Throughout the decades-long attacks on reproductive rights in the United States, two large organizations have emerged as nationally known champions—Planned Parenthood, known primarily as a target of right-wing ire and occasional violence; and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
These giants have national and regional offices and rake in millions in donations, and although the work they do is integral to the public-facing fight for abortion rights, they often overshadow networks of smaller groups that do equally important work at the grassroots level.
This new generation of reproductive justice groups aims to represent those too often overlooked by the large mainstream organizations: women of color and poor women in the conservative Southeast.
Check out three of the repro movement’s brightest stars below:
SisterSong
Founded in 1997, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective was created by women from some of the United States’ most underrepresented minorities: Native Americans, Latinas, African Americans and Asian Americans.
Rather than expecting large organizations to speak for them, SisterSong’s founders “recognized that we have the right and responsibility to represent ourselves and our communities, and the equally compelling need to advance the perspectives and needs of women of color.”
Like other groups whose focus is wider than simply securing abortion rights, SisterSong—which reported $2.5 million in revenue in 2017—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.”
SisterSong traces its lineage back to a 1994 declaration by a group of Black women who named themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice—the first group ever to use the term “reproductive justice” formally. Their work centers women of color and LGBTQ people, as well, both of whom have been traditionally left out of the mainstream reproductive rights conversation.
Headquartered in Atlanta with funding from groups like the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ms. Foundation for Women, one of the group’s primary objectives is to make reproductive justice “a household term.” Part of this work includes connecting lesser-known advocates with media contacts and partnering with larger groups to train them to better serve the movement’s most marginalized voices.
Reproaction
One of the most promising organizations in the reproductive justice scene happens to be one of the newest.
Founded in 2015 under the NEO Philanthropy donor collaborative, Reproaction puts abortion front and center in its reproductive justice vision, stating in its mission that it aims to “empower and inspire the reproductive rights movement and the broader progressive community to openly and enthusiastically stand up for abortion rights.”
Along with its goal to get progressives to stop “minimizing and shaming” abortion, the group also pushes for accountability from the so-called “pro-life” movement by noting the many ways it hurts the United States.
In that vein, one of Reproaction’s most recent campaigns details the ways “Big Pro-Life” is making the COVID-19 pandemic worse, noting that leaders in that community urge followers to throw their masks away and are taking group trips. The campaign—an example of the type of social media-savvy work the group does—includes an informational video and petition.
With its all-remote team, Reproaction operates nationally and has state-specific campaigns in D.C., Virginia, Missouri and Wisconsin. It counts the Ms. Foundation for Women as a sponsoring donor.
National Network of Abortion Funds
Founded in 1994, the National Network of Abortion Funds does exactly what its name suggests: helps raise money so that people can afford to get abortions.
By centering the actual people who need help accessing abortions, NNAF approaches its organizing “at the intersections of racial, economic and reproductive justice”—meaning that instead of making abortion a legislative issue, it makes it a human rights issue.
While mainstream groups have focused large amounts of money and resources on upholding Roe v. Wade, the NNAF acknowledges openly that the rights granted by the seminal Supreme Court hearing have “never been a promise to actual abortion access” because poorer women may not have the money or insurance to attain an abortion—and that’s if they even have a clinic that performs them nearby.
It is also much bolder in calling out “a national philanthropic abortion funding strategy that has inadvertently created compounding barriers and replicated the bureaucracy people experience when trying to access health care systems.”
Acknowledging that local abortion funds have worked around the murky landscape of abortion access “for many decades,” NNAF—which reported $5.4 million in revenue in 2017—has in recent years shifted its organizing focus to a world in which Roe is overturned, calling for “a radical change in logistics, structure, and funding strategy to ensure abortion care.”
This restructuring, the NNAF notes, will only be achieved by putting the power into the hands of local advocates and funds—which is exactly what they do as a semi-decentralized network of funds.
