Somos Poderosas: The Movement for Reproductive Justice
“Yo valgo mucho en este lugar,” photo used with permission by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice
This photo was taken in 2015 in South Texas after the Human Rights Hearing in which Latinas shared their testimonios about their lack of access to health care. Texas had passed legislation designed to restrict women’s use of abortion services but it had the effect of limiting women’s access to any type of reproductive healthcare services since so many clinics closed down. As they shared stories of cancers diagnosed too late, abortions that required extraordinary efforts, or other health issues, these activists were voicing the discourse promoted by the movement for reproductive justice: “I value a great deal in this place,” or more succinctly, “somos poderosas” or “somos chingonas.” Based in over thirty organizations across the United States (and one in Canada), this movement has been active since the 1990s. The reproductive justice movement uses a holistic framework that melds intersectionality and human rights. It also honors the strength and resiliency of people of color and draws on our ancestral knowledge and spiritual practices. Its mission is promoting women’s right to bear children free from coercion or abuse, terminate their pregnancies without obstacles or judgment, and raise their children in healthy environments as well as the right to bodily autonomy and gender self-identification. Advocates believe full reproductive justice will only occur in communities free from state violence expressed through colonialism, neoliberalism, criminalization, or policies related to poverty, child welfare, environmental regulation, immigration, education, or health that impede people’s human rights. They assert access to healthcare is related to the ability to earn a living wage without placing your health at risk, afford healthy food, have access to parks and open space, and express our spiritual and cultural traditions openly.
In The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism, I document how RJ activists strategically promote policy advocacy at the local, state, and federal levels. They engage in grassroots organizing in communities of color using storytelling as a methodology. They also perform culture shift work that contest the symbolic violence of racist, classist, sexist, and heteronormative ideologies. With its effective collaboration among like-minded groups working toward similar goals, this movement offers a model for other social movements in four ways.
“We are the border,” photo used with permission by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice
First, this movement vernacularizes intersectionality through grassroots organizing with women in modest circumstances, ranging from adolescents to elders. Women engage in consciousness-raising where they learn to center themselves and find their own transformation, identities, and healing by becoming activists. Trainings provide an orientation toward thinking structurally and welcoming vulnerable people in their communities. Women mobilize power by learning skills—analysis, self-reflection, research, writing, public speaking, lobbying, organizing, facilitating meetings, questioning presenters—as well as gaining knowledge about a range of issues.
Secondly, participants begin a process of working in solidarity on others’ behalf as well as for their own needs. Thus, intersectionality becomes generalized, with a simultaneous inward and outward gaze, and leads women toward collective social action with other movements. Participants in this movement endorse political philosophies that range from LGBTQ rights or environmental justice to immigrant rights or faith-based activism.
Third, by using a human rights framework, reproductive justice activists invite scrutiny of conditions in the United States. This movement disrupts US exceptionalism, the debilitating notion that social problems mainly happen elsewhere. Reproductive justice organizations are enmeshed in transnational networks of activists who present their work in high-profile venues such as the United Nations, and they are in communication with activists from around the world.
Fourth, the reproductive justice approach engages in decolonial thinking. These activists are expanding the notion that citizens should have access to quality care by advocating that everyone, including the undocumented, have access to health insurance, healthcare, and well-being. This movement takes on struggles for a living wage or adequate state resources for the poor, with the right to open space, parks, and toxin-free environments as well as full access to clean air and water and food security. This social movement offers multiple expressions of collective politicized identity by activists who advocate for empowerment for all.
Lucy Ceballos-Félix, photo used with permission by the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice
In the current era, national politics related to health are even more divisive, and low-income people of color in the United States are bearing the brunt of the pandemic. Simultaneously, we are witnessing the many ways in which people are pushing back. We see robust critiques of how the pandemic is managed and insistence that everyone should be able to maintain their health. We are witnessing remarkable creativity as people voice their views through social media—sharing humor, recipes, gardening and healthy practices—as well as innovative tactics like drive-by or socially-distanced demonstrations. Once we can meet in person, undoubtedly activism will increase. How do we create a post-pandemic world of inclusion? We can follow the strategies of the movement for reproductive justice and begin by asserting: we all value a great deal in this place!
The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism By Patricia Zavella 320 pp. New York University Press. $32.00
Patricia Zavella is Professor Emerita in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of I’m Neither Here nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty and coauthor of Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios.