American Dreams: Reproductive Justice
A podcast on how our systems make it dangerous for women from to HAVE children
In the spring of 2022, Erika Washington, executive director of Make It Work Nevada, talked to me about doing a podcast on Reproductive Justice.
Reproductive Justice (and I am capitalizing this here, contrary to AP style) is something I had heard about. Glancingly. Adjacent to medical racism. And maternal mortality. And abortion.
But as Dr. Toni Bond put it in our first episode - which is attached below - Reproductive Justice is different from Reproductive Rights - which is the term we normally use to refer to abortion.
Reproductive Justice has four tenets:
The right to have a child - safely (think Serena Williams)
The right to not have a child
The right to raise a child in a safe and healthy environment
The right to sexual health and bodily autonomy
Within those four tenets are so much about how medical systems fail women and pregnant capable people (trans men, essentially), how society values fetuses and babies over the people who give birth, how safe and healthy living environments - including schools - are few and far between.
While we were making this podcast, Erika talked to me about master planned communities - which we have a lot of in Vegas. Gated communities. Areas like Green Valley and Anthem and parts of Summerlin, which are planned out with parks and sidewalks and beautiful scenery.
“You have everything you can possibly need. All the resources are there,” Erika says of these highly prized and expensive areas of town.
“But,” she continues, “I think the communities where there is nothing, that is master planned as well. You don’t need to have a grocery store over here, but you can have four liquor stores and five fast food restaurants. All on the same street.”
Essentially Reproductive Justice is a framework for talking about justice. Examining how Reproductive Justice works - and how it doesn’t work - gives us a kind of report card, if you will, on how our society is doing.
I am immensely proud of this podcast. I interviewed over 40 people, in so many Reproductive Justice and maternal health spaces. Erika and I also talked to two founders of the movement - Toni Bond and Loretta Ross, who just won a MacArthur Genius Grant for her body of work in this and other pro-women areas.
The first two episodes are below:
Episode 1: The Birth of the Movement explores how 12 women came together in 1994 out of exasperation with the Clinton health plan to create a framework for centering health care for women. We also lay out in this episode what Reproductive Justice is.
Episode 2: Reproductive INjustice, where we go back to history, how Black women were experimented on to create many of the procedures doctors currently use, and how racism endures in the medical system. We also talk to Wanda Irving, who lost her daughter, Shalon - a CDC researcher in maternal mortality - three weeks after Shalon gave birth, because her post-partum doctor ignored her hypertension. The interview with Wanda is riveting. And heartbreaking.
As we note in the podcast, Black women are three times as likely to die during or after pregnancy than any other group. And most pregnancy-related deaths occur AFTER someone gives birth.
This graph - which is based on findings from the CDC - shows the percentage of women in different ethnic groups who have pregnancy-related deaths. The numbers on the bottom, which I added, note the percent of deaths relative to population. These numbers in comparison are pretty stark.
Give It a Listen
These two podcasts are each about 35 minutes each. You can listen to them via this page, or you can listen on most podcast apps. (We are still waiting for Apple, but it is prominent on Spotify and Google Play.) Or here at Make It Work Nevada.
You can also listen to them at 7am every Sunday morning on KUNV radio, 91.5.
I will post the next two podcasts in two weeks. And I look forward to your feedback.
In the meantime, I have so many tabs open in my Scrivener software of issues I have wanted to write about, which I now have time again to tackle. The January 6 committee and how it has been reported. How authoritarianism and familial abuse are related. What we never knew or perhaps have forgotten about Trump’s presidency. And I want to share with you cross-posts of other Substackers who are writing about the same topics I write about, but from a different industry perspective.
So you will start seeing You’re Overthinking It popping up regularly in your inbox again.
In the meantime, listen and enjoy American Dreams: Reproductive Justice.