Reproductive Justice Icon Loretta Ross Visits Maven
The MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award winner reflects on reproductive justice, “calling in”, and her 50 years (and counting) of activism
Loretta J. Ross is not easily pigeonholed. She is a provocateur and a coalition-builder. She is a towering intellectual and a woman of the people. She is a survivor of terrible violence and a champion of human rights. Loretta is also one of the most influential Black feminists of the last half-century: she wrote the book on reproductive justice, And over the course of her long career, she has served in historic roles at the very center of the movement to bring the lived experiences of women — particularly Black women — into the public discourse. These days, Loretta is a professor at Smith College, where her course, “White Supremacy, Human Rights, and Calling In the Call Out Culture” is a paradigm-shaping bet on repairing a fragmented and increasingly divisive progressive movement.
Above all, Loretta is a model of integrity and generosity who took my cold call a few years ago and has remained someone who I have counted on to tell me the truth, hold me accountable to my values and serve my part in advancing reproductive justice. During a week in which she was no doubt inundated with requests for her time, she made space for our team at Maven for a candid and deeply inspiring conversation. (Two days before visiting us, she won the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award).
Below are excerpts of our conversation:
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When the MacArthur announcement came out, you wrote: “When you serve your people with integrity, all your dreams come true and you get your flowers while you're alive.” For people who don’t know your background, what brought you to this work? And what has sustained you for so long?
I think the most proximate cause of my activism is what I went through. I was a survivor of childhood incest and rape. An older married cousin thought it was a good idea to ply me with alcohol when he was 27 and I was 14 so that he could have sex with me, and I ended up pregnant because of that. In the 1960s, with these unplanned pregnancies due to incest, you didn't have a lot of options. The only option was to keep the baby or give the baby up for adoption. And I chose to keep my son and that meant that I ended up co-parenting with my rapist.
I was already headed to college. I was kind of precocious. I was going to major in chemistry and physics because I've got that left-brain orientation. And I had to fight all the time for the right to stay in school because the school wanted to expel me for having had a baby. I had to fight to be the only woman in my chemistry department at Howard University where they didn't actually like women in STEM back then. I had to fight to parent my child as a 16-year-old, first-year-of-college student, which complicates everything as you can imagine.
“The people who are opposed to human rights mistakenly think that they're fighting us, the human rights movement. I think they’re wrong… They’re fighting the truth.”
One thing my mother said to me that was pretty profound was that she really admired the fact that — not that I don't let success go to my head — but that I never let failure go to my heart. And I did not know that about myself. My mother pointed it out. And that really has been what sustains me, that mistakes are just opportunities to learn better and do better the next time. I will always strive to be more than what happened to me. Because at 14 I could have just described myself as a victim and never emerged out of the self hatred and the self destructiveness and all of that, that childhood sexual assault leaves as a residue. It's always been a struggle to define a Loretta Ross outside of what happened to her. I do it with joy now, but I used to do it with a lot of pain and tears.
Since I joined Maven, we’ve had conversations together where I’ve asked you about how we can build a reproductive justice competency here. As one of the people who coined the term and defined it, what is reproductive justice?
We spliced together two concepts, reproductive rights and social justice, to coin the term reproductive justice. And the reason we did that as 12 Black women in June of 1994 in Chicago was because we were very frustrated at the paralysis of the pro-choice and pro-life binary, and the way all discussion on abortion was always isolated from the social justice issues that preceded the pregnancy in a person's life. Because if a person doesn't have good healthcare, doesn't have access to affordable housing, may be economically or educationally insecure so that the pregnancy would stop them from working or finishing their education — then whenever they do become pregnant, chances are they're going to want an abortion because their life is already in chaos. And they don't need something furthering that. But if a person has good answers to those kinds of questions — ‘OK, I can tell my boss. My partner will not beat me if I tell him I'm pregnant. I can stay in school. I’ve got a bedroom to put this child in’ — if you have good answers, then people frequently turn unplanned pregnancies into wanted babies. So our frustration was that both the pro-choice and pro-life people started with the pregnancy, not what was going on in the person's life before the pregnancy happened.
Those things that are happening before pregnancy are what we call human rights issues. And so we coined the term reproductive justice to talk about three basic human rights. We overlap with the pro-choice movement and fighting for the right to use abortion or birth control and to have evidence-based sex education. But because we were Black women, we also have to fight deeply hard for the right to have the children we want to have because we had been subjected to sterilization abuse and our children are always demonized as being the reason that there’s crime and poor schools and the mortgage crisis and whatever else they want to blame us for. And then the third tenet is once you have the child, do you get to raise your child in a safe and healthy environment? And this brings us into conversation with gun violence and poor schools and the school to prison pipeline and environmental issues and tax policies and all kinds of things.
So the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent our children are the three core tenets of reproductive justice.
And then 10 years after we created the first definition in 1994, our LGBTQ partners and allies said, ‘Wait a moment, everything shouldn't just be about the womb. There should be a human right to body autonomy, gender identity, sexual pleasure,’ and so they expanded the framework. One of the things I like about reproductive justice is the capacity for expansion, because when indigenous women talk about reproductive justice, they add in sovereignty, when immigrants talk about reproductive justice, they add in citizenship rights. When disabled people talk about it, they talk about ableism. I love this elasticity, when you think about how people are challenged, to get their human rights protected.
There's been some progress since you all came together in 1994 and also some pretty significant regression. How do you think about the arc of that, the forwards and the backwards?
I tend to be an optimist. Those of us who do social justice work, we by definition believe that things can get better — otherwise our work is futile. I’d be on a beach somewhere if I didn't think we were going to win. But in more practical terms, I think that the people who are opposed to human rights mistakenly think that they're fighting us, the human rights movement. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re fighting forces way beyond their control, because they’re fighting the truth. They’re fighting evidence, like science. They’re fighting history, and they're fighting time, and I have never imagined that a group could defeat truth, evidence, history or time. As a matter of fact, those things are on our side. And so my biggest fear right now, is that with this call-out culture that we overly indulge in, that we will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. We will cannibalize each other with our political correctness, ‘wokeism’ kind of crazy stuff. When we've got truth, evidence, time and history on our side. All we have to do is not self-destruct.
Don't you just get impatient?
Oh, yeah. But I learned a long time ago that the timeline of history was not mine to command. I’m always surprised. This year we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first rape crisis center that I was the director of. Of course 50 years ago, we thought that we could end violence against women in a few years. We didn’t think it would be five decades later and we'd still be fighting. But at the same time, I did anti-apartheid work as a teenager back in the 1970s. When Nelson Mandela got released from jail and he became president of South Africa, I never foresaw that happening in my lifetime. So you just keep plodding along and accepting the incremental victories and all of a sudden acceleration starts happening, and then you get awed by the results.
“Our frustration was that both the pro-choice and pro-life people started with the pregnancy, not what was going on in the person's life before the pregnancy happened.”
One thing I say quite frequently to young people is to not imagine yourself as the entire chain of freedom, because the chain of freedom stretches back towards your ancestors and forward towards their descendants. So your job right now is to not have the chain of freedom break at your link. Be the strongest link you can be. You're not in control of what your ancestors did or what your descendants do. But you can control that attention you pay to justice right now. When the world's a mess, just grab a broom and clean where you are.
Can you tell us the story of how you came to be interested in ‘calling in’?
In 2016 when I first started noticing ‘call out culture’ I started organizing at Smith College a forum for students to talk about how it was affecting them. And in my research, I discovered a young trans man named Loan Tran, who had coined the term in 2013 when they were only 18 years old. I was kind of disappointed that I wasn’t as original as I thought I was, but it’s logical that young people had named something that they were immersed in. I started organizing students to resist the call out culture, and after COVID happened, I started offering online classes. I was able to locate Loan, and ask them to become my lead trainer for my online classes.
The class is about teaching people calling in techniques. What do you do if you've been called out? And very simply, you thank people for giving you their time and attention. Because that’s very, very precious nowadays. And then you tell them, ‘I will take what you said under consideration,’ because you're indicating that you've heard them. But you're not necessarily indicating that you agree with them. And then you turn the call out into a call in. Because you say, ‘You know while we’re at it how are you doing? I'm pretty sure you could have gotten my attention other than calling me out. So I want to know what's happening with you. Are you hurt? Are you angry? Are you feeling unheard?’ And that way you turn a call out until a call in and you go on about your day, while you consider in your own good time whether or not you deserve to be called out.
This notion is really resonating with people all around the world, and yet it seems very hard to practice for whatever reason. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that.
I have to resist the urge to call people out a dozen times a day, because I have a temper. I get outraged really easily. It's hard for me to make it through the New York Times and the Washington Post without wanting to go punch somebody. So I have to call myself in all the time. All the time. It’s an ongoing practice, over and over and over again.
But I'm quite proud of myself once I do rein in my quick temper, once I do rein in my quick judgment. I love how the growing discipline of calling myself in is working for me, because I'm uttering a lot fewer words that I regret. I'm giving myself a chance to find out more information instead of making those assumptions and quick snap judgments.
It’s a process. It’s not like once you get it done, you're forever going to get it right. It’s a process, but I so like the burnishing of my integrity that happens with that. I like myself more for calling people in than I did for calling people out.
You have been called out yourself on a few issues.
I do get in trouble sometimes, for instance on gender, because I push back at people who promote gender neutrality the same way I push back at people who promote color-blindness, because it re-victimizes the targets of the oppression. I say ‘women and pregnant people,’ but I get pushback from extremes of the trans movement. And to them I say, ‘I'm sorry. Just as I afford you the right to name who you are, I take the right for myself to name who I am.’
I want to go back to something you said, that we are at risk of snatching ‘defeat from the jaws of victory.’ Is that a real concern for you, this idea of the reproductive justice movement collapsing on itself?
I think there's a risk. I don't think that there's an inevitability about our failure. But I am concerned that we brutalize each other in the process as we fail to address our unhealed trauma. We're bleeding all over each other and that is not helpful. You have no obligation to help somebody else grow and heal, but I do strongly recommend that you attend to your own trauma. It’s a truism but hurt people hurt people.
At the same time, I’ve been to something like 70 countries around the world, and the vast majority of people I meet just want to do the right thing. They want to take care of themselves, their families, contribute to society, have a life of peace and try not to do any harm. That’s the majority of the people in the world. And so when we only talk about people who are trying to troll others or harm others we get a very skewed idea of how wonderful humanity actually is.
Now there are people that I work around, because they're the trolls. They're the people who are not operating in good faith. They profit from people's misery. And so I'm going to have a totally different strategy for them than trying to call them in. But at the same time, I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. And I give people room to grow like other people gave me room to grow and it’s a much better way to be in the world.
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What else my team is reading, considering, and building against
For readers who are looking for more Loretta Ross, I’d recommend this piece, where she describes the value of teaching young people ‘calling in’ techniques for the first time, as well as her masterful TED Talk on the subject.
A new paper in Pediatrics showed that the already shameful racial disparities in infant mortality are doubled by fertility treatments. Specifically, the authors found that Black families are impacted most (infant mortality rates were four times as high among those conceived through ART). While an analysis of the cause was beyond the scope of the paper, I believe this indicates an unmeasured difference in who is selecting into fertility care, with those at highest risk concentrated among Black, Asian, and Hispanic families. I also believe this means everyone in the fertility industry must be held accountable for health equity. Providers must root out sources of bias at the point of service. Benefits administrators must move beyond DEI statements to driving equitable health outcomes. Employers must invest in maternity alongside fertility with an awareness that many fertility services drive high-risk pregnancies.
In Fertility & Sterility, researchers took longitudinal outcomes data from NYU Langone patients who pursued pregnancy using their frozen eggs, offering a significant contribution to a glaring gap in our current understanding of the procedure. First and foremost, their data underscored that success rates for using frozen eggs are comparable to IVF generally — around 40 percent per patient. Even more significantly, they found that a patient’s age at the time of using a frozen egg did not affect the outcome one way or another; what mattered most was the age at which the patient froze their eggs, and the number they had kept in storage.
A large study in JAMA Network Open examining data from more than 500,000 people found that patients with exposure to telehealth significantly outperformed or were equivalent to those who received exclusively in-person care on 13 out of 16 medication, testing, and counseling quality measures. Notably, telehealth exposure significantly outperformed on all 11 testing (ex. blood pressure control) and counseling-based (ex. influenza vaccination) measures, suggesting that the convenience of reaching a trusted healthcare voice and the autonomy afforded by connected devices actually empower patients to take on a greater role in following through on their provider’s recommendations. It is interesting to think about this kind of democratization of care delivery; it’s a world maybe a bit less about ‘doctor’s orders’ and more about their support — or, to borrow a term from the late Dr. Paul Farmer, accompaniment.
Dr. Alex Peahl, Maven’s inaugural visiting scientist, is lead author of a new paper exploring the use of human-centered design to reimagine prenatal care for low-income Black pregnant people. In structured interviews with both patients and practitioners in prenatal care clinics in Detroit, Michigan, Dr. Peahl and her team heard that prenatal visits were often perceived as low-value by patients (said one: “I’m not going to waste my gas.”) Interviewees expressed a desire for more flexible, customizable prenatal care delivered by a team of practitioners, with a consistent ‘point person’ serving as a connector to resources within both the traditional healthcare system and the broader community.