Dear Colleague,

For over a quarter of a century, terms such as “reproductive rights” and “sexual and reproductive health” have appeared in dozens—perhaps hundreds—of UN resolutions, despite remaining controversial due to their inextricable linkage to the issue of abortion.  In recent years, another term, “reproductive justice,” has started to appear, not in negotiated resolutions, but in reports generated by UN agencies like the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).  Major abortion groups and the international feminist establishment, including the governments that support UN agencies, have re-aligned themselves along the contours of this notion of “reproductive justice.”  The term is not actually new; it emerged decades ago in the United States, coined by black feminists calling attention to what they saw as the shortcomings of the majority-white feminist “pro-choice” movement. 

This Definitions explores the origins of “reproductive justice” in the U.S., how it is being promoted in the international context, how it relates to abortion, and why it ultimately is a fatally flawed framework for international policymaking.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.
Director of Research

Black feminists coined the term “reproductive justice” in the 1990s as a merging of the concepts of “reproductive rights” and “social justice.”  The twelve black women who coined the phrase were dismayed at the state of the national abortion debate.  As one of the twelve women, Loretta Ross, wrote in the book Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, she and the other women “questioned the primacy of abortion, but not its necessity.”  To them, abortion was a “crucial resource,” but so were employment, education, and health care, and that the choice to be a mother or not hinged on other issues including “economics, immigration, and incarceration.”  Read more >>>