Marking SisterSong’s twentieth anniversary, 2017 is the perfect time to celebrate, explain, and illuminate what radical reproductive justice means. And this anthology—put together by SisterSong activists and others who believe in reproductive justice whose work has been critical to the reproductive justice framework and movement—is an ideal forum. The path-breaking vision and relentless organizing by SisterSong and other Indigenous and women of color organizations over the last two decades has been remarkably successful at increasing awareness of reproductive justice in activist and scholarly circles. Yet this very success in the face of intensifying oppression makes it more essential than ever to clarify the history and meaning of reproductive justice and to chart a path for the movement’s future.
At the outset of my career as a law professor in the late 1980s, I was drawn from the academic world of researching reproductive oppression against black women into the burgeoning movement for their liberation. As I wrote my first book, Killing the Black Body, I found my engagement with women of color organizing for reproductive justice not only essential to my research but also my spirit. The dominant legal approach focused on the right to choose (which meant only the right to choose abortion) was completely inadequate to grasp the violations of black women’s bodies I was documenting. The reproductive justice framework provided a radically different way to place reproductive health and rights in the context of the experiences of women of color and the struggle for equality, social justice, and human rights. The reproductive justice movement offered a radically different place for women of color to be in the leadership and to develop political strategies that could effectively contest the interlocking oppressions they faced, oppressions that had for centuries generated an unjust conception of reproductive freedom.
Soon after Killing the Black Body was published in 1997, I answered a call from Julia Scott, then president of the National Black Women’s Health Project, to join the organization’s board of directors. Over the next twenty years, I would share in the exciting work of SisterSong, along with other women of color organizations, to put the RJ framework into action. Serving on the plenary panel at SisterSong’s first national conference in 2003, I felt the thrill of women of color activists coming together to stake a claim in the battle for reproductive freedom and make clear why our RJ movement mattered.
The critical importance of RJ became even clearer the following year, when SisterSong, Black Women’s Health Imperative, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum brought an RJ approach to the leadership of the 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC, and helped to make it one of the largest of its kind in US history. Many victories grounded in RJ organizing followed. SisterSong’s work with women of color organizations succeeded in staving off numerous racist and sexist assaults on reproductive freedom. For example, challenging antiabortion billboards accusing black women of perpetrating genocide against their own communities through abortion, and helping to defeat the Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act, introduced in Congress in 2012, that would have penalized abortions by Asian American and black women.
RJ’s centering of women of color, social justice, and human rights provides a galvanizing moral reason for radical change and a concrete basis for building coalitions among organizations working toward a more humane society. RJ is a model not just for women of color, nor just for achieving reproductive freedom. RJ is a model for organizing for human equality and well-being. The world needs radical reproductive justice. This anthology tells us why and shows us how to get there.
—Dorothy Roberts
Philadelphia, 2017