BLACK WOMEN AND THE FIGHT FOR REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
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Women’s History Month
Black women have long been on the frontlines in the fight for reproductive justice, bodily autonomy and maternal health equity. Their leadership and advocacy have highlighted how one’s race, gender, and class all impact access to reproductive freedom. Black women are often left out mainstream conversations around reproductive rights, and yet their contributions to the movement have built a much larger tent, bringing us closer to a society where all women have the right to make decisions about their bodies without discrimination, criminalization, and oppression.
What Is Bodily Autonomy?
Bodily autonomy is the right to make decisions about your own body, life, and future, free from coercion or violence. At its core is a simple truth: “I am the expert on my body.”
For Black women in the United States, bodily autonomy has never been guaranteed. Instead, it has been something fought for across generations in the face of extreme violence and oppression.
Defining Reproductive Justice
Reproductive Justice (RJ) offers a broader framework for understanding this fight. SisterSong defines Reproductive Justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
The National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda expands this definition, emphasizing that RJ can only be achieved, “when all women and girls have the complete economic, social, and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, our families, and our communities in all areas of our lives.”
Reproductive Justice recognizes what reproductive rights alone often fail to address: that choice without access, safety, or equity is not freedom.
A History of Reproductive Exploitation
From the beginning of this country, Black women’s bodily autonomy was systematically denied. Enslaved Black women were treated as property, with no legal protection from sexual violence, forced pregnancy, or family separation. Their bodies were exploited for labor and profit.
Medicine played a violent role in this exploitation. Enslaved women were subjected to gynecological experiments without consent or anesthesia. Physicians like James Marion Sims built the foundations of modern gynecology through experimentation on Black women’s bodies. These abuses created deep and lasting medical mistrust that continues today.
After the abolition of slavery, Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws continued to control and criminalize Black life and from the early 1900s through the 1970s, eugenics policies labeled Black women, Indigenous people, immigrants, disabled people, and poor communities as “unfit” to reproduce. Forced and coerced sterilizations occurred nationwide, often through public health systems and welfare programs. California led the nation in sterilization procedures, frequently without full knowledge or consent. Even as recently as 2006 to 2010, sterilizations occurred in California prisons, without the State’s approval.
The Belly of the Beast Documentary sheds light on this modern-day story of eugenics and reproductive injustice. Learn more here.
Redlining further determined who had access to hospitals, healthy environments, and quality care, while abuses like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study deepened mistrust in medical institutions. Today, Black women continue to carry the long-term maternal health consequences of systemic racism.
Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951)
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer and underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Her cancer cells were taken and cultured without her consent to be used in research due to their unique ability to replicate continuously. They came to be known as HeLa cells, the first immortal cell line. HeLa cells have been mass produced, they traveled into space, they were used to help develop the polio vaccine, and they made possible many other landmark scientific discoveries in genetics and the treatment of disease. The family finally reached a compensation settlement in 2023 - almost 70 years after profiting from her cells without consent.
Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977)
Fannie Lou Hamer entered surgery to remove a fibroid tumor and was given a hysterectomy without her consent. This practice was so common it was known as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” This experience is noted as one of many reasons Hamer joined the Civil Rights Movement,
The Birth of the Reproductive Justice Framework
The mainstream women’s rights movement, largely led by middle-class white women, often failed to address the realities faced by Black women, Indigenous women, women of color, immigrants, disabled people, LGBTQ+ communities, and poor women.
In 1994, twelve women, Toni M. Bond Leonard, Reverend Alma Crawford, Evelyn S. Field, Terri James, Bisola Marignay, Cassandra McConnell, Cynthia Newbille, Lorretta Ross, Elizabeth Terry, ‘Able’ Mable Thomas, Winnette P. Willis, and Kim Youngblood, gathered in Chicago to confront the limitations of the mainstream “pro-choice” movement, and formed Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice. While abortion rights were framed as a matter of individual choice, these women understood that many Black women and other marginalized communities had very few real choices at all.
Out of that gathering emerged Reproductive Justice, a human rights–based framework that intentionally centered race, class, gender, and lived experience. “It repositioned reproductive rights in a political context of intersecting race, gender, and class oppressions.” (Dorothy Roberts, 2015)
More on Reproductive Justice:
Carrying the Work Forward
The fight for bodily autonomy and Reproductive Justice is ongoing. Black women remain at the forefront, drawing strength from their ancestors and continuing to fight for the health and well-being of their communities.
A Few Black Women Leaders of Reproductive Justice History You Should Know:
Byllye Avery: Byllye Avery is a reproductive justice pioneer who founded several organizations including the Black Women’s Health Imperative, Gainesville Women’s Health Center, and Birthplace.
Dorothy Boulding Ferebee: Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee was a pioneering obstetrician and civil rights leader who expanded healthcare access for Black communities by founding the Southeast Neighborhood House, directing the Mississippi Health Project, and serving as president of the National Council of Negro Women while advancing maternal and public health equity nationally and internationally.
Dr. N. Louise Young Spencer: Dr. N. Louise Young Spencer was an early Black obstetrician-gynecologist who expanded reproductive healthcare access by opening a Baltimore medical practice and operating a Planned Parenthood health center that provided family planning services to underserved communities. “Young believed in frank and practical sex education for girls.”
Elaine Brown: Elaine Brown is a political activist who became the first and only woman to chair the Black Panther Party (1974–1977), leading major community programs such as free breakfast initiatives, legal aid services, and political organizing efforts while advancing Black liberation and prison justice activism. She brought reproductive rights to the party's platform.
Faye Wattleton: Faye Wattleton served as the first Black and youngest president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (1978–1992), transforming it into a major national healthcare and political advocacy organization to advance access to sexual health care and defend reproductive rights.
Khiara Bridges: Khiara M. Bridges is an American law professor and anthropologist who specializes in the intersection of race, class, and reproductive rights. She is the author of four books Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization (2011), The Poverty of Privacy Rights (2017), and Critical Race Theory: A Primer (2019) and Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans (releasing this March 2026).
Loretta J. Ross: Loretta J. Ross is a human rights and reproductive justice activist who co-founded SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and helped build the Reproductive Justice framework connecting reproductive rights with racial, economic, and human rights movements. “[Reproductive Justice] talks about [how] controlling the fertility of women is directly tied to attempts to control the populations of communities of color. … It’s becoming the connective framework that ties economic justice, human rights, reproductive rights, immigration rights, those kinds of things, together” (Ross 2004-2005). - Loretta J. Ross
On Black Feminism and Reproductive Justice with Loretta J Ross and Dázon Dixon Diallo — Feminist
Sources:
Black Resistance: Reproductive Justice – National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Harbinger of Health, Racial, and Gender Equity | Simmons University
How Fannie Lou Hamer Challenged a Nation | National Museum of African American History and Culture
Reproductive Justice Timeline - National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice
The ‘Father of Modern Gynecology’ Performed Shocking Experiments on Enslaved Women | HISTORY
Who was Henrietta Lacks? Here's how HeLa cells became essential to medical research | PBS News
