Abortion: A Guide to Fighting Back
Those who care about abortion rights are in desperate need of hope right now: just do a Google search for “abortion news.” It’s easy to sink into distraction and despair, but we do not have that option. Nor do we need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to strategy or theory around abortion access. Hope has been here all along, and now, thanks to a new book by Marlene Fried and Loretta J. Ross, we can connect the past with the path forward.
Abortion and Reproductive Justice: An Essential Guide for Resistance (University of California Press, $27.95) is all at once a history book, a road map, and a confrontation. In its early pages, Ross reflects on turning “my rage into outrage.” The difference is key: where rage is an intense emotional reaction that has the potential to be violent, outrage is a moral anger that’s triggered by an injustice—in Ross’s case, spending much of her life fighting sterilization, sexual abuse, and racism, living with the reality that Black women and girls have little, if any, control over their sexual experiences and decisions. Ross has translated her outrage into co-founding SisterSong and Women of Color Reprojustice Collection, and, along with 12 other Black feminist theorists, is credited with coining both the phrase and framework “reproductive justice,” or “RJ.”
The reproductive justice framework is a means for “thinking about and analyzing the history and politics of reproductive experiences.” In An Essential Guide, Fried and Ross explain the framework, and how it can be applied to abortion, or in shorthand, “RJ-ing abortion.”
When Roe v. Wade was reversed in 2022 via the Dobbs decision, the response from folks supporting abortion justice was one of devastation. But RJ-ing the news means accepting the reality that Roe’s existence meant nothing for many across the country for whom abortion had already been inaccessible, primarily communities of color, low-income communities, those living with disabilities, young people, and queer people. While abortion was technically legal in every US state before June 2022, barriers such as waiting periods, childcare, travel, parental involvement laws, and the costs of the abortion itself kept abortion seekers away from the care they needed.
“RJ-ing abortion rejects basing access to reproductive health care on the flimsy individualist concept of “choice,” when so many people do not live under conditions where real choice is possible,” write Fried and Ross in the chapter titled “Telling Different Abortion Stories.” While mainstream abortion rights organizations once considered individual “choice” to be the mark of victory in this movement, the reproductive justice framework considers “whether and which individuals have access to the resources or conditions necessary to make reproductive choices.” The ability to make a genuine choice about one’s reproductive life—whether that be to have children, not have children, and raise children in a safe environment — hinges on the intersecting ecosystems of one’s life.
Abortion and Reproductive Justice: The Essential Guide is thorough in setting forth reproductive justice’s history and present and also in its rendering of the grim truths of sterilization, eugenics, racism, and the erasures of bodily autonomy that have shaped our current reality.
The movement for self-managed abortion, in which people seeking abortion can be their own providers, is one example of the practical hope we need. The application of a reproductive justice framework, with its emphasis on the fullness of human experiences, can bring us closer to a reality in which abortion is truly accessible, when stigma around abortion is considered beyond the pale, where coalitions can be formed between the mainstream and the radical, and decades and even centuries of community work are uplifted.
Chanel Dubofsky is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.
