The Everyday Feminist

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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 ...