201cReproductive freedom is a life-and-death issue for many Black women and deserves as much recognition as any other freedom,\u201d and \u201cWE WILL NOT ENDORSE A HEALTH CARE REFORM SYSTEM THAT DOES NOT COVER THE FULL RANGE OF REPRODUCTIVE SERVICES FOR ALL WOMEN, INCLUDING ABORTION\u201d\u2014profound. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know we had created a paradigm shift,\u201d Ross says, \u201cbecause that wasn\u2019t our intention at that time. We meant it only as a response to the Clinton administration and to Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n Thirty years later, the conceptual framework that Ross helped launch has been transformational. Where once abortion was the primary focus of the reproductive rights movement, reproductive justice is equally concerned with birth control, sterilization, the criminalization of pregnancy, and maternal health. Where \u201cpro-choice\u201d centered the concerns of middle-class white women, reproductive justice widens the lens to include women of color, LGBTQ people, and the poor. Instead of tokenizing Black and brown activists, reproductive justice organizations\u2014including the SisterSong collective<\/a>, which Ross cofounded in 1997\u2014reflect the diverse communities they serve. At the core of reproductive justice is autonomy: the idea that people have the right to control their own bodies; to have children, or not have them; and to raise those children in safe and healthy environments.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was radical then, and it\u2019s radical still.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cIt was radical then,\u201d adds Ross\u2019s longtime friend and collaborator, activist and scholar Marlene Fried, \u201cand it\u2019s radical still.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Trump 2.0 era, the reproductive justice framework is more important than ever, Ross and Fried argue in their new book, Abortion and Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide for Resistance<\/a><\/em>. Reproductive justice stands in opposition to pretty much every health and social policy espoused by the Trump administration and its Christian nationalist, pronatalist allies. \u201cWe are in a ferocious backlash,\u201d Fried says. \u201cIt\u2019s a moment when people see the fragility of rights won or not\u2014realizing that rights are not secured forever.\u201d With so much under attack, it can be tempting to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton era, sacrificing those on the margins in a vain attempt to avoid greater losses.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been very struck by how little of our own history of resistance and activism is known within our own movement,\u201d Fried says. \u201cWe want people to learn their own history and gain inspiration and strength from it.\u201d<\/p>\n No one is better suited to tell that story than Ross, whose work earned her a MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d award in 2022<\/a>, and Fried,<\/a> an emeritus professor in philosophy at Hampshire College who was the founding president of the National Network of Abortion Funds. I caught up with them soon after the release of their book, Ross from her office at Smith College, where she is an associate professor<\/a> of women\u2019s and gender studies, and Fried from her home office outside Boston. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Why did you feel the need to write this book now?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Marlene Fried:<\/strong> We actually decided to write it during the first Trump administration. What immediately prompted us was the fact that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump and, at the same time, were opposed to the administration\u2019s policies attacking abortion and contraception. So one of our goals was to expose the way in which abortion is located in the world of racism and white supremacy.\u00a0It was also important to us to include the international context\u2014to ground reproductive justice in human rights.<\/p>\n Much of the book is focused on this country\u2019s history of racism and oppression\u2014exactly the history that Trump 2.0 <\/strong>is trying to erase. <\/strong><\/p>\n Loretta Ross:<\/strong> As we frequently say, if you don\u2019t understand white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, you don\u2019t understand reproductive politics. Because it\u2019s not just about gender. Racism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia\u2014all of those things affect reproductive politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cRacism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia\u2014all of those things affect reproductive politics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n One of the things we always want to do is correct the record, because there are many accounts of how people are oppressed, particularly women, but fewer accounts of how they fought back. So we wanted to make sure that we included\u00a0women who mounted strategies of resistance\u2014not just detailing what happened to them, but what they did for themselves.<\/p>\n Fried: <\/strong>When you examine history, what you see is that the world we\u2019re living in now is not that different from the world we\u2019ve been in. In some ways, yes, it is a different world. It\u2019s a very frightening world. But it has been for a very long time. We have been here before. <\/p>\n Tell me about your own histories\u2014how you became not just abortion activists, but reproductive justice activists. Loretta, y<\/strong>ou were from Texas, right?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross:<\/strong> I call myself an accidental feminist because I had no intention of dedicating my life to [this movement]. But as I always say, my plumbing got in the way of my dreams. I was pregnant through incest at 14, and had a baby at 15 because in 1968, one didn\u2019t have a choice about whether or not you were going to continue a pregnancy. I chose to keep my son after his birth instead of giving him up for adoption.\u00a0<\/p>\n You got into Radcliffe College at the amazingly young age of 16. But when they found out about your baby, they took away your scholarship. Is that how you ended up at Howard University?<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>Right, and I got pregnant again during my first semester. I was under 18, so I needed parental consent for birth control, and my mother wouldn\u2019t sign the permission slip. I had an abortion, and this is when I accepted implantation of [an early IUD,] the Dalkon Shield<\/a>. Within a few years, it sterilized me.\u00a0<\/p>\n A lot of people have forgotten the story of the Dalkon Shield. This was an IUD with a defective design that made it incredibly dangerous.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>It was a piece of plastic with a string attached. The string was only there to make it easy for the physician to remove the device. But it served as a bacterial wick into the uterus, which led to pelvic inflammatory disease and acute sepsis. Hundreds of thousands<\/a> of women were sterilized<\/a> because of that design flaw, and some died.<\/p>\n I got an acute infection in my fallopian tubes, and they burst one night\u2014sending me into a coma. I had been suffering all these mysterious symptoms, but I was a young, Black, single mother, so instead of conducting lab tests, the doctor made a lot of racist assumptions about me. And I was sterilized at the age of 23<\/a>.<\/p>\n My god, Loretta, I just have to say how sorry I am to hear that this happened to you.\u00a0Marlene, your background and experiences were quite different. You were a white, middle-class kid from Philadelphia who ended up writing your dissertation at Brown University on Marx\u2019s theory of historical materialism.<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried:<\/strong> In grad school, I got caught up in politics\u2014the anti-war movement, women\u2019s liberation, civil rights. I came to work around abortion rights when I was pregnant with a much-wanted pregnancy after several miscarriages. <\/strong>The experience of not<\/em> being able to get pregnant when I wanted to be felt very connected to the experience of trying not<\/em> to get pregnant when I didn\u2019t <\/em>want to be.\u00a0<\/p>\n Your personal stories really highlight how abortion is just one aspect of reproductive health and rights. How, then, did the pro-choice focus become so narrow?<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross:<\/strong> You can\u2019t understand the myopic focus on abortion that women\u2019s rights activists were pushed into until you understand how abortion became a significant wedge issue for the Republican Party in the post\u2013Brown v. Board of Education <\/em>era. In their attempts to reclaim power, the segregationists who were resentful of the civil rights movement formed an alliance with the evangelical Christian movement that was opposed to abortion. They integrated anti-gay activists, anti-immigrant people, and a very hawkish set of people who were very pro\u2013Vietnam War. This unruly coalition was eventually called the Moral Majority when Ronald Reagan used the same tactic, but it all started under Richard Nixon. And opposition to abortion<\/a> became the best mobilizing strategy that these right-wing people had.\u00a0<\/p>\n The feminist movement also played into the hands of those conservative forces\u2014for example, by not working harder to stop the Hyde Amendment, which passed in 1976 and banned federal funding for abortion.<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried:<\/strong> The Hyde Amendment<\/a> erased Roe <\/em>for millions of people. I mean, who cares if abortion is legal if you can\u2019t get one? By not putting access and affordability in the foreground, the larger mainstream choice movement was pretty much saying, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s this group of middle-class white women whose rights we\u2019re putting ahead of everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n The mainstream pro-choice movement also didn\u2019t spend a lot of time focused on sterilization. There was the kind you experienced, Loretta, from an unsafe medical device. And then there was America\u2019s ugly history of forced sterilizations, which continued for decades and targeted poor women and women of color.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried:<\/strong> It\u2019s about who\u2019s supposed to have children, what the country is supposed to look like. Going back to the genocide of Native American people, this was established as a white country for white people. Many of the reproductive policies put in place throughout our history are implicitly or explicitly eugenicist. The only time I can think of when Black and brown babies were valued is when children of enslaved women were enslavers\u2019 property. Otherwise, most reproductive policies in this country have been enacted to prevent<\/em> women of color from having children.\u00a0<\/p>\n The activism against sterilization abuse\u2014which was led by women of color\u2014was going on at the same time as the fight for Roe v. Wade.<\/em> But you wouldn\u2019t know that if you looked only at what was going on in the abortion sector of the movement.\u00a0<\/p>\n Frustrations about all of this came to a head in the summer of 1994. Loretta, why then?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross:<\/strong> 1994 was a very eventful year. I had just returned from South Africa, serving as an election monitor for Nelson Mandela\u2019s election<\/a> in April as president. Later that year was the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo<\/a>, which explicitly renounced population control as a framing for reproductive rights and asserted that reproductive rights were human rights. That June was also the OJ Simpson car chase<\/a>, when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.<\/p>\n So there were a series of huge events that spotlighted, in their different ways, themes like human rights, population control, misogyny, and violence against women.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>There was a conference in July organized by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance. A number of women of color had received scholarships from the Ms. Foundation to be there.\u00a0We heard this proposal by the Clinton administration for health care reform that pretty much left out reproductive health care, as well as the needs of Black women. One of the people at the conference, [Georgia state lawmaker and activist] \u201cAble\u201d Mable Thomas, convened 12 Black women in her hotel room and asked us what we wanted to do to respond.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s when we first analyzed that abortion was always separated from routine health care, which doesn\u2019t make sense. We talked about how both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements neglected things that were important to Black women\u2014not just the right not<\/em> to have a child, but because of the history of sterilization abuse, the right to have<\/em> children under the conditions in which we<\/em> want to have them. Neither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movements spent a lot of energy on what happens to children once they\u2019re born.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cNeither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movements spent a lot of energy on what happens to children once they\u2019re born.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n And so we spliced together the concept of \u201creproductive rights\u201d and \u201csocial justice\u201d and coined the term \u201creproductive justice.\u201d We decided to purchase an ad in two national newspapers that more than 800 women<\/a> signed. But the ad didn\u2019t mention reproductive justice, because nobody would understand what it was.<\/p>\n I remember the first time I heard the term\u2014my reaction was, What? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>A communications specialist for nonprofits heard about this term and offered to test it with some focus groups. And she came back and said, \u201cI don\u2019t think this \u2018reproductive justice\u2019 thing is going to work.\u201d The first focus group asked, \u201cDo you mean Law and Order<\/em>?\u201d Because the word \u2018justice\u2019 made people think of criminal justice. The second focus group seized on the word \u201creproductive\u201d and asked, \u201cWhat do y\u2019all got against Xerox copiers?\u201d They actually thought we were organizing to protest the Xerox copier!\u00a0<\/p>\n But Marlene, you were an early adopter. What about the repro justice concept spoke to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried: <\/strong>I came to abortion rights activism with a broader view, having been schooled by the civil rights and anti-war movements, and socialist feminism. I was also one of the founders of the National Network of Abortion Funds, where my work was very focused on access issues and helping people obtain abortions when they didn\u2019t have the money or other resources to afford one. In a way, reproductive justice gave us a language for how we already saw the world. It was a way of putting intellectual arms around our politics. But it didn\u2019t take hold right away, because it\u2019s a radical framework. <\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>It\u2019s radical because it transcended the limits of the US Constitution. It invoked the global human rights framework.<\/p>\n \u201cSome very prominent abortion rights groups opposed it. They worried that by widening the frame, you would shrink the importance of abortion rights. \u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n A lot of the mainstream abortion rights movement found it threatening.<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried: <\/strong>Some very prominent abortion rights groups opposed it. They worried that by widening the frame, you would shrink the importance of abortion rights. There was a commitment to single-issue politics on the assumption that it is the most winning approach. If nothing else, people who read our book should come away understanding that it doesn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n Flash forward 31 years. Reproductive justice has become a critical part of the broader reproductive rights movement. So that is the good news.<\/strong> But now the right wing has captured our country. It\u2019s targeting people of color, especially Black women. Under Trump 2.0, just using the word \u201cjustice\u201d <\/a>in a research grant application is enough to get your grant canceled.<\/strong><\/p>\n Ross: <\/strong>Justice is about accountability. And I think that\u2019s one of the things that scares the bejesus out of the Trump administration, because accountability is not their strong suit.<\/p>\n How, then, can the reproductive justice framework help us get through this dire moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n Fried:<\/strong> The right is trying to take back every civil, political, and human right possible. The extremism that\u2019s been unleashed at this moment is terrifying\u2014for example, abortion abolitionism, which calls for the death penalty for people who are engaged in abortion work or have an abortion. As people struggle to access abortion, the fear is that sterilizations will rise, and while some of those procedures might be voluntary<\/a>, we know that a lot of them will not be. In a moment like this, people often retract. \u201cOK, we\u2019ll ask for less, because otherwise we\u2019re going to get nothing. Let\u2019s just try to hang on to something<\/em>.\u201d But if you ask for less, you get less. If you truncate the frame, you\u2019re not going to end up with justice.\u00a0<\/p>\n So that\u2019s one big lesson\u2014Don\u2019t retreat. Another seems to be: \u201cThis is not new. Don\u2019t freak out\u2014fight.\u201d And maybe the most important message: The past is prologue.<\/strong><\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n Ross:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been thinking about how we need to update the reproductive justice framework that we created in the 20th century, for the 21st century so that we can look at what\u2019s coming down the pike in 30, 40, 50 years. It\u2019s something we call reproductive justice futurism<\/a>. <\/p>\n For example, designer babies.<\/a> We\u2019ve got these amoral scientists working with these immoral billionaires<\/a> trying to sculpt the future of the human race, that\u2019s all designed around themselves and their genes. They\u2019re not even showing me pictures of designer babies that are Black or brown!<\/p>\n Fried: <\/strong>Is this a whole new thing we\u2019ve never seen before? No, it\u2019s good old eugenics and population control repackaged in a new way. Seeing how these oppressive frameworks emerge in different moments in our history is an important tool for trying to understand where we\u2019re at now, but also what\u2019s going to come.<\/p>\n But meeting this political moment requires us to be focused on the resistance as a source of inspiration and hope. We tell a history of abortion that shows us that people have historically struggled against oppression in order to lead the lives they want for themselves, despite the danger and the strength of the opposition. Yes, we are living in a dangerous and frightening time, and<\/em> that history calls us to action.<\/p>\n\n
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![full-page ad<\/a>s in The Washington Post<\/em> and Roll Call<\/em>. The presentation was buttoned-up, the ideas\u2014\u201cReproductive freedom is a life-and-death issue for many Black women and deserves as much recognition as any other freedom,\u201d and \u201cWE WILL NOT ENDORSE A HEALTH CARE REFORM SYSTEM THAT DOES NOT COVER THE FULL RANGE OF REPRODUCTIVE SERVICES FOR ALL WOMEN, INCLUDING ABORTION\u201d\u2014profound. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know we had created a paradigm shift,\u201d Ross says, \u201cbecause that wasn\u2019t our intention at that time. We meant it only as a response to the Clinton administration and to Congress.\u201d<\/p>\nThirty years later, the conceptual framework that Ross helped launch has been transformational. Where once abortion was the primary focus of the reproductive rights movement, reproductive justice is equally concerned with birth control, sterilization, the criminalization of pregnancy, and maternal health. Where \u201cpro-choice\u201d centered the concerns of middle-class white women, reproductive justice widens the lens to include women of color, LGBTQ people, and the poor. Instead of tokenizing Black and brown activists, reproductive justice organizations\u2014including the SisterSong collective<\/a>, which Ross cofounded in 1997\u2014reflect the diverse communities they serve. At the core of reproductive justice is autonomy: the idea that people have the right to control their own bodies; to have children, or not have them; and to raise those children in safe and healthy environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cIt was radical then, and it\u2019s radical still.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n\u201cIt was radical then,\u201d adds Ross\u2019s longtime friend and collaborator, activist and scholar Marlene Fried, \u201cand it\u2019s radical still.\u201d<\/p>\nIn the Trump 2.0 era, the reproductive justice framework is more important than ever, Ross and Fried argue in their new book, Abortion and Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide for Resistance<\/a><\/em>. Reproductive justice stands in opposition to pretty much every health and social policy espoused by the Trump administration and its Christian nationalist, pronatalist allies. \u201cWe are in a ferocious backlash,\u201d Fried says. \u201cIt\u2019s a moment when people see the fragility of rights won or not\u2014realizing that rights are not secured forever.\u201d With so much under attack, it can be tempting to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton era, sacrificing those on the margins in a vain attempt to avoid greater losses.<\/p>\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been very struck by how little of our own history of resistance and activism is known within our own movement,\u201d Fried says. \u201cWe want people to learn their own history and gain inspiration and strength from it.\u201d<\/p>\nNo one is better suited to tell that story than Ross, whose work earned her a MacArthur \u201cgenius\u201d award in 2022<\/a>, and Fried,<\/a> an emeritus professor in philosophy at Hampshire College who was the founding president of the National Network of Abortion Funds. I caught up with them soon after the release of their book, Ross from her office at Smith College, where she is an associate professor<\/a> of women\u2019s and gender studies, and Fried from her home office outside Boston. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\nWhy did you feel the need to write this book now?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nMarlene Fried:<\/strong> We actually decided to write it during the first Trump administration. What immediately prompted us was the fact that 53 percent of white women voted for Trump and, at the same time, were opposed to the administration\u2019s policies attacking abortion and contraception. So one of our goals was to expose the way in which abortion is located in the world of racism and white supremacy.\u00a0It was also important to us to include the international context\u2014to ground reproductive justice in human rights.<\/p>\nMuch of the book is focused on this country\u2019s history of racism and oppression\u2014exactly the history that Trump 2.0 <\/strong>is trying to erase. <\/strong><\/p>\nLoretta Ross:<\/strong> As we frequently say, if you don\u2019t understand white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, you don\u2019t understand reproductive politics. Because it\u2019s not just about gender. Racism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia\u2014all of those things affect reproductive politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cRacism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia\u2014all of those things affect reproductive politics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\nOne of the things we always want to do is correct the record, because there are many accounts of how people are oppressed, particularly women, but fewer accounts of how they fought back. So we wanted to make sure that we included\u00a0women who mounted strategies of resistance\u2014not just detailing what happened to them, but what they did for themselves.<\/p>\nFried: <\/strong>When you examine history, what you see is that the world we\u2019re living in now is not that different from the world we\u2019ve been in. In some ways, yes, it is a different world. It\u2019s a very frightening world. But it has been for a very long time. We have been here before. <\/p>\nTell me about your own histories\u2014how you became not just abortion activists, but reproductive justice activists. Loretta, y<\/strong>ou were from Texas, right?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss:<\/strong> I call myself an accidental feminist because I had no intention of dedicating my life to [this movement]. But as I always say, my plumbing got in the way of my dreams. I was pregnant through incest at 14, and had a baby at 15 because in 1968, one didn\u2019t have a choice about whether or not you were going to continue a pregnancy. I chose to keep my son after his birth instead of giving him up for adoption.\u00a0<\/p>\nYou got into Radcliffe College at the amazingly young age of 16. But when they found out about your baby, they took away your scholarship. Is that how you ended up at Howard University?<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>Right, and I got pregnant again during my first semester. I was under 18, so I needed parental consent for birth control, and my mother wouldn\u2019t sign the permission slip. I had an abortion, and this is when I accepted implantation of [an early IUD,] the Dalkon Shield<\/a>. Within a few years, it sterilized me.\u00a0<\/p>\nA lot of people have forgotten the story of the Dalkon Shield. This was an IUD with a defective design that made it incredibly dangerous.<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>It was a piece of plastic with a string attached. The string was only there to make it easy for the physician to remove the device. But it served as a bacterial wick into the uterus, which led to pelvic inflammatory disease and acute sepsis. Hundreds of thousands<\/a> of women were sterilized<\/a> because of that design flaw, and some died.<\/p>\nI got an acute infection in my fallopian tubes, and they burst one night\u2014sending me into a coma. I had been suffering all these mysterious symptoms, but I was a young, Black, single mother, so instead of conducting lab tests, the doctor made a lot of racist assumptions about me. And I was sterilized at the age of 23<\/a>.<\/p>\nMy god, Loretta, I just have to say how sorry I am to hear that this happened to you.\u00a0Marlene, your background and experiences were quite different. You were a white, middle-class kid from Philadelphia who ended up writing your dissertation at Brown University on Marx\u2019s theory of historical materialism.<\/strong><\/p>\nFried:<\/strong> In grad school, I got caught up in politics\u2014the anti-war movement, women\u2019s liberation, civil rights. I came to work around abortion rights when I was pregnant with a much-wanted pregnancy after several miscarriages. <\/strong>The experience of not<\/em> being able to get pregnant when I wanted to be felt very connected to the experience of trying not<\/em> to get pregnant when I didn\u2019t <\/em>want to be.\u00a0<\/p>\nYour personal stories really highlight how abortion is just one aspect of reproductive health and rights. How, then, did the pro-choice focus become so narrow?<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss:<\/strong> You can\u2019t understand the myopic focus on abortion that women\u2019s rights activists were pushed into until you understand how abortion became a significant wedge issue for the Republican Party in the post\u2013Brown v. Board of Education <\/em>era. In their attempts to reclaim power, the segregationists who were resentful of the civil rights movement formed an alliance with the evangelical Christian movement that was opposed to abortion. They integrated anti-gay activists, anti-immigrant people, and a very hawkish set of people who were very pro\u2013Vietnam War. This unruly coalition was eventually called the Moral Majority when Ronald Reagan used the same tactic, but it all started under Richard Nixon. And opposition to abortion<\/a> became the best mobilizing strategy that these right-wing people had.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe feminist movement also played into the hands of those conservative forces\u2014for example, by not working harder to stop the Hyde Amendment, which passed in 1976 and banned federal funding for abortion.<\/strong><\/p>\nFried:<\/strong> The Hyde Amendment<\/a> erased Roe <\/em>for millions of people. I mean, who cares if abortion is legal if you can\u2019t get one? By not putting access and affordability in the foreground, the larger mainstream choice movement was pretty much saying, \u201cOkay, here\u2019s this group of middle-class white women whose rights we\u2019re putting ahead of everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\nThe mainstream pro-choice movement also didn\u2019t spend a lot of time focused on sterilization. There was the kind you experienced, Loretta, from an unsafe medical device. And then there was America\u2019s ugly history of forced sterilizations, which continued for decades and targeted poor women and women of color.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nFried:<\/strong> It\u2019s about who\u2019s supposed to have children, what the country is supposed to look like. Going back to the genocide of Native American people, this was established as a white country for white people. Many of the reproductive policies put in place throughout our history are implicitly or explicitly eugenicist. The only time I can think of when Black and brown babies were valued is when children of enslaved women were enslavers\u2019 property. Otherwise, most reproductive policies in this country have been enacted to prevent<\/em> women of color from having children.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe activism against sterilization abuse\u2014which was led by women of color\u2014was going on at the same time as the fight for Roe v. Wade.<\/em> But you wouldn\u2019t know that if you looked only at what was going on in the abortion sector of the movement.\u00a0<\/p>\nFrustrations about all of this came to a head in the summer of 1994. Loretta, why then?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss:<\/strong> 1994 was a very eventful year. I had just returned from South Africa, serving as an election monitor for Nelson Mandela\u2019s election<\/a> in April as president. Later that year was the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo<\/a>, which explicitly renounced population control as a framing for reproductive rights and asserted that reproductive rights were human rights. That June was also the OJ Simpson car chase<\/a>, when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.<\/p>\nSo there were a series of huge events that spotlighted, in their different ways, themes like human rights, population control, misogyny, and violence against women.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>There was a conference in July organized by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance. A number of women of color had received scholarships from the Ms. Foundation to be there.\u00a0We heard this proposal by the Clinton administration for health care reform that pretty much left out reproductive health care, as well as the needs of Black women. One of the people at the conference, [Georgia state lawmaker and activist] \u201cAble\u201d Mable Thomas, convened 12 Black women in her hotel room and asked us what we wanted to do to respond.\u00a0<\/p>\nThat\u2019s when we first analyzed that abortion was always separated from routine health care, which doesn\u2019t make sense. We talked about how both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements neglected things that were important to Black women\u2014not just the right not<\/em> to have a child, but because of the history of sterilization abuse, the right to have<\/em> children under the conditions in which we<\/em> want to have them. Neither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movements spent a lot of energy on what happens to children once they\u2019re born.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cNeither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movements spent a lot of energy on what happens to children once they\u2019re born.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\nAnd so we spliced together the concept of \u201creproductive rights\u201d and \u201csocial justice\u201d and coined the term \u201creproductive justice.\u201d We decided to purchase an ad in two national newspapers that more than 800 women<\/a> signed. But the ad didn\u2019t mention reproductive justice, because nobody would understand what it was.<\/p>\nI remember the first time I heard the term\u2014my reaction was, What? <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>A communications specialist for nonprofits heard about this term and offered to test it with some focus groups. And she came back and said, \u201cI don\u2019t think this \u2018reproductive justice\u2019 thing is going to work.\u201d The first focus group asked, \u201cDo you mean Law and Order<\/em>?\u201d Because the word \u2018justice\u2019 made people think of criminal justice. The second focus group seized on the word \u201creproductive\u201d and asked, \u201cWhat do y\u2019all got against Xerox copiers?\u201d They actually thought we were organizing to protest the Xerox copier!\u00a0<\/p>\nBut Marlene, you were an early adopter. What about the repro justice concept spoke to you?<\/strong><\/p>\nFried: <\/strong>I came to abortion rights activism with a broader view, having been schooled by the civil rights and anti-war movements, and socialist feminism. I was also one of the founders of the National Network of Abortion Funds, where my work was very focused on access issues and helping people obtain abortions when they didn\u2019t have the money or other resources to afford one. In a way, reproductive justice gave us a language for how we already saw the world. It was a way of putting intellectual arms around our politics. But it didn\u2019t take hold right away, because it\u2019s a radical framework. <\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>It\u2019s radical because it transcended the limits of the US Constitution. It invoked the global human rights framework.<\/p>\n\n\n\u201cSome very prominent abortion rights groups opposed it. They worried that by widening the frame, you would shrink the importance of abortion rights. \u201c<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\nA lot of the mainstream abortion rights movement found it threatening.<\/strong><\/p>\nFried: <\/strong>Some very prominent abortion rights groups opposed it. They worried that by widening the frame, you would shrink the importance of abortion rights. There was a commitment to single-issue politics on the assumption that it is the most winning approach. If nothing else, people who read our book should come away understanding that it doesn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\nFlash forward 31 years. Reproductive justice has become a critical part of the broader reproductive rights movement. So that is the good news.<\/strong> But now the right wing has captured our country. It\u2019s targeting people of color, especially Black women. Under Trump 2.0, just using the word \u201cjustice\u201d <\/a>in a research grant application is enough to get your grant canceled.<\/strong><\/p>\nRoss: <\/strong>Justice is about accountability. And I think that\u2019s one of the things that scares the bejesus out of the Trump administration, because accountability is not their strong suit.<\/p>\nHow, then, can the reproductive justice framework help us get through this dire moment?<\/strong><\/p>\nFried:<\/strong> The right is trying to take back every civil, political, and human right possible. The extremism that\u2019s been unleashed at this moment is terrifying\u2014for example, abortion abolitionism, which calls for the death penalty for people who are engaged in abortion work or have an abortion. As people struggle to access abortion, the fear is that sterilizations will rise, and while some of those procedures might be voluntary<\/a>, we know that a lot of them will not be. In a moment like this, people often retract. \u201cOK, we\u2019ll ask for less, because otherwise we\u2019re going to get nothing. Let\u2019s just try to hang on to something<\/em>.\u201d But if you ask for less, you get less. If you truncate the frame, you\u2019re not going to end up with justice.\u00a0<\/p>\nSo that\u2019s one big lesson\u2014Don\u2019t retreat. Another seems to be: \u201cThis is not new. Don\u2019t freak out\u2014fight.\u201d And maybe the most important message: The past is prologue.<\/strong><\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\nRoss:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been thinking about how we need to update the reproductive justice framework that we created in the 20th century, for the 21st century so that we can look at what\u2019s coming down the pike in 30, 40, 50 years. It\u2019s something we call reproductive justice futurism<\/a>. <\/p>\nFor example, designer babies.<\/a> We\u2019ve got these amoral scientists working with these immoral billionaires<\/a> trying to sculpt the future of the human race, that\u2019s all designed around themselves and their genes. They\u2019re not even showing me pictures of designer babies that are Black or brown!<\/p>\nFried: <\/strong>Is this a whole new thing we\u2019ve never seen before? No, it\u2019s good old eugenics and population control repackaged in a new way. Seeing how these oppressive frameworks emerge in different moments in our history is an important tool for trying to understand where we\u2019re at now, but also what\u2019s going to come.<\/p>\nBut meeting this political moment requires us to be focused on the resistance as a source of inspiration and hope. We tell a history of abortion that shows us that people have historically struggled against oppression in order to lead the lives they want for themselves, despite the danger and the strength of the opposition. Yes, we are living in a dangerous and frightening time, and<\/em> that history calls us to action.<\/p>\nTop image: Mother Jones illustration; images courtesy: UC Press, Hampshire College, National Women\u2019s Hall of Fame<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Authors Marlene Fried, left, and Loretta RossMother Jones illustration Get your news from a source that\u2019s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Activist and educator Loretta Ross didn\u2019t know she was helping to birth a movement. The year was 1994, the place was a crowded hotel room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-usa-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firearmgiveawayfinder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/www.fordfoundation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/black-women-health-care-reform.jpg\"){kind=link}