How Not to Pimp Out Reproductive Justice: Adventures in Education, Activism, and Accountability

“So, who was your favorite speaker today?” I was asking one of the ten Oklahoma students I had arranged to join me at Hampshire College’s annual Civil Liberties and Public Policy (clpp) conference on Abortion Rights and Reproductive Freedom. It was 2010. The year before I’d brought only four young women up from Oklahoma.

“Loretta Ross.”

“Cool.” I had long admired the work and words of Loretta Ross, founder of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective. She had been the first speaker I brought to the campus of Oklahoma State University, where I was the only faculty hired to teach women’s studies. I wondered what, in particular, the student had seen in Ross. “Why?”

“Because she said ‘If I catch you pimping out reproductive justice I will hunt you down.’” The audacity of Ross’s hyperbole thrilled the student, who went on to tell me how some people use the phrase without really understanding it. Documented now by scholars culling activist declarations, the definition of reproductive justice entails a racial and class critique of the pro-choice paradigm, a broadening of the feminist movement to encompass more social justice issues, and a rededication to radical politics that demands an intersectional analysis of oppression.¹ Reproductive justice began with women-of-color activists and scholars criticizing a too-narrow focus on abortion as an individualist right supposedly secured by lobbying. The student I was talking with, however, was starting to see how the phrase reproductive justice was becoming more style than substance.

These are my reflections on how to stay true to the political and intellectual integrity of an idea called reproductive justice. It is the story of how we feminists in Oklahoma started a gathering now known as the Take Root conference, a reproductive justice event serving the conservative South Central region of America. Now in its third year, “Take Root: Red State Perspectives on Reproductive Justice” was modeled after the Civil Liberties and Public Policy annual abortion rights conference at Hampshire College (clpp), inspired by multi-issue organizing and public education exemplified by National Advocates for Pregnant Women (napw), and currently is hosted by the University of Oklahoma. But it began at Oklahoma State University (osu) a couple of years ago amid a renaissance of feminist organizing in response to an incredibly toxic confluence of antiwomen conditions and reprehensible legislative proposals.

The Need and The Fear

As detailed elsewhere, the need for a broad contextualization of reproductive issues is especially important in today’s Oklahoma.² The state’s abnormally high rates of domestic violence and teen pregnancy, its dubious distinction of being the top incarcerator (per capita) of women in the world, its abysmal lack of funds for education (ranked forty-ninth in per-pupil spending), its leading role in pioneering new types of antiabortion legislation, and its pride in being the reddest state in the nation (determined by having no county with a majority vote for Obama in 2008) culminate in a perfect conservative storm that oppresses young women.³ The state’s past includes its Indian Territory history as the stopping point of the Trail of Tears, its innovations in terrorizing black people during the Greenwood riots of 1921, and its hosting of internment camps during World War II. The state’s political heritage of leftist populism and socialism was subsumed with an apparent vengeance following the Dust Bowl, replaced by multinational corporatism and an anticommunist fervor that pervades today.

The repressed historical memory of progressive labor politics barely surfaces in class when a student asks what a Wobbly is, because he thinks his grandfather talked about that once. The not-so-repressed McCarthyism is evident in the fact that employers for the state—including Oklahoma State University, where I worked—required their employees to sign a loyalty oath.⁴ The effects of domestic violence, drug use, and incarceration come across in the veiled excuses or frank explanations that students make for why they didn’t complete an assignment. The effects of state-mandated abstinence-only education manifest in remarkable “slut-shaming” on...