More on Reproductive Justice

In honor of the Reproductive Justice Week of Action that Jessica posted about last week, I wanted to share a few of my own thoughts about RJ as well.
In my day job, I work at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, whose work is based on the principles of reproductive justice (RJ). I spend a good amount of my time talking to people about reproductive justice, usually with the Latina/Latino men and women that we work with. I really like the framework because I think it provides us with a wholistic and broad-based way of bringing in all the issues we care about, through a feminist lens.
When I talk about RJ, I talk about it as being about people’s right to create the families they want to create. The work that we do as part of the reproductive justice movement is all about ensuring people’s right to create these families (when and how they want to create them), and that can encompass A LOT of different issues. For example, there are the obivous ones, like reproductive health care access. You can’t create the family you want if you don’t have access to things like birth control, abortion and prenatal care. It also encompasses things like immigration status, socioeconomic conditions, job security, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, race and discrimination, spirituality, environmental conditions.
Each of these issues has an impact on our ability to create the families we want to create, and therefore must be a part of the repro justice movement. It’s a philosophy that emphasizes the intersectionality of the many social justice issues, and I’m a big fan.