Reproductive justice was a revolution. Here’s why it matters in Trump 2.0.

Activist and educator Loretta Ross didn’t 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–First Lady Hillary Clinton. But the plan was “very male-centric,” Ross recalls—and 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. 

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 ads in The Washington Post and Roll Call. The presentation was buttoned-up, the ideas—“Reproductive freedom is a life-and-death issue for many Black women and deserves as much recognition as any other freedom,” and “WE WILL NOT ENDORSE A HEALTH CARE REFORM SYSTEM THAT DOES NOT COVER THE FULL RANGE OF REPRODUCTIVE SERVICES FOR ALL WOMEN, INCLUDING ABORTION”—profound. “We didn’t know we had created a paradigm shift,” Ross says, “because that wasn’t our intention at that time. We meant it only as a response to the Clinton administration and to Congress.”

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 “pro-choice” 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—including the SisterSong collective, which Ross cofounded in 1997—reflect 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.

“It was radical then,” adds Ross’s longtime friend and collaborator, activist and scholar Marlene Fried, “and it’s radical still.”

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. Reproductive justice stands in opposition to pretty much every health and social policy espoused by the Trump administration and its Christian nationalist, pronatalist allies. “We are in a ferocious backlash,” Fried says. “It’s a moment when people see the fragility of rights won or not—realizing that rights are not secured forever.” 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.

“We’ve been very struck by how little of our own history of resistance and activism is known within our own movement,” Fried says. “We want people to learn their own history and gain inspiration and strength from it.”

No one is better suited to tell that story than Ross, whose work earned her a MacArthur “genius” award in 2022, and Fried, 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 of women’s and gender studies, and Fried from her home office outside Boston. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you feel the need to write this book now? 

Marlene Fried: 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’s 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. It was also important to us to include the international context—to ground reproductive justice in human rights.

Much of the book is focused on this country’s history of racism and oppression—exactly the history that Trump 2.0 is trying to erase.

Loretta Ross: As we frequently say, if you don’t understand white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, you don’t understand reproductive politics. Because it’s not just about gender. Racism and [homophobia] and Christian nationalism and antisemitism and ableism and Islamophobia—all of those things affect reproductive politics. 

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 women who mounted strategies of resistance—not just detailing what happened to them, but what they did for themselves.

Fried: When you examine history, what you see is that the world we’re living in now is not that different from the world we’ve been in. In some ways, yes, it is a different world. It’s a very frightening world. But it has been for a very long time. We have been here before.

Tell me about your own histories—how you became not just abortion activists, but reproductive justice activists. Loretta, you were from Texas, right? 

Ross: 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’t 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. 

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?

Ross: 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’t sign the permission slip. I had an abortion, and this is when I accepted implantation of [an early IUD,] the Dalkon Shield. Within a few years, it sterilized me. 

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. 

Ross: 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 of women were sterilized because of that design flaw, and some died.

I got an acute infection in my fallopian tubes, and they burst one night—sending 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.

My god, Loretta, I just have to say how sorry I am to hear that this happened to you. Marlene, 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’s theory of historical materialism.

Fried: In grad school, I got caught up in politics—the anti-war movement, women’s liberation, civil rights. I came to work around abortion rights when I was pregnant with a much-wanted pregnancy after several miscarriages. The experience of not being able to get pregnant when I wanted to be felt very connected to the experience of trying not to get pregnant when I didn’t want to be. 

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?

Ross: You can’t understand the myopic focus on abortion that women’s rights activists were pushed into until you understand how abortion became a significant wedge issue for the Republican Party in the post–Brown v. Board of Education 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–Vietnam 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 became the best mobilizing strategy that these right-wing people had. 

The feminist movement also played into the hands of those conservative forces—for example, by not working harder to stop the Hyde Amendment, which passed in 1976 and banned federal funding for abortion.

Fried: The Hyde Amendment erased Roe for millions of people. I mean, who cares if abortion is legal if you can’t get one? By not putting access and affordability in the foreground, the larger mainstream choice movement was pretty much saying, “Okay, here’s this group of middle-class white women whose rights we’re putting ahead of everybody else.”

The mainstream pro-choice movement also didn’t 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’s ugly history of forced sterilizations, which continued for decades and targeted poor women and women of color. 

Fried: It’s about who’s 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’ property. Otherwise, most reproductive policies in this country have been enacted to prevent women of color from having children. 

The activism against sterilization abuse—which was led by women of color—was going on at the same time as the fight for Roe v. Wade. But you wouldn’t know that if you looked only at what was going on in the abortion sector of the movement. 

Frustrations about all of this came to a head in the summer of 1994. Loretta, why then? 

Ross: 1994 was a very eventful year. I had just returned from South Africa, serving as an election monitor for Nelson Mandela’s election in April as president. Later that year was the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, 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, when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her friend.

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. 

Ross: 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. We 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] “Able” Mable Thomas, convened 12 Black women in her hotel room and asked us what we wanted to do to respond. 

That’s when we first analyzed that abortion was always separated from routine health care, which doesn’t make sense. We talked about how both the pro-choice and the pro-life movements neglected things that were important to Black women—not just the right not to have a child, but because of the history of sterilization abuse, the right to have children under the conditions in which we 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’re born. 

And so we spliced together the concept of “reproductive rights” and “social justice” and coined the term “reproductive justice.” We decided to purchase an ad in two national newspapers that more than 800 women signed. But the ad didn’t mention reproductive justice, because nobody would understand what it was.

I remember the first time I heard the term—my reaction was, What?

Ross: A communications specialist for nonprofits heard about this term and offered to test it with some focus groups. And she came back and said, “I don’t think this ‘reproductive justice’ thing is going to work.” The first focus group asked, “Do you mean Law and Order?” Because the word ‘justice’ made people think of criminal justice. The second focus group seized on the word “reproductive” and asked, “What do y’all got against Xerox copiers?” They actually thought we were organizing to protest the Xerox copier! 

But Marlene, you were an early adopter. What about the repro justice concept spoke to you?

Fried: 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’t 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’t take hold right away, because it’s a radical framework.

Ross: It’s radical because it transcended the limits of the US Constitution. It invoked the global human rights framework.

A lot of the mainstream abortion rights movement found it threatening.

Fried: 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’t make sense.

Flash forward 31 years. Reproductive justice has become a critical part of the broader reproductive rights movement. So that is the good news. But now the right wing has captured our country. It’s targeting people of color, especially Black women. Under Trump 2.0, just using the word “justice” in a research grant application is enough to get your grant canceled.

Ross: Justice is about accountability. And I think that’s one of the things that scares the bejesus out of the Trump administration, because accountability is not their strong suit.

How, then, can the reproductive justice framework help us get through this dire moment?

Fried: The right is trying to take back every civil, political, and human right possible. The extremism that’s been unleashed at this moment is terrifying—for 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, we know that a lot of them will not be. In a moment like this, people often retract. “OK, we’ll ask for less, because otherwise we’re going to get nothing. Let’s just try to hang on to something.” But if you ask for less, you get less. If you truncate the frame, you’re not going to end up with justice. 

So that’s one big lesson—Don’t retreat. Another seems to be: “This is not new. Don’t freak out—fight.” And maybe the most important message: The past is prologue.

Ross: I’ve 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’s coming down the pike in 30, 40, 50 years. It’s something we call reproductive justice futurism.

For example, designer babies. We’ve got these amoral scientists working with these immoral billionaires trying to sculpt the future of the human race, that’s all designed around themselves and their genes. They’re not even showing me pictures of designer babies that are Black or brown!

Fried: Is this a whole new thing we’ve never seen before? No, it’s 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’re at now, but also what’s going to come.

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 that history calls us to action.

Top image: Mother Jones illustration; images courtesy: UC Press, Hampshire College, National Women’s Hall of Fame.