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A Trump-appointed judge in Texas is now poised to outlaw medication abortions in all 50 states, a nationwide ban that will impact some 40 million people and block their access to reproductive health care and bodily autonomy. This latest assault makes it a practical necessity to accelerate the development of a politically unified convergence, movement or party to secure and defend reproductive justice, which includes LBGTQ liberation, as a primary basic need.
Abortion care is health care. Building this national movement will bring together local groups, and provide a structure for talking about the kind of transformation we need. This is a matter of survival in the context of a society characterized by extreme wealth and poverty and an economy driven by automation, robotics, and A.I. – technologies that are being wielded to make everyday people into a “surplus population” that has no right to live and thrive.
The reproductive justice movement is fiercely mobilizing to take the offensive against the attacks on reproductive freedom that have intensified following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization to strip protection of the right to abortion from the U.S. Constitution.
Led by youth claiming power in their own right as a social force, the movement is exposing and confronting the narrative that white supremacist/hetero-patriarchal rule – “white nationalist” rule that claims to be “moral” or “Christian” – is all Americans can expect. While the movement is intensely practical – defending clinics and setting up hotlines – it is also deeply visionary, seeing reproductive justice as integral to a world worth fighting for – a world in which reproductive freedom, and LBGTQ liberation, is woven in to the very fabric of a just society.
The non-profit advocacy organization “Gen Z For Change” describes this new world as one of “people-first politics”: “Uplifting everyone is how we create a long-term, sustainable economy in which all people can thrive.” Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z member elected to Congress and who was previously the national organizing director for the anti-gun-violence March for Our Lives, has framed this revolutionary vision with stark simplicity: “We want everything for everybody.”
The meaning and impact of Dobbs
What is Dobbs really about? What is the impact of this raw and total reversal of Roe v. Wade, this judicial repudiation of a societal vision of equality and mutual respect?
It is widely recognized that this attack on reproductive rights, and the attack on transgender, non-conforming and gender expansive people, is a “useful tool” of the religious right, funded and driven by the 1 percent – the class of mega-donors and corporations that control both major political parties. The goal of these ruling corporate interests is to create a bloc of single-issue voters, weaponizing religion in service to the corporate, fascist state, making programs like Social Security as well as civil rights and democratic participation, relics of the past. The vanquishing of electoral democracy is an essential step in this process.
In this war, the ruling class relies on and cultivates the ideology of white supremacy and hetero-patriarchy – the ideology of dominance, violence, and exploitation that underlies Dobbs’ attack on bodily autonomy and gender liberation. In a recent program, the author Robyn Maynard explains that this is an ideology in which land and people are “only to be extracted in the creation of profit from slavery through to capitalism … that is exactly what has gotten us into the throes of this present moment in which most human beings are disposable. And of course, the logics of racism are what have made that palatable, and what has made that normal and possible.”
The Dobbs decision legitimizes forced pregnancy and obedience to the corporate masters of the religious state. It disempowers and victimizes women and pregnant people, in particular, by banning and criminalizing abortion, but of course its logic also underlies the current attacks on transgender, non-binary, and gender-expansive people. In state after state, fighters see this as an attack on people of all colors and diverse genders.
Control of the body is at stake as fascism advances. These issues were recently explored by Cheryl Rivera, writer and abolitionist activist from Brooklyn, linking reproductive rights, the coercion involved in low wage work and mass incarceration: “You really do need control of the body everywhere you can to extract the most amount of wealth out of it.” She points out the flip side of this attack – while the Dobbs decision “puts us in vulnerable positions [it] also makes it much clearer to many of us that we have some common stake together. We all are at risk of criminalization, we are at risk but we don’t feel it most of the time – some of us more than others due to racial and class lines that already exist – but right now more people are going to feel that you are actually under capitalism, some more than others, but more than ever before.”
Mobilization and victory
“I want to tell anybody that’s younger than me – stop listening to some of the grownups – and the advice that we’ve been given: ‘Don’t hold rallies, don’t protest, don’t counterprotest, don’t make demands for the things that you really want.’ Where has that led us? Into a slide of Christo-fascism, not just here in Kansas, but across the nation. I’m all done with that advice. There is no reason we are not outside of abortion clinics yelling, ‘We love you, we are proud of you, go get what you need, your community loves you and we will be here for you.’ ”
With these words, Melinda Lavon, mom, midwife, DSA leader, and chair of Vote No Kansas, describes the fight to defeat the referendum in August of 2022 that would have stripped abortion rights out of the Kansas state constitution. This victory was followed in 2022 by parallel victories in other states. Youth turned out overwhelmingly in these campaigns.
In the words of Rija Nazir, a recent graduate of Wichita State College and lead organizer of the Vote Neigh Campaign in Kansas that was instrumental in bringing out the youth vote: “If there is anything that the primary taught us, it is that the Democrats will not save us – we will save us. Not just voting for the lesser of two evils, but voting for who we think will save us.” Fighters like Rija Nazir are using the power of vote as one form of protest and a demonstration of political independence.
The fight for democracy
Park Cannon serves as a member of the board of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, “a multiracial movement rooted in Black Liberation and Indigenous Resistance, which centers on Black women and recognizes that only when Black women, transgender, and gender-expansive people are safe, free and thriving is liberation possible.” The term reproductive justice was first coined by this movement in 1994.
Young, Black, and queer, Park Cannon is also a member of the Georgia legislature, elected from Atlanta. In March 2022, she was arrested and jailed because she insisted upon knocking on the door and on demanding to be admitted to Governor Brian Kemp’s office as he signed Senate Bill 202, a comprehensive attack on voting rights.
After she was released from jail, Park Cannon tweeted, “I am not the first Georgian to be arrested for fighting voter suppression. I’d love to say I’m the last, but we know that isn’t true. … But someday soon that last person will step out of jail for the last time and breathe a first breath knowing that no one will be jailed again for fighting for the right to vote.”
Park Cannon’s courageous response to the attempt to criminalize resistance to voter suppression is a powerful example of the way that the reproductive justice movement – a movement in which she is herself a leader – has taken on the fight for political power that we must have as we look toward building a unified national movement.
Resources for further reading and research:
Voting Rights and Reproductive Freedom Rising: A Dialogue for Revolutionaries. (LRNA.org)
Visioning New Futures for Reproductive Justice Declaration 2023 (SisterSong.net)
Building New Worlds in an Era of Collapse, Kelly Hayes, Truthout, with Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (truthout.org)
Rebuilding a New Reproductive Justice Movement: Taking on the Right [Workshop with Cheryl Rivera] (socialismconference.org)
