05/02/2026
Black history is inseparable from the fight to know, protect, and reclaim Black reproductive bodies from systems designed to control them.
This , let's celebrate Black women's contributions to the development of and .
In 1994, a group of Black women calling themselves the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice convened in Chicago for a conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance and the Ms. Foundation for Women.
They published a statement titled “Black Women on Universal Health Care Reform” in response to the Clinton administrations proposed plan for universal healthcare.
In 1997, 16 different women-of-color organizations representing four communities of color - Native American, African American, Latin American, and Asian American - launched the nonprofit SisterSong to build a national reproductive justice movement.
The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice collective was the first org founded to build the reproductive justice movement.
Reproductive justice was a response to the “reproductive rights movement” of the 1970’s, which favored exclusionary politics that were too narrowly focused on the interests of classed, white women of the western world.
Black women, brown women, LGBTQI+ people, impoverished women, incarcerated women, homeless women, immigrant women, and disabled women were marginalized and outcast from the reproductive rights movement, which focused on abortion’s pro-choice versus pro-life debates.
Reproductive justice sought to acknowledge the ways in which social forces like race and class intersected with gender to limit the freedom to make informed choices and exercise their bodily autonomy.
This extended past the issue of abortion and extended into pregnancy, access to menstrual health and gynecological services, emergency contraception, contraception, abortion, treatment and prevention of STI’s, domestic violence assistance, out of hospital birth options access to midwives, doulas, and lactation consultants, domestic violence assistance, support services after medical trauma and harm, safe homes, childcare, and s*x education.
