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Why you should pay attention to Virginia's Question 1 this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2026 United States election.
Sara Sanatkar learned firsthand how important it is to have the freedom to make decisions over her own body when she faced an unexpected pregnancy at 19 years old.
This was in 2019. Sanatkar was in an unhealthy relationship, and knew she wasn’t ready to be a mother. But, unfamiliar with the laws regarding reproductive care in her home state of Virginia, Sanatkar wasn’t sure if she could have an abortion, so she Googled it and learned about Roe v. Wade. Back then, she felt immense relief. “I can have access to care. I can have access to legal care. I can have access to safe care,” she remembers her 19-year-old self saying.
Sanatkar says she was “geographically lucky” to have gotten pregnant in Virginia. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Sanatkar grew up in a country where, even though her family and the general population supported the right to abortion, the government did not. Leaving Tehran at age 15 wasn’t easy; despite some of the drawbacks women face, such as the threat of death penalty for illegal abortions, it was the only home she’d known. The year before she moved, she remembers sitting in the back of a taxi with her mother, whose words altered her perspective of home and family. While holding her hand, Sanatkar’s mother told her, “I'm so happy that you get to live in a country where you get to make decisions about your own body.”
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—the ruling that had provided Sanatkar relief just three years before—ending the federal constitutional right to abortion, once again leaving the authority with individual states. Since then, 20 states have either severely restricted abortions or established total bans, including West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
As the Field & Canvass Manager at REPRO Rising, a grassroots political organization working to guarantee comprehensive reproductive healthcare information and services to all Virginians, Sanatkar now works alongside the Virginians for Reproductive Freedom coalition, which includes ACLU of Virginia, Virginia League for Planned Parenthood, and the National Women's Political Caucus of Virginia, to protect the right to reproductive freedom within their state constitution. Since August 2024, REPRO Rising has been organizing awareness around Virginia Question 1—one of three proposed amendments to the state constitution on the ballot this November.
In her organizing work so far, she has seen an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the amendment. According to Sanatkar, many people view it as “very reasonable,” which has resulted in “a sense of pride for me as a Virginia voter,” she says.
“Across Virginia, we’ve heard a consistent message from voters,” she adds. “Regardless of their personal beliefs or experiences with reproductive healthcare, Virginians believe these deeply personal decisions should remain between a patient, their family, and their doctor, not politicians.”
For Virginians, the outcome of Question 1 will determine whether the state establishes a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, following a complicated, multi-year process to add the amendment to the state constitution.
The constitutional amendment was first introduced in January 2023. The General Assembly subsequently passed the amendment in January 2025. The state process requires an intervening election, and a House of Delegates election was held in November 2025. Then, the General Assembly passed the amendment for the second time in January 2026.
Now it is up to voters to vote yes or no. A “yes” vote means Virginians will have a constitutional right to make their own decisions on reproductive care, including abortion. (However, not without some potential restrictions: The proposed amendment would still allow the Virginian government to pass laws regulating abortion care in the third trimester though with decreased barriers.) A “no” vote will mean the status quo is maintained, including the same restrictions to abortion care in the third semester that require approval from three physicians. What’s more, abortion rights in the future could eventually be restricted with a change in office.
The issue has been a key part of Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s platform since her electoral victory over Glenn Youngkin last November. In June, half a year after taking office, Gov. Spanberger joined the Reproductive Freedom Alliance (RFA), a nonpartisan coalition of governors dedicated to protecting reproductive freedom across the nation.
“Virginia is the only state in the South where a woman has the same freedom to make her own healthcare decisions as she did before the fall of Roe v. Wade. Today, we are taking a step to reaffirm those freedoms,” Gov. Spanberger said in an RFA press release last June.
In effect, a “yes” vote means Virginia law won’t change, says Executive Director of Virginia ACLU Mary Bauer. “Our goal is not to change Virginia law. Our goal is to enshrine reproductive freedom into our constitution because we know that these rights can be taken away with a flick of a politician’s pen,” she says. “We want to make sure that our rights don’t depend on who happens to be in office at any given moment.”
Prior to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, roughly 3% of patients accessing abortion care in Virginia came from out of state. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and more Southern states limited access to abortions, the percentage of out-of-state patients jumped to 30%, according to the Virginia Independent. This means the results of Amendment 1 will affect more than just Virginians. Arguably, the state is the last stronghold for abortion care in the South.
“To see Virginia as a leader in this space is really a beautiful thing,” Bauer says.
If the amendment fails to pass, there is a risk that Virginia will transform into a state banning abortion, says Dr. Kimberly Chernoby, a physician and reproductive rights lawyer. “Virginia is a state that is not very clearly Democratic or Republican,” she says. “Our legislature has gone both ways, and so there is a real risk that in the future, and it could be near future, that we could lose access to reproductive healthcare.”
Amendment 1 also holds implications for practicing physicians. “It means that when my patient is miscarrying and I have to offer them an abortion to treat their miscarriage, that I'm not worried. ‘Am I going to go to jail? Am I going to lose my medical license? Am I going to be fined $10,000?’ The idea that any physician is asked to weigh those things at the bedside is really incredible,” Dr. Chernoby says. “Abortion is routine healthcare, and you cannot affect all other aspects of reproductive healthcare. When you limit abortion care, you are by definition going to limit all other aspects of reproductive healthcare, and you can't have one without the other.”
It’s exactly this full span of reproductive healthcare that Sanatkar is advocating for, and that she’s encountered broad support for through her organizing. “It's a very simple question: Do you want to have access to bodily autonomy, and do you want to be able to make decisions independently with your doctor without being scared that the state is going to punish you or your provider? And I think [the] majority of Virginians are going to say ‘yes’ to that,” she says.
[post_title] => When the Future of Bodily Autonomy Is in Question
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Virginia's Question 1 this election.
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Abortion
- A Republican HHS Secretary could override the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs most often used to induce abortion. Mifepristone was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000; but in 2022, anti-abortion activists, hoping to curb access to the drug, filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approach to regulating it. The Supreme Court’s June ruling in that case preserved access to mifepristone for now, but left the door open to further challenges down the road. And the next president’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary could still override the FDA’s approval of the drug, effectively ending what has become the most common method of abortion nationwide.
- An anti-abortion administration could resurrect the Comstock Act. Comstock is a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law which prohibits using the mail to send or receive “obscene” items, potentially including anything that could be used to perform an abortion. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Comstock applies to the internet, as well, meaning that even discussing abortion online could lead to up to five years in prison, $250,000 in fines, or both. Medical abortions performed via telemedicine, wherein providers consult with patients online and send the necessary pills by mail, are just as safe and effective as those performed in person; but Comstock would prevent doctors from sending the pills at all, severing a lifeline connecting women in red states and remote, rural areas to needed care. (Between April 2022 and August 2022, around 4 percent of total recorded abortions in the U.S. were performed via telemedicine; as of May 2024, that figure had risen to 19 percent.) Because Comstock is a federal law, it would most likely invalidate state laws, which means a Republican Department of Justice could federally prosecute doctors and drug companies nationwide. It could also shut down all U.S. abortion clinics by barring them from receiving any abortion-related materials via mail.
- An anti-abortion Republican president could reinstate the global gag rule. The rule bars foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from using any funds, including non-U.S. government funds, to provide abortion services, information, counseling, referrals, or advocacy, effectively forcing NGOs outside of the U.S. to choose between receiving U.S. global health assistance and providing comprehensive healthcare. It has largely been in place under Republican administrations since 1984, but the Trump administration expanded it to apply to an unprecedented range of agencies and public health programs, many of which serve poor women in rural areas. When women desperate to end a pregnancy are kept in the dark about their options, they have more abortions, not fewer—and many end up dead or seriously injured as a result. The International Women’s Health Coalition wrote in a 2019 report that the rule “contributes to arbitrary deaths by impeding the provision of life-saving care.” Marie Stopes International, one of the largest global family planning organizations, estimated in 2017 that Trump’s expanded gag rule would increase abortions in Nigeria by 660,000 over four years, and that 10,000 women would die as a result. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but it’s clear that women have, as predicted, died as a consequence of this cruel and pointless policy. (Healthcare providers also expect the repeal of Roe to continue harming women worldwide.)
Whether or not the above scenarios come to pass—and there is little doubt that, if a Republican wins the White House in November, the last one will—the harm already caused by state abortion bans shows that a national ban would be an unmitigated disaster. Nor would it stop people from getting abortions. Women end pregnancies for a myriad of reasons, some more common than others. They do so whether it is safe, legal, and accepted, or dangerous, criminal, and condemned. And they do it whether or not their parents, lovers, spouses, friends, neighbors, religious leaders, strangers, or elected officials approve. The only difference is how many will get the quality care they need, and how many will suffer and die.
Forcing a person to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth against their will is a brutal act under any circumstances. But in a country like the U.S., with its threadbare social safety net and policies that vary wildly by state and region, it often means forcing them into poverty, as well. As Bryce Covert explained in 2023, “The states that have banned abortion are the same ones that do the least to help pregnant people and new parents make ends meet.” Most states with abortion bans offer little help to pregnant workers; none guarantee any control over work schedules, paid family leave, or paid sick days. When Lationna Halbert of West Jackson, Mississippi, found herself unexpectedly pregnant in 2022, she told In These Times, she cried and cried. She was earning just $8.50 per hour and already had a four-year-old son. She and her partner were not ready for another baby, nor could they afford to raise one. When Roe was overturned, an abortion ban automatically went into effect in Mississippi, shutting down the state’s last remaining clinic. By the time Halbert realized she was pregnant, it was too late: She couldn’t afford to travel to another state to get an abortion, and it was impossible to get one safely and legally in Mississippi. She delivered her second baby in a hospital with no hot water.
As I have written for The Conversationalist before, the same officials who worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe have also fiercely resisted using public funds to help vulnerable women like Halbert. This is because the same politicians who romanticized her fetus have nothing but contempt for Halbert herself, and for all the other people—who are, not coincidentally, mostly women—being forced to have babies they do not want and cannot provide for. That contempt is matched only by their sociopathic indifference to the children who make it out of the womb—the kind who already exist, only to be routinely denied housing, healthcare, and basic nourishment by their state governments. (Nor do these politicians have any empathy for living, breathing children facing crisis pregnancies of their own.)
If pregnant women are the primary and intended victims of U.S. abortion policy, which is rooted in a desire to control and punish them, their children, partners, and families are collateral damage. It is bad for babies to be unwanted; bad for already existing children to be deprived of needed resources; and bad for the couple experiencing an unexpected pregnancy to be forced to have a baby that one or neither wants. It is delusional and insulting to pretend otherwise. Anti-abortion zealots’ cozy fantasies of domestic fulfillment have nothing to do with the daily lives of women forced into motherhood.
Even under a Democratic administration, women are already being investigated, prosecuted, and punished for various pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages. In 2023, Brittany Watts, a 33-year-old Black woman in Ohio whose water broke prematurely, leading to a miscarriage, was charged with abuse of a corpse—a felony punishable by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine. Doctors told Watts her fetus was nonviable, and she spent a total of 19 hours in a local hospital over the course of two days, begging for supervised medical help. Concerned about the potential legal ramifications, the hospital repeatedly delayed her care. Watts ultimately gave up and miscarried alone in her bathroom. When she returned to the hospital for follow-up care, a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay—then called the police at the behest of the hospital's risk management team. As Watts was lying in the hospital recovering, police searched her home, seized her toilet, and broke it apart to retrieve the remains of her fetus as “evidence.” Watts’ charge was dismissed after a grand jury declined to indict her: Her prosecution was meant to shame and punish her, not protect her fetus. But prosecutors have always been more inclined to target women of color, immigrants, and/or poor women in these types of cases—because it’s easier to win against someone who can’t fight back. Watts’ experience also specifically demonstrates how little our healthcare system values the health and well-being of Black women, who are three times more likely than white women to die from a pregnancy-related cause.
One of the bitterest ironies of conservative reasoning on abortion is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it will impede tens of thousands of people who desperately want to become parents or expand their families from doing so. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children, three of the state’s IVF providers suspended their services, fearing legal repercussions. (Alabama voters in a longtime Republican stronghold were so alarmed that they elected a pro-abortion rights Democrat to Congress a few weeks later.) A number of prominent Republicans, including Trump, have since affirmed their support for IVF, but that hasn’t stopped many of them from co-sponsoring the Life at Conception Act, a piece of federal legislation that would ban nearly all abortions nationwide and does not include a carveout for IVF. Nor has it stopped those same Republicans from blocking a recent bill that would have protected the procedure. Leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, have recently voted to condemn the use of IVF, as well.
While Republicans’ support of openly fascist and deeply unpopular abortion policies has become a political liability for the GOP, it’s simultaneously become a human nightmare for the rest of us. Trump’s failed attempt to contain the political fallout from Arizona’s recent revival of an 1864 ban is an object lesson in locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. If abortion is the same as infanticide, as most anti-abortion activists insist that it is, then no person seeking one would be exempt from prosecution, whether you’re 9 years old and a man rapes you, 11 years old and your grandfather rapes you, 12 years old and a man rapes you, 33 and desperate to end your pregnancy, 33 and suicidal, a married mother who doesn’t want another child, or unexpectedly pregnant at 45. Even white, married, heterosexual moms are not exempt. The state of Texas recently forced lifelong Texan Kate Cox to travel out of state for an abortion she needed to protect her life and fertility. Cox, a married mother of two who wants more kids, was told that her third pregnancy was nonviable: The fetus was unlikely to survive, and the best-case scenario was that she might give birth to a baby who would live in anguish for a week or less. Alternatively, she could experience a life-threatening uterine rupture and need a C-section and/or a hysterectomy, potentially losing the ability to have more children in the future. Forced sterilization, which is one outcome Texas’ barbaric denial of care could have imposed on Cox had she lacked the means to travel out of state, is internationally recognized as a human rights crime. No wonder she fled.
It’s a sad truth that things can always get worse, even for relatively privileged Americans. Until it did, many legal experts considered it highly unlikely that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe, upending nearly 50 years of precedent and stripping American women of a right guaranteed to us for half a century. But many U.S. residents, particularly in rural areas and throughout the South and Midwest, have been living under de facto abortion bans for at least the last decade. A right is only guaranteed when it can be freely and easily exercised by all; for many U.S. residents, the cost of abortion—the procedure itself, the travel, the lodging, the childcare costs, the ability to request and take time away from paid work—is too high. One in five U.S. women must travel more than 40 miles one way to access care; in some rural areas, that distance is 300 miles or more. Under a national abortion ban, the situation will only grow more dire. People have taken and will continue to take risks that range from reasonable but frightening (crossing the border to buy pills from a pharmacy in Mexico) to desperate and potentially fatal (shooting themselves in the stomach). Denying care to women who need it permanently alters their lives, most often not for the better.
There is no reason to believe that the proudly anti-democratic GOP will uphold democratic norms or respect the popular will, and little reason to trust the Democratic Party, which has, in recent years, canceled elections, failed to defend abortion rights, and repeatedly defied its own voters. But focusing on how abortion politics are hurting the GOP or improving Biden’s chances misses the point. Like miscarriage, abortion stops an embryo or a fetus from becoming a baby. Restricting it tortures women, children, and families and rips holes in communities. Policies that harm actual, living people must be stopped, and those who promote them held to account. Voting is one fragile, inadequate tool. With so many lives at stake, we’ll need more.
[post_title] => The Reality of a National Abortion Ban [post_excerpt] => Two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, an honest assessment of how things could get worse. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => national-abortion-ban-republican-gop-president-election-roe-v-wade-womens-rights-united-states-policy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:06:13 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:06:13 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=6921 [menu_order] => 54 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )- Reproductive Health - deals with delivery of services
- Reproductive Rights - addresses legal issues
- Reproductive Justice - focuses on movement building
Reproductive justice goes beyond efforts to safeguard abortion rights. It is not solely dependent on courts, political parties, or sympathetic politicians and physicians. It’s about empowering women and girls to make decisions not just about a particular pregnancy but throughout their entire reproductive lives. Reproductive justice can only be achieved when all women have not just the same rights on paper, but the power, freedom, and resources necessary to exercise them.
What are the principles of reproductive justice?
Reproductive justice is a broad concept, and as such it touches on a wide range of issues. The list below is not comprehensive—however, it does provide a useful framework for understanding just how multifaceted the fight for reproductive justice can be:
- The right to remain child-free
- The right to end one or multiple pregnancies
- The right to free health care, including abortion
- Easy access to every kind of health care, including abortion and other reproductive services
- The right to raise as many children as one wants
- The right to raise children in a safe and healthy environment
- The right of every child to a safe and healthy home
- The right to support a family
- The right of all mothers, including those charged with and convicted of crimes, to see and care for their children
- The right of pregnant women and mothers in prisons and jails to be treated in accordance with international human rights law
- The right to nonjudgmental and medically sound health care, including abortion, prenatal care, and care for new parents and newborns
- The right to create a birth plan honored by all health care providers assisting in a birth
- Respect and support for essential care work performed inside and outside of the home
- Freedom from food deserts, contaminated water, and state violence
- Freedom from prosecution for struggling with drug addiction while pregnant
- Freedom from forced or coerced sterilization
- Freedom from forced or coerced abortion
- Freedom from shame and stigma
Who coined the term ‘reproductive justice’?
After organizing an informal Black Women’s Caucus at a national pro-choice conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in Chicago in 1994, a group of Black women social justice advocates came up with the term and defined the framework. They recognized that the mainstream feminist movement of the time, which was led by and represented the interests of middle- and upper-class white women, was not familiar with or equipped to meet the needs of women of color, trans people, and other marginalized women.
These women, who called themselves the “Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice,” argued for a new and broader conception of reproductive freedom rooted in internationally recognized human rights standards developed by the United Nations. Advocates of reproductive justice seek to unite the struggle for reproductive rights with the fight for social justice. The women who coined the phrase published a full-page statement with over 800 signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call to announce the birth of a new movement.
When did the reproductive justice movement start?
Though many of the ideas behind it have existed in some form for decades, it officially began in 1994, when a group of Black reproductive rights advocates who participated in a number of national conferences in the U.S. and the International Conference on Population & Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt, gathered in Chicago to pioneer a new reproductive rights framework. They hoped that framing these rights as a question of “justice” would better address both the full spectrum of women’s reproductive rights and the particular experiences and concerns of Black and/or low-income women. They shared frustrations about the status of Black women’s reproductive health around the globe and the limits of a pro-choice movement rooted in narrow notions of privacy. And they urged the larger movement to contextualize abortion care as one crucial aspect of a broader spectrum of human rights, including bodily autonomy and the full range of reproductive decision-making.
Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. “In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda,” which employs a reproductive justice framework, focuses on three key policy areas: abortion rights and access, contraceptive equity, and comprehensive sex education.
How does reproductive justice relate to intersectionality?
The concept of reproductive justice is an outgrowth of intersectionality, which is itself related to the original meaning of identity politics as defined by the Black socialist feminists of the Combahee River Collective. Members of the Collective believed their identities and the various forms of oppression they experienced as members of different but overlapping groups—Black people, women, LGBTQ people, and working-class people—uniquely suited them to fight these oppressions.
Intersectionality means that all forms of oppression are interconnected, and all people experience oppression and discrimination differently as a result of their particular identities. As the self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde once said, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” And in the words of SisterSong, “Marginalized women face multiple oppressions and we can only win freedom by addressing how they impact one another.” Reproductive justice is about recognizing, honoring, and easing the lives of all child-bearing people by fighting all forms of oppression—including racism, sexism, able-ism, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and economic injustice—not only in isolation, but when and where they intersect.
Why does reproductive justice matter?
Reproductive justice matters because it relates to the lives and experiences of every person capable of giving birth. By significantly broadening the lens through which most people view reproductive rights, it covers a far wider range of human experiences, is relevant to and supported by many more people, and has the potential to transform millions of lives by harnessing the collective power of various social movements—for economic justice, criminal justice reform, and civil rights, among others—that are connected but too often siloed.
Reproductive justice in childbirth
Until the mid-1800s, women in the United States managed their own birth experiences with little oversight and intervention. Abortion was common throughout the nineteenth century. It was only in the latter half of the century, when medicine became a respected profession and the American Medical Association was established, that physicians lobbied to have abortion banned. Their concern was not about the morality of abortion, but the financial and professional implications of being forced to compete with midwives and purveyors of home abortion remedies.
Tensions arose around that time, and persist today, between midwives, many of whom were trained in traditional healing practices, and formally educated and/or state-licensed physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners. The conflict was partly between an authoritarian and patriarchal medical establishment and the women giving birth and the midwives they trusted to assist them.
Women of color, poor women, and women with disabilities typically had and have fewer choices about where and how to give birth and who may attend them when they do. Reproductive justice advocates seek to eliminate these disparities and ensure that all women can give birth safely, comfortably, in the company of their chosen attendants, and in the setting and manner of their choosing.
Reproductive justice in schools
A key aspect of reproductive justice in schools is comprehensive sex education, which can help students prevent unintended pregnancies and increase their odds of graduating.
Teenagers who are given partial or no medically accurate information about how to prevent pregnancy and/or STIs and explicitly or implicitly taught to be ashamed of their bodies and sexuality are likelier to become pregnant or cause a pregnancy—a circumstance which interrupts their educations more often than not. Students who are pregnant or parenting should not have to choose between raising children and completing their educations. They deserve time to recover after giving birth, permission to make up missed work, child care, transportation, counseling, health care, personalized graduation plans, flexible schedules, and freedom from stigma. As the novelist Toni Morrison said in a 1989 Time interview in response to a leading question ("You don't feel that these girls will never know whether they could have been teachers, or whatever?”) about teen moms, “They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons…That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we don't want to pay for it. I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black—or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money.” The U.S. will not achieve reproductive justice until it is willing to invest the necessary resources in all of its children.
Reproductive justice in workplaces
In 2014, then Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois), a woman of color and a veteran of the Iraq war who lost both legs in a 2004 helicopter crash, was 46, pregnant, and in her third trimester. Because her doctor had advised her not to travel at that stage of her pregnancy, she appealed to her fellow Democrats to make a one-time exception to the Democratic caucus’s ban on proxy voting so she could participate in House Democratic caucus leadership and committee member elections.
Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders denied her request. Far more disturbing than what happened to Duckworth, who went on to become a U.S. senator, is what happens to women in retail and service industry jobs on a regular basis. Employers routinely deny pregnant workers basic accommodations like access to bottled water, the ability to sit down, and extra bathroom breaks. In 2014 Bene’t Holmes, a 25-year-old single mother and Walmart employee who was then four months pregnant, asked her manager for the less physically demanding job duties her doctor had recommended. Her request was denied. The next day she had a miscarriage at work.
Reproductive justice means supporting whatever choices women make about their reproductive lives, not forcing them to choose between supporting their families and following a doctor’s advice. It means fighting to ensure both that every woman who wants to end a pregnancy can do so and that every woman who wants to continue one can do so safely and with dignity. And it means that employers and governments must support workers while they are becoming and once they have become mothers. During World War II President Franklin Roosevelt used funds from a wartime infrastructure bill to establish a national network of child care centers for women who took factory jobs to support the war effort. Despite the best efforts of mothers, social welfare groups, unions, early childhood educators, and social workers to keep them open after the war, President Harry Truman shut them down as soon as Japan surrendered. It shouldn’t take a world war for governments to meet people’s needs.
Reproductive justice in prisons
Women in many countries, including the United States, have been arrested and incarcerated for ending or attempting to end unwanted pregnancies and/or endangering fetuses, which is particularly ironic given how the state often treats incarcerated mothers. It is cruel and illogical to imprison pregnant women for possibly jeopardizing a nonexistent baby by, for example, using drugs while pregnant and to separate mothers convicted of crimes from the living children who need them. The treatment of pregnant and nursing women and/or mothers in prisons and jails, including for pregnancy-related crimes, is clearly connected to poverty, xenophobia, and racism.
In 2017, a U.S. government official denied an abortion to a teenaged immigrant detainee who was pregnant as a result of rape and said she would rather harm herself than continue the pregnancy. In 2014 a Pennsylvania woman named Jennifer Whalen was charged with a felony and three misdemeanors, including endangering the welfare of a child, and sentenced to prison after helping her 16-year-old daughter end an unwanted pregnancy by ordering the abortion pill online. Whelan, a single parent who worked as a nursing home aide, said her daughter did not have health insurance and could not afford a hospital abortion.
In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, began arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests showed they were smoking crack. In some cases, Dorothy Roberts wrote in her 1997 book, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY a team of police officers tracked down expectant mothers in their neighborhoods. In others, officers appeared at hospital maternity wards to haul away women in handcuffs and leg irons hours after giving birth. According to Roberts, one Charleston woman spent the final weeks of her pregnancy in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail. When she went into labor, she was taken to the hospital in chains, where she remained shackled to the bed throughout the entire delivery. All but one of the 48 women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston that year were Black. And in 1978—five weeks into a 40-year sentence, with no painkillers or sterilized medical equipment of any kind—22-year-old Debbie Sims Africa gave birth to her son Mike in a Pennsylvania prison cell. She cut the baby’s umbilical cord with her teeth, hid him under a sheet, and relied on her fellow incarcerated women to hide the noise by singing or coughing when he cried. She couldn’t keep her baby with her under jail rules and knew it would be difficult to conceal his existence for long. After three days, she told the authorities, who promptly took him away.
Reproductive justice demands that all women terminating or carrying a pregnancy, giving birth, and/or raising a child be treated like human beings in life-altering circumstances. Then President Trump signed a law banning the shackling of pregnant women in 2018. Far more remains to be done to guarantee reproductive justice for incarcerated people.
Who invented intersectional feminism?
Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw is often credited with having coined the term in 1989, when she published a paper entitled, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, a collection of interviews with pioneering Black feminists, Demita Frazier, one of Taylor’s interviewees, questions that narrative. “I have to talk to the young woman—Kimberlé Crenshaw…who says that she coined the term intersectionality,” Frazier says. “I always laugh when I read that because I remember the day we were sitting at the women’s center in Cambridge, drafting our probably third or fourth draft of the [Combahee River Collective] statement, I said, ‘You know, we stand at the intersection where our identities are indivisible.’ There is no separation. We are as Black women truly and completely intact in our paradox, and there’s nothing paradoxical about oppression [laugh]” (How We Get Free, Haymarket Books, p. 123).
In the 1970s, Frazier and her fellow Black socialist feminists conceptualized identity politics as the idea that Black liberation, feminism, and the fight for economic justice didn’t have to and shouldn’t be disparate and conflicting movements; it was only by coming together to fight all forms of oppression that organizers could truly free all people. In 1977 the Collective issued a statement which proclaimed, among other things, that “work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work…and not for the profit of the bosses,” but added, “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”
Many of the core concepts of intersectionality can be traced back to nineteenth century figures like the abolitionist and women’s rights crusader Sojourner Truth, who wanted to be recognized for and freed from the specific indignities she had suffered as a Black woman in the United States. Truth is said to have challenged attendees of the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, to include women like her in their conception of women’s rights: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”
Reproductive Justice Around the World
Defending the rights and dignity of all women often means confronting state power, as Irish women did when they took to the streets to demand the repeal of Ireland’s abortion ban in 2017 and Polish and Mexican women did when they protested their countries’ abortion laws en masse in 2020. Women in Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and other Latin American countries followed suit in 2021. In the last decade and a half Marea Verde (Green Wave), a Latin American women’s movement, has waged “aggressive campaigns” and led mass popular protests “organized around legal action and legislative demands that center broadly on women’s autonomy and rights” that have helped liberalize abortions laws throughout the region, as reproductive rights litigation expert Ximena Casas recently explained in The New York Times.
Reproductive justice in the United States
Abortion is, for now, legal in the U.S. but heavily restricted. Women, many of whom are poor, immigrants, and/or women of color, have been prosecuted for ending pregnancies and having miscarriages. United Nations human rights monitors harshly criticized the state of Texas for a particularly draconian 2021 anti-abortion law which, they said, violated international law by endangering women’s lives and denying them the basic right to control their bodies. Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer tasked by the United Nations Human Rights Council with fighting to end discrimination against women and girls, characterized the law as “sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst,” adding that it has “not only taken Texas backward, but in the eyes of the international community, it has taken the entire country backward.”
The U.S. has the highest maternal death rate among developed nations. In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., which is more than double the ratio of most other high-income countries. It has far more OB/GYNS than midwives and an overall shortage of maternal health care providers of any kind relative to births. The U.S. is the only developed country that does not guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave to women who have just given birth.
Government officials have sterilized thousands of U.S. women without their full knowledge or consent and required many more to have fewer children than they wanted in exchange for desperately needed financial support. These policies have disproportionately affected Native Americans, Black people, Latinas, low-income people, and people with intellectual disabilities. From 1950 to 1966, Black women in North Carolina were sterilized at over three times the rate of white women and over 12 times the rate of white men.
Reproductive justice in Canada
Inducing an abortion was a crime in Canada until 1988, when the country’s Supreme Court determined its abortion law was unconstitutional and struck it down. Abortion has since been legal at any stage in a woman’s pregnancy and is covered as a publicly funded medical procedure under the Canada Health Act, but provinces such as New Brunswick place limits on these funds. In New Brunswick only hospital abortions are covered by insurance; abortions at private clinics are not insured. As in the United States, access to abortion varies widely throughout the country. Inhabitants of many rural provinces and territories have access to only one or two providers. Canadian officials have a long and ugly history of sterilizing Indigenous women without their knowledge or consent.
Reproductive justice in India
India allows abortion during the first trimester with approval by a medical practitioner and under specific conditions, including when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when a patient’s life or health is at risk. In cases involving severe fetal anomaly, a three-person medical board composed of a gynecologist, a pediatrician, and a radiologist must confirm the diagnosis in order for a pregnant person to access care, a requirement that is particularly difficult to fulfill outside of major cities.
Activists in India have been seeking to reform the country’s abortion laws for over a decade. In March 2020, a new set of amendments to the 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act were introduced in parliament. Critics have suggested the proposed amendments were inadequate and not framed “within a rights-based context for a person seeking abortion.”
Reproductive justice in Poland
Poland has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe. The government instituted a near-total ban on abortion in October 2020, triggering the country’s largest protests since the fall of communism. In September 2021 a 30-year-old woman named Izabela died of septic shock after doctors refused to perform a life-saving abortion. “The baby weighs 485 grams. For now, thanks to the abortion law, I have to lie down. And there is nothing they can do,” she wrote in a text message to her mother shortly before her death. “They'll wait until it dies or something begins, and if not, I can expect sepsis.”
Draconian abortion laws notwithstanding, Poland has one of the world’s lowest maternal mortality rates. Its National Health Fund, for which the vast majority of Polish residents are eligible, covers most of the costs associated with giving birth in a hospital. The government also covers uninsured women during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. Low-income parents receive a government allowance for their first child, and parents of two or more children get around $130 per month per child. Every woman, regardless of insurance status, gets a home visit from a midwife within days of giving birth. The Health Ministry guarantees a woman's right to choose the place and method of birth, decide who is in the delivery room, and be with her newborn for at least two hours after giving birth.
Reproductive justice in El Salvador
Latin American women, particularly in El Salvador, have served decades-long prison sentences for having miscarriages the authorities claimed were self-induced. El Salvador is one of four countries in Latin America with no-exceptions abortion bans. In 2021, the authorities freed three Salvadoran women who were sentenced to 30 years in prison for what the authorities claimed were self-induced abortions. A fourth woman was released in 2022. In 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found El Salvador responsible for the death of a Salvadoran woman sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide after losing a pregnancy in 2008. The woman, who had two children, died of cancer in prison two years later, partly as a result of inadequate medical care. Among other reforms, the Court ordered El Salvador to tighten regulations governing doctor-patient confidentiality and, in a ruling that applies to countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, ruled that health care providers can no longer report women seeking abortion care and other reproductive services to law enforcement.
Reproductive justice in Ghana
In 2022, Ghana’s national health insurance program expanded to include free long-term contraception with the goal of sparing millions of women already covered by the country’s national health insurance program from paying out-of-pocket costs for effective long-term contraception. Ghana has high maternal mortality rates—its maternal mortality ratio is 308 per 100,000 live births—high rates of sexually transmitted infections, and low levels of contraceptive use. Women in rural communities have a particularly hard time accessing birth control and other reproductive health care services. Abortion is still a criminal offense in Ghana, with exceptions in cases of rape, incest, serious fetal anomaly, and/or risk to the woman's health. Around 22–30 percent of maternal deaths in Ghana are thought to be the result of unsafe abortions.
A few last words on reproductive justice
In the last 25 years, reproductive justice advocates have worked to broaden the view of an occasionally myopic pro-choice movement overly focused on electing Democrats and pressuring sympathetic administrations to appoint liberal justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. Having a Democrat in the White House and a more liberal Supreme Court does make it likelier that American women will retain certain rights. But it would profoundly improve the lives of all U.S. women, and women and people capable of giving birth around the world, if governments treated control over one’s reproductive and family life as a fundamental human right, rather than a privilege reserved for those with the means to obtain needed services.
“Every child a wanted child” has long been a credo of the pro-choice movement. Reproductive justice seeks to take this laudable goal several steps further by challenging us to build a world in which every child is not only “wanted” by its parents at birth, but well provided for. It offers a path to creating societies that truly honor life by treating all who are capable of creating it, and every person born, as worthy of love, respect, and care—and investing our collective resources accordingly.
[post_title] => A beginner's guide to reproductive justice [post_excerpt] => Reproductive justice combines tenets of human rights, social justice, and reproductive rights. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => a-beginners-guide-to-reproductive-justice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 20:49:18 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 20:49:18 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=3955 [menu_order] => 131 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )- Donate to a local abortion fund, share information about where to get the pills that can end a pregnancy and how to use them, and/or identify and refer women to brave and ethical providers willing to break state laws against prescribing pills online and mailing them to patients.
- When I asked Jenny Brown, National Women's Liberation organizer and author of Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now, about current organizing efforts, she cited groups like Plan C and Shout Your Abortion, which have put out clear and detailed information about the pills that induce abortion, where to get them, how to take and dispense them, and what they cost.
- Plan C also includes information about whether and how you or your provider can get in trouble for taking or prescribing these pills. The How to Use Abortion Pill website also describes how to take them, how you can expect to feel afterward, and how abortion laws differ by country.
- Planned Parenthood’s site includes information on how to get abortion pills for cheap or free (the cost varies by location, whether or not you have insurance, and whether or not your insurance provider covers abortion care).
- For now, people in states where telemedicine is legal can order pills from abortionondemand.org for a $239 fee that covers a consultation with a board-certified physician, a medication kit delivered within two to five days, and 24/7 call service and coordination of follow-up care if needed.
- Aid Access, founded by a Dutch physician, gets pills to U.S. women in states with abortion bans via a pharmacy in India.









