January 22 would be the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, had the Supreme Court not overturned it in June 2022. Here, Black women weigh in on how they're working to protect reproductive rights.
When Ohio voters secured another ballot victory for abortion rights in November, experts appeared in the media to talk about the significance of these kinds of wins in a post-Roe world. But, as they often are, many of those experts were white women, older Gen Xers and Boomers.
As a volunteer and staff member in the reproductive rights movement, I know there’s a disparity between those who are often most visible in the movement, and the people most affected by abortion bans , complications during pregnancy and childbirth, or other barriers to care. Those people are most often Black women and other women of color; trans and nonbinary folks; and young people. I also know that, behind the scenes, it is those people who are most impacted whose strategic leadership and organizing have helped secure ballot initiative victories in battleground states like Ohio, Michigan, and hopefully soon in Arizona.
So, I spoke to some of these Black women who are organizing for abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. They focus their work around reproductive justice, a Black feminist framework that centers its core values around the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments.
Below are just some of the thoughts and lessons they share to guide the work ahead.
Criminal justice reform and abortion rights are deeply connected
Chris Love is an attorney and senior advisor to Planned Parenthood of Arizona. In 2020, Love supported asking candidates endorsed by Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona not to accept money from law enforcement organizations, or to refund it if they already had.
For Love, it was simple: “If abortion becomes illegal, who is going to be arresting patients and providers? When police are put in contact with pregnant folks, especially pregnant folks of color, it is a recipe for disaster.”
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 14 states have banned nearly all abortion, according to the Guttmacher institute. Seven more states have severely limited access to it with gestational age restrictions. In total, more than 25 million women lived in states where abortion was banned or restricted as of June 2023.
These bans have had obvious consequences, but in addition to the many people who have been denied an abortion because of them, some states have criminalized providing an abortion to someone in need. This, according to the ACLU, can result in the people seeking those abortions being targeted. These bans have also resulted in highly publicized cases resulting from abortion bans, such as in the case of Kate Cox from Texas, who sought an abortion for her unviable pregnancy and was stopped by Attorney General Ken Paxton. And, Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Ohio woman, who was charged with “abuse of a corpse” after she miscarried in her bathroom, according to the New York Times. (A grand jury recently declined to criminally charge her, dismissing the case against her.)
When you consider the potential legal consequences associated with increasing abortion restrictions, criminal justice reform is inextricably linked with reproductive justice.
Mary Drummer, a digital strategist who has worked with a number of national and state reproductive rights and justice organizations, noted that abortion rights are also linked to other criminal justice issues like marijuana legalization. In her home state of Ohio, abortion rights and marijuana legalization were both measures on the ballot in 2023. Reproductive justice organizations seized the opportunity to message both to voters. “Abortion and weed are linked to the criminalization of people of color,” Drummer said. Organizers knew this strategy would particularly resonate with younger voters and communities of color.
Communities of color and young people are critical to electoral reproductive justice victories
“Michigan is the blueprint,” Shanay Watson-Whittaker, says with conviction about the power of harnessing oft-overlooked voting blocks. Watson-Whittaker is currently director of Michigan Campaigns at Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America). As part of her work there, Watson-Whittaker helped run point on outreach to communities of color, “who needed repro care the most.” Campaign materials and events were translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic, to reflect the communities that significantly make up Michigan’s racially diverse population. Using her own story of seeking abortion care, Watson-Whittaker personally recruited Black pastors throughout the state. Their endorsements were critical to securing access to and support from members of the congregations for the campaign.
Watson-Whittaker deeply understood centering the people most impacted by abortion bans in the fight to protect reproductive rights, and facilitating whatever they needed to reach out to their own communities was important to the strategy.
“I think that's why we were successful, because we sent the people who needed access to reproductive care the most,” she said. “They were our best messengers, and they gave that campaign credibility.”
The team behind the recent abortion rights win in Ohio deployed a similar strategy. The Ohio Women’s Alliance (OWA), always a Black-led reproductive justice organization, took the lead on voter of color outreach for the Ohioans United for Reproductive Freedom ballot coalition. “We were the largest field program out of the entire repro coalition,” said Jordyn Close, deputy director of OWA, on reaching out to scores of Black and brown women, nonbinary, and queer folks across the state, Close said. Close, an abortion storyteller herself, facilitated recruitment of her fellow Black and brown abortion storytellers to be featured in the coalition’s ad campaigns, and all the work seemed to pay off: Exit polls showed that 60% of female voters, 83%of Black voters, and 77% of voters under 30 voted yes on the issue.
But even with Michigan’s blueprint, it was still a fight for OWA to ensure they had the resources to reach out to voters of color and young people akin to those devoted to outreach to white voters. “There is this desire with campaigns to focus more on this unicorn of the moderate white swing voter … instead of giving our base something to turn out for,” Close said.
In Arizona, in 2024, Love believes that, despite independent voters being the largest voting block in the state, they cannot be the focus. “[Arizona] Democrats always feel the need to grab from those other groups (Republican and Independents to win),” Love said. “We cannot ignore the groups who show up to reliably vote for us every single time.”
The fight for reproductive justice is not over
Even with a handful of abortion rights ballot initiative victories across the country, the work to protect abortion access and other reproductive health care is far from over. For Watson-Whittaker, the work in Michigan continues into 2024 in the state legislature. “Our goal is to make sure all people have access to reproductive care….to eliminate barriers for those who need access the most,” Watson-Whittaker said.
“The legal access to abortion does not make it a reality for everyone,” said Close. “So, make sure to consistently support organizations that are doing practical support and abortion funding. We're seeing an increase in client requests and client needs, and we're also seeing a decrease in funding and donations.”
Drummer wants Democrats, especially on the federal level, to do even more to protect abortion access. “Republicans will barely have a majority, and they will get their stuff through,” Drummer said. “They [Democrats] could issue executive orders and other things, but they are afraid to do those things because ‘if we do them and a Republican President wins, they’ll do it too but for bad stuff.’ But listen, they’re gonna do what they wanna do, no matter what you do… do what makes your base happy and they will come out and vote for you.”
