Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (review)

On April 25, 2004, more than 1 million marchers converged on the nation's capital to make a multifaceted demand for reproductive justice. The March for Women's Lives diverged dramatically from prior prochoice marches on Washington. For the first time the principal organizers included leading women of color groups—Black Women's Health Imperative (BWHI) and National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (NLIRH)—alongside the predominantly white convening organizations, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Feminist Majority, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and National Organization for Women (NOW).

This unprecedented expansion of leadership made a difference. The event's original title, the March for Choice, was changed to reflect an expanded agenda that extended beyond abortion rights to include other issues that affect women's reproductive health and decision making, including poverty, racism, homophobia, incarceration, and domestic violence. With the help of Loretta Ross, executive director of the National Center for Human Rights Education, who served as the march's codirector, BWHI and NLIRH mobilized busloads of women of color. A broad spectrum of antipoverty, health, environmental, and civil rights organizations, including the NAACP for the first time in its history, became sponsors in record numbers.¹

The involvement of women of color in the March for Women's Lives marked the culmination of decades of struggle to forge a more inclusive reproductive rights movement in the United States that would challenge constraints on childbearing as well as barriers to abortion. Jennifer Nelson's Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement meticulously reconstructs a critical historical segment of this effort in the decades surrounding the Roe v. Wade decision, which established a constitutional right to abortion. This book is the latest in an emerging literature on the history of the reproductive rights movement that not only includes the long-neglected activism by women of color but places it at the center. (As this review goes to press, another important contribution to this literature, Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber-Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena Gutiérrez, is to be published by South End Press.)

Nelson's key thesis is that black and Latina women were essential to developing a feminist movement for reproductive freedom in the 1970s and early 1980s that extended beyond the fight for legalized abortion to encompass a broad right to reproductive control, including the right to bear children. As Nelson writes, "Black women seldom receive proper credit for the work they have done for reproductive rights. Nor have white feminists often acknowledged the extent to which black women shaped the feminist reproductive rights movement" (56). In the late 1960s feminist reproductive rights advocates centered on gaining fertility control for women by extending access to legal abortion and birth control. Nelson chronicles the dramatic transformation of this agenda over the course of the next two decades to include opposition to sterilization abuse and other forms of population control. Her first chapter describes the evolution of Redstockings, a radical feminist organization in New York City that was founded in 1967 and burst on the political scene by disrupting the first New York State legislative hearings on abortion law reform in 1969. Nelson explains how Redstockings shifted abortion activism from the movement for birth control to a central aspect of the feminist struggle for women's autonomy, including control over reproduction.

Although she criticizes Redstockings' "political blind spot" in failing to recognize the different experiences (and I would add political status) of women of color and poor women, Nelson helpfully elucidates the group's radical defense of abortion rights that distinguished it from mainstream liberal women's organizations such as NOW. In the process she brings the contentious period to life through fascinating details about Redstockings' rhetorical and organizing strategies as well as confrontations with its adversaries. Nelson's careful attention to political nuance among people who are often conveniently lumped together, from white women's liberationists and...