"I charge you to speak about the injustices you see"
I charge you to speak about the injustices you see.
Chanel Porchia-Albert in Davis, DA (2019) Reproductive Injustice p.173
There’s a lot of Reproductive Justice (RJ) in the air lately - and understandably so: reproduction continues to be attacked the world over, and RJ is a very powerful and resonant framing.
My intention is not to gatekeep when I say this, but: not everything is RJ because it meets (one of) the three tenets of the philosophy, framing, praxis, methodology […]
Sometimes, the things we are pointing to or analysing or calling for aren’t RJ, but are ‘reproductive rights’. Reproductive rights are important for RJ, but they aren’t RJ exactly.
For me, what differentiates RJ from reproductive rights is its radical political call and impetus - where it locates its analysis, who it targets and how it has come to be. To strip it of its radical politics; of its grounding in the Combahee River Collective; in intersectionality; in the transnational reproductive rights-focused Global South-led movements at the ICPD; and remove it from a deep understanding of the matrices of oppression experienced by Black & Brown peoples that shape their reproductive lives, is to diminish its power and to lessen its radical demands for justice. It is to risk a failure of the imagination.
That isn’t to say that it cannot transfer to other contexts or be applied in multiple ways. RJ is incredibly potent and valuable because of how it speaks to multiple contexts and histories and experience. The key here, however, is in locating RJ in those radical politics & understanding how it functions in other spaces: what new analyses it can offer or give rise to, what matrices of oppression can it make visible?
Part of this is understanding and acknowledging its genealogy, and how one comes to articulate and imagine it in the contexts they work in.
I was a baby feminist when I was first introduced to Reproductive Justice.
In 2009, I was working for the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR); a global feminist network based in the Philippines. I was passionate about reproductive rights, identified as a feminist, and was (so I thought) pretty well versed in feminist thinking. Of course I was “pro-choice”!
On WGNRR’s Board at the time were reproductive rights and reproductive justice stalwarts including Doc Guy, Marlene Gerber Fried, and Leila Hessini (amongst many others!). My grounding in RJ was swift (and sometimes painful) as I learnt to confront my own nonsense & assumptions. My understanding of RJ comes through their generosity, patience, and care of my intellectual and political growth.
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There were some key readings and events that shaped my understanding of RJ:
Z, whose feminist principles and approaches were shaped by their experiences in the NDF, was the first person to challenge my easy and unproblematised use of the language of “choice”. They pushed me to expand my knowledge of feminist thinkers and writing, to think deliberately about who I read and whose lived realities I centred in my understandings. They lent me their dog-eared photocopy of the Combahee River Collective Statement. I painstakingly copied out so many sections, I still know entire bits from memory.
Marlene’s 10 Reasons To Rethink Reproductive “Choice” remains my go-to recommendation for shifting how people think about “choice”. I devoured the Reproductive Justice Briefing Book, the ACRJ’s training manual on the language of reproductive justice, and learnt so much from the much-missed Queers for Economic Justice.
These framings helped me understand the work that I was doing at WGNRR, locate its history of resistance to coercive, structurally violent policies, and understand its analyses of reproduction as mired in matrices of oppression. For example, the narratives of ICPD were always couched in broader critiques of neoliberalism (link) or discussions of LARCs were tempered with reflections on coercive experiences of women in the Global South (e.g., WGNRR’s campaign against hazardous contraceptives)
They also pushed me to think about my own histories and overlaps with reproduction - the state-sponsored forced sterilisation in India under Emergency, for example. It led to one of my favourite conversations with my father - who, at the time of Emergency, was in the Indian Navy - and his memories & analysis of what he was witnessing. I carry this with me still (and it shaped my favourite chapter in my PhD on reproductive governance).
In 2011, I attended CLPP (again, much missed), where I really came to understand just how integral RJ was to how we can conceptualise and reimagine the world. It was also the very first time I was in a room with many of the key thinkers and stalwarts of RJ- I don’t think I’ve ever been that tongue tied before!
In 2018, I attended the third Abortion and Reproductive Justice conference in Makhanda, South Africa. Apart from feeling rejuvenated by the friendships and (re) connections forged there, it felt like coming home: here were my people, committed to not just documenting violations or analysing them through RJ, but determined to transform. To hold true to RJ as praxis.
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All of these experiences and many others (understanding LARCs in South Africa, caste politics in India, race and im/migration politics in the UK) have since shaped my approach to and analyses of reproduction. It’s these understandings - local, community-led, transnational, political - that I draw on when applying an RJ approach.
I spent so much of the PhD introducing RJ to many reproduction-focused folks & explaining how it differs from reproductive rights, how it challenges the notion of “choice”. I struggled with this a fair bit: its place and contribution in academia and whether I was co-opting it, whilst at the same time worrying about whether I was doing it a grave injustice in how inadequately I was applying it.
I still worry about this post-PhD. I’ve been thinking about what exactly I mean when I say my work is framed/inspired/underpinned/shaped [verb here] by reproductive justice. Is my research and continued link with activism really doing the work of RJ? What are the politics I locate it in? How do I embed praxis in my academic work?
I’m not sure I have answers.
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I read the incredible Dána-Ain Davis’ “Reproductive Injustice” when it came out in 2019 and I couldn’t stop thinking about Chanel Porchia-Albert’s incredible charge to speak about the injustices that we see.
I’ve since been describing my work as “reproductive in/justice”, as I think much of what I do is the documenting of reproductive in/justices (at the micro, meso, & macro levels), and it is in the resistance/challenge to these that the hope & transformation of reproductive justice lives and persists.
When we witness, document and identify reproductive injustices and the conditions and structures that give rise/shape/extend/enable/persist them, we make it harder to individualise blame or make invisible the structures that give rise to these injustices. We shine a light on these injustices. Without speaking about the injustices we see in the world, we cannot forge a new way of being. It’s what shapes our imaginations of justice.
And where there is injustice, there is always resistance. Thinking through how resistance manifests - at the micro, meso, and macros levels, through community and care, through an articulation of difference, through solidarities - is, for me, where the work and hope of reproductive justice thrives: in demanding justice, in building and creating enabling conditions, and in reimagining our world.
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When I am reimagining a world of reproductive justice, when I am documenting reproductive in/justices in my work; I am building on these genealogies, on these knowledges, on the labour of these visionaries, and on these politics.
I charge you, in every invocation of reproductive in/justice, to do the same.
To reflect on how you came to know of RJ, how you’ve understood and responded to its political impetus, what it means for your praxis. To consider how you began to speak of reproductive in/justices, and whose intellectual labour and generosity you’re building on. To sketch out your own genealogy and what RJ means when you invoke it, the conditions you do it in, and what guides you.
Speak what drives you to it: it shapes your imaginations.