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Quality Partnership Is a Thing: Take Real and Unique Steps Together
Spotlight: Loretta Ross and Reproductive Justice Movement
Issue: Bodily Autonomy
On a hot August day in 2014, I sat in my Manhattan office reading the news with my morning tea, when I saw an article in the reproductive health news site Rewire entitled “Reproductive Justice and ‘Choice’: An Open Letter to Planned Parenthood.”1 Signed by dozens of organizations and activists, the letter was penned by Monica Simpson, the executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, whom I had met just months earlier, after asking her to join me at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women convening.
The letter was sparked by a recent article in the New York Times about how reproductive rights groups were moving beyond the “pro‐choice” narrative.2 In explaining this shift, mainstream groups like Planned Parenthood hadn't credited “the long‐term work of scores of reproductive justice organizations, activists, and researchers that have challenged the ‘pro‐choice’ label for 20 years,” the letter charged. “This is not only disheartening but, intentionally or not, continues the co‐optation and erasure of the tremendously hard work done by Indigenous women and women of color (WOC) for decades.”
The term reproductive justice (RJ) was coined in 1994 by a group of Black women at a Chicago conference who felt the mainstream pro‐choice movement's focus on the legal right to choose abortion didn't fully speak to the issues in their communities. Rooted in a human rights framework, the concept of reproductive justice encompasses the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child in a safe and healthy environment. The framework challenges the rhetoric of individual choice in the traditional pro‐choice narrative and highlights how reproductive choices are often constrained by structural factors such as race, class, immigration status, sexual orientation, and more.
“Over the past 20 years,” Simpson wrote, “RJ activists have changed the trajectory of the pro‐choice movement and helped to inform and expand the analysis of reproductive issues in ways that are more inclusive of the lived experience of all marginalized communities.”3 And now that mainstream pro‐choice organizations like Planned Parenthood were increasingly embracing a reproductive justice lens, they weren't adequately acknowledging the women of color leaders who had worked to develop this innovative and intersectional framework.
Monica is an everyday feminist.
At the time I had been executive director of Planned Parenthood Global (PPG) for three years. Just before taking this role, I was evacuated from Cairo during the Arab Spring, retiring after 10 years in the US Foreign Service. I knew I would not return to Egypt with the US government. There were too many signs. My son had asked that wherever we move next, we stay there through his high school years. After moving every 2 to 3 years for the last 20 years, he didn't want to move again. And probably, most importantly, my new boss, who had recently arrived from Afghanistan, was toxic and did not appreciate or respect my role in the mission. He shouted at people in meetings, and he did not listen to dissenting views. I was partial to the former director, who had three decades of technical skills, evolved people skills, and was not afraid to roll up her sleeves for the cause. I told her I wanted to work for an NGO. I'd had enough of navigating the politics of the foreign aid world and wanted to be more of an advocate and activist. Maybe I could even use more of my law background.
At Planned Parenthood, I worked closely with local partners in Africa and Latin America to ensure access to reproductive health services for women and young people. Every country had a unique set of champions and organizations working on women's health using innovative approaches that addressed the specific social, economic, and cultural contexts in which they lived. In Senegal, Guatemala, Sudan, Mexico, Uganda, Ecuador, Kenya, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, to name a few, we developed one of the first youth peer provider programs, where young people provided counseling, referrals, and contraception to their peers from school and broader community. We offered contraceptive services in local businesses like hair salons, a model I first encountered in Nairobi two decades earlier (see the Introduction). PPG was also a pioneer of the “miso‐only” protocol for a medication abortion and conducted research for countries that did not have access to the preferred protocols for safe abortion services.
I spent an enormous amount of time in Miami, where the regional office for Latin America was based. After a career spent mostly in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East up until then, I was thirsty to learn more about the region. Our programs in Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Mexico were among the most innovative in the field thanks to Dee Redwine, the regional director, a woman of great talent and commitment. During our many visits to these countries, I watched as women advocates created a way where there was none. There, I met midwives, mostly unpaid, who saved more lives than any surgeon could possibly take credit for. I visited the Afro‐Caribbean and Indigenous populations in the four countries and met amazing advocates such as Fundaeco in Guatemala, an organization pioneering work at the intersection of reproductive health and environmental protection. In Peru, Promsex, another PPG partner, led by everyday feminist Susana Chavez, worked on internationally renowned campaigns Ni Una Menos and Let Her Decide, as well as taking cases to the international court on behalf of young girls denied their bodily autonomy.
While I worked on global rather than domestic programs, I still had the privilege to partner with US‐backed organizations, such as Dázon Dixon Diallo's Sister Love, a leading reproductive justice organization based in Atlanta and Johannesburg. Diallo expanded the concept of south‐to‐south partnership, a term that captures a historically used reference by policy makers and academics to describe the exchange of resources, technology, and knowledge between developing countries, also known as countries of the Global South, to include states in the US South, experiencing similar development challenges. Dázon also signed the open letter to Planned Parenthood.
Susana and Dázon are everyday feminists.
Being a Good Partner Matters
The seventh major lesson that listening to and observing everyday feminists in action across the globe for more than three decades has taught me is to learn how to be a good partner.
The open letter resonated with me for so many reasons. The reproductive justice framework was essentially the working platform for our international work at Planned Parenthood. Almost all the everyday feminists we partnered with in Africa and Latin America were much more comfortable with the intersectional nature of the framework than that of a siloed safe abortion reference for the communities where they lived and worked. Yet, we never really gave credit to the pioneers of this work. I was emboldened by the letter and almost wished I could high‐five the everyday feminists who signed it. Reading it, I recalled the many times in my career when I'd suggested an idea, only to hear it restated by a white male colleague and implemented without acknowledging me at all.
Planned Parenthood swiftly responded to the letter and accurately acknowledged the oversight, giving me comfort that I was working with the right organization. The open letter was the topic of our senior leadership meeting for many days thereafter. It didn't come without many tears shed by members of the staff. It also started a long and difficult, and maybe overdue, process for the organization to come to terms with its past racial legacy, including lingering questions about the eugenicist beliefs of its founder Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood also held face‐to‐face conversations with representatives from RJ groups, listening to their perspectives and thoughts on how PP could better support their work. I'd like to think that the letter, the response, and subsequent actions made PP and PPG better organizations with special, closer ties to the RJ community.
Everyday Feminists Succeed and Make Social Impact Through Good Partnerships
This episode within the pro‐choice movement is a lesson in the importance of good partnerships between different organizations within a social movement.
As funders, we must carefully look for these types of partnerships, particularly in the social movement work of everyday feminists. It starts by looking at the diversity of organizations doing the work. There are often larger organizations that are well funded and led by members of more privileged communities. And if the partnerships are thriving, then you also find medium and small organizations that are often run by more traditionally marginalized leaders. In a good partnership, there are participatory opportunities to allocate and share funding—if not by the funding organization, then among the organizations themselves in an open discussion on where resources should be allocated. In good partnerships, larger organizations will also often directly fund smaller ones to maintain a balance of power that drives the success of the movements and appropriately credits all the participants.
It is not enough that movement members show up at the same events and sign onto advocacy letters together. Partnerships that benefit the everyday feminist must take the time to hear from each other and lift each other's independent missions to benefit the whole. After years of managing cooperatives, strategic partnerships, and now feminist movements, I know that the ups and downs, ins and outs, of building lasting relationships with partners matters. The quality of these partnerships is built less on funding and more on the time spent together on the front lines. True partnerships are rooted in the challenges they overcome and the ability to stay together for the cause, despite apparent and not‐so‐apparent differences among the partners.
I've witnessed both good and bad partnerships over the years. For example, as I discussed in Chapter 2, I saw the results the fragmentation of the feminist movements in Nicaragua and Peru had on the delay in achieving successes that were imminent in these countries.
One effective partnership I've been involved in recently is She Decides. For the last five years, this global intergenerational partnership among funders, governments, and activists has been standing up for the right for all women and girls to decide what to do with their body, life, and future. The partnership was created after the election of Donald Trump and his immediate signing of the Global Gag Rule, reinstating restrictions on organizations receiving assistance funds from the USG. The partnership stands up jointly for bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights in a challenging world. Leveraging strong political leadership and joint coordinated efforts across regions, sectors, and actors, it encourages broad recognition of rights that are increasingly at risk around the world in the context of COVID‐19, increased backlash to gender equality, a shrinking civic and democratic space, and decreasing financial and political support for reproductive rights at the national and global levels. And it provides partners with an opportunity to connect with others to renew inspiration, strategize and build smart partnerships, and to strengthen global movements. The partnership respects the autonomy of each member and what they bring to the table and never dictates an approach or strategy, but rather develops agendas and next steps together.
It is imperative that funders support the diversity within social movements and encourage partnerships. When it starts to feel like movement partners are competing or falling into disarray, this is often the time when we can be most useful as the silent partner at the table.
In Her Words: Loretta Ross
A decade after joining Planned Parenthood, I serendipitously ran into a member of the delegation of Black women that I joined at the 4th Women's Conference in Beijing back in 1995: Loretta Ross. I remember being awed by her words, her boldness, and her ability to articulate how human rights apply to Black women the same as everyone else. As a Black American, I knew her voice was revolutionary and powerful.
Ross was one of the original groups of Black women who coined the term reproductive justice and cofounded SisterSong in 1997. In the years since, Loretta has continued to lead the RJ movement. She is a renowned professor at Smith College, teaching such courses as “White Supremacy,” and a sought‐after expert in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In recent years, she has started a public conversation on the “calling out” and “calling in” culture as it applies to transformative human rights organizations. She has partnered with many organizations, academic institutions, and media outlets.
Who Is This Everyday Feminist? I think I could only answer that question by saying the movement was in me before I was in the movement. I became pregnant through incest at age 14. And at age 15, I had that baby. Quite naturally, that is one of the worst ways to become a mother. And then, seven years later, I was sterilized by the Dalkon Shield [IUD]. I was 23. So long before I was conscious of reproductive oppression, it was happening to me. And the intersection of sexual violence and reproductive oppression kept contouring my life. But it wasn't until the sterilization and my outrage at that, that I began to seek out and find explanations for what continued to happen to me. And I was lucky enough to start volunteering and then working at the DC Rape Crisis Center, which was founded in 1972. I came in ’78 and that's where I learned the vocabulary to attach to and explain my experiences. So that's when I can say that I came to the understanding that grew into reproductive justice, but I'm convinced that my participation in the defining of reproductive justice was based on what I'd been through.
The greatest force that I encountered in the movement was the support and mentoring by older Black women who were around me. I came from San Antonio, Texas, went to school at Howard University in 1970, in Washington, DC. And DC has always been a city where it's hard to not be conscious, not know what's going on in the world, because some random cab driver will give you a whole elegy on it. So, it's very hard not to pay attention to world affairs and even local community affairs in Washington. But it was those older Black women [whom] I kept encountering who didn't give up on me. Because I thought I knew everything, like every other teenager who thinks she's woke. They didn't like me much, but they didn't give up on me. They could see the potential in me I hadn't even seen in myself. And so, I always want to honor the fact that they invested their time and attention into someone that they didn't particularly like or understand. I always think about the gifts that those women gave me in terms of recommending me for positions, giving me perspectives, telling me to shut the fuck up when they needed to.
What Is Her Movement Work? Since I've been doing this work for more than 50 years now, I've had a lot of time to think about the meaning of what I've done. Because it's one thing, like Foucault says, to know what you do and it's another thing to know what you do does. And I've had the time to understand that, in the ’70s, I was part of a group of Black women who defined the movement in violence against women. Twenty years later, I was part of another group of Black women who defined reproductive justice. Twenty years after that I'm part of a human rights movement that's redefining the Calling In, Calling Out culture.
So, I think that if I have a gift from the universe—I'm not necessarily responsible for having but I want to be responsible for how I use it—it is that I'm good at synthesizing what looks like disparate or random facts into a trend, into an analysis. Kinda like Hermione. That's a gift when you can detect these things pretty early on and somehow perceive what the next logical step is in the process. People say that's an act of prophecy. But I think it's an act of analysis. It's just that I see how things fit together.
What Impact Is She Making? I'm sure there are books written about the power of naming something. Because it gives it a corporality, a substance that was always there but unmarked or unnoticed by people until it was named. I mean, Newton didn't invent gravity, but he named it and that changed everything. Kimberle Crenshaw didn't invent intersectionality, but she named it and that changed everything. And so, I like to think that reproductive justice had that same effect. It did not invent the concept of intersectionality, nor were we the first to apply the concept of intersectionality to reproductive politics. But once we named it, it became an on ramp for a lot of people to see reproductive politics differently. That's the impact that I think it's had, where we've gone beyond simply fighting for the right to keep abortion safe and legal, which is in the reproductive justice framework, obviously. But we focused equally on the right to have a child, which, for many people, particularly white women, is not an issue for them.
For the most part, there's such a social pressure on white women to breed, to have children. I'm convinced that all the restrictions on birth control and abortion are not about trying to produce more Black and Brown babies—it's about trying to produce more white babies. Because these white supremacists have not convinced me that they want more Black or Brown babies. So, if you don't have a racial lens through which you see reproductive politics, you're missing most of the story. Reproductive justice goes beyond focusing only on the biological debates to looking at non‐biological issues that affect the conditions under which we parent and raise our children. So we can have conversations about gun violence, or poor schools, or unfair tax property policies, or political corruption, or gentrification, or housing and food insecurities, those kinds of things. I love the way reproductive justice by naming it has expanded into an examination of every field of human endeavor, which just simply focusing on abortion didn't do.
I think changing human hearts and minds is a glacially slow process. 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the first rape crisis center in this country, the DC one, which was founded in 1972. Think about how significant the change is—between saying women deserve services when they've been raped, to the Me Too movement, to where we're actually getting consequences, major social and economic consequences [for perpetrators]. That's 50 years. But in the arc of history, that's just a drop of time. But I've lived to see it all. I'm always encouraged by that.
With reproductive justice—it's been 26 years or something like that. And yet, we have moved from the margins to the center. We've changed how people talk about both pro‐life and pro‐choice politics. We got people to see everything we're talking about through a human rights lens that they hadn't done before. We've defined a universal framework that includes everyone because everyone has the same human rights. And it has been so attractive and capacious that you even got the opponents using it. I mean, one of the more interesting conversations I recall having was with Mary Krane Derr, who was the founder of Feminist for Life. But I included her article in my anthology, because I knew we were on to something when someone representing the pro‐life movement wanted to use reproductive justice. I was like, “Oh hell, this is truly transformative.” Because I think many analysts would argue that when your opponent starts using your framework, you've won the war.
There was a communication consulting firm called Communications Consortium and they did a lot of polling work for the pro‐choice movement. When we first created the term reproductive justice, Kathy Bonk, who was the founder, said, “Let me do some polling on this, let me do some focus group work on this term, Loretta. Let's see what the community thinks of it.” And it was so new, because this was in the early 2000s, maybe five or six years after being created by us. We hadn't popularized that beyond those of us who created it. And when she showed me some of the data from the focus groups, the term reproductive justice evoked the most hilarious responses. One person asked, “Reproductive justice? What do they have against copiers?” And then when they focused on the justice part, they only knew the TV show Law & Order. “Oh, why are we talking about Law and Order?”
So, it's come a long way from “Why are we mad at copiers?”
How Have Partnerships Helped the Movement? One of the strengths of the movement is its adaptability. I was so pleased when Indigenous women started talking about reproductive justice, but through the lens of sovereignty in a way that we had not anticipated they would. Or when the LGBT movement started talking about it through the question of sexuality and personal autonomy and gender identity and all those things which we cis[gender] women hadn't thought about. It has something in it for everybody and is flexible enough to be adapted and embraced by widely varying people from their own standpoint, from their own perspectives. Even if what they find in it is not what someone else finds in it. I often compare reproductive justice to the optometrist shifting all these eyeglass lenses in front of you until they find the one that's yours. That doesn't make all those other lenses wrong—they're just not yours. Reproductive justice is one of those shifting kinds of framework. Depending on what your vulnerabilities and needs are, you can land at a framework that is yours, while not invalidating all the other frameworks.
[One] tension that I encounter is what I call identity reductionism or identity determinism. There's a group of Black women, often the younger ones, who think that because reproductive justice was created by Black women that it should only apply to Black women or be used by Black women. So, they want to monitor the boundaries of who gets to call themselves a reproductive justice organization, who gets to use the term. They want to police how it's used and all of that, which is a lose‐lose proposition, because this is entirely too flexible, too expandable, too amorphous, and too ambitious to be contained by any one person's perception of what it should or could be. As a matter of fact, by insisting on that kind of conformity, you're guaranteeing its underperformance because you're denying it all its tremendous power and possibilities based on your insistence that the lens you got is the only lens that matters.
The question becomes, how much energy are we going to put in policing the boundaries or the debate, rather than just moving the debate forward? You can fight the rear guard of making sure people do that right or you can just move it forward, and let those people just catch up to the Freedom Train.
I've been doing more focused work on a concept I call reproductive futurism. Because I'm convinced that our reproductive technologies are promising a scientific utopia that's not actually going to manifest itself. This “designer babies” thing. This “freeze your eggs and become pregnant at your choice and timing” thing. The “right to become a parent, even if it means exploiting other people's economic and social vulnerabilities” thing. Those are the kinds of questions we're not having enough discussion on. So, I'm taking a reproductive justice lens to look at reproductive technologies and questioning whether or not our preexisting inequalities will be upgraded using technology.
The fruit of the reproductive justice movement continues to be its ability to bring more people into the conversation that didn't previously think that they had any common ground with other people. And so it may be that the people who've had infertility issues that for whatever reason are seeking surrogacy or technological solutions can be brought together under our second tenant—the right to parent—in a way. They haven't necessarily seen themselves in that conversation because they have this perception that reproductive politics is all about abortion. So I think it's always going to provide that opportunity to build bridges with people who didn't think they belong in it.
The thing that surprises me the most about reproductive justice is how people globally have adopted it. When we conceptualized it, we thought of it as a way of bringing human rights home to the United States. I know I personally said, “Well, the other people in other countries, they're using the human rights framework better than people in the US are doing it.” So I never thought that it would have the transnational appeal that it has proven to have. I was not expecting women in Ireland, or women in Chile, to be embracing the reproductive justice framework, but that, again, shows its true universality.
In this post‐Roe world in the United States, there is a great deal of scrambling among institional and individual donors to figure out how to support women, particularly in unfriendly states, in accessing abortion services. In this moment of crisis, it is a critical to think about our strategies when it comes to supporting pro‐choice organizations. This moment requires that we step up support to all those groups in which we partner on this issue to ensure the push back is appropriate at all levels.
In the “Resource” section, I provide a list of RJ groups that you can partner with to support their intersectional agendas. For those who are already in the gender equality or reproductive health and rights space, I encourage you to reevaluate your relationships with these organizations. Focus less on extraction, co‐optation, and public relations. Instead, lean into being a more supportive and silent partner providing resources that further the agenda of RJ organizations around the world.
Everyday feminists—like Loretta Ross, Dazon Dixon Diallo, Paris Hatcher, Rickie Solinger, Dr. Joia Crear‐Perry, and many more—have been doing this work for decades. They are worthy of good partners in this work.
Notes
- 1. “Reproductive Justice and ‘Choice’: An Open Letter to Planned Parenthood,” Rewire News Group (August 5, 2014). https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2014/08/05/reproductive-justice-choice-open-letter-planned-parenthood/.
- 2. J. Calmes, “Advocates Shun ‘Pro‐Choice’ to Expand Message,” New York Times (July 29, 2014). https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/us/politics/advocates-shun-pro-choice-to-expand-message.html?_r=0.
- 3. J. Calmes, “Advocates Shun ‘Pro‐Choice’ to Expand Message.”
- 4. A. Abrams, “How Advocates of Reproductive Justice Found Their Spotlight,” Time (November 21, 2019). https://time.com/5735432/reproductive-justice-groups/.
- 5. “Population and Development,” UNECE. Retrieved September 30, 2022, from https://unece.org/population/population-and-development.