At Least You Have Your Health: Women’s Health and Reproductive Justice

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In order to ensure that our lives are free from control and exploitation, we must ensure the health and well-being of our bodies. The regulation of women’s bodies happens in many public and private institutional and social arenas, and as reproductive justice activists we must actively incorporate a broader vision for women’s health into our organizing.

To really understand what this framework can offer, let’s look carefully at how we might answer some common questions about women’s health through a reproductive justice framework.

What is health? The first and most important element of this approach is to keep in mind the multi-faceted nature of what it means to be healthy. A measure of health is often made by assessing a woman’s physical needs. This is central and inexorable. However, reproductive justice pushes us to think more broadly by thinking about the political, cultural, economic, racial, institutional and environmental factors that pertain to bodily health. A reproductive justice based approach enables us to consider not only what illness a woman might have, but also the social factors (environmental toxins, access to preventative care, community health education, etc.) that make her more or less prone to getting sick and more or less able to afford treatment. This comprehensive approach changes the meaning of “health” rather dramatically. It no longer simply refers to whether or not a person is sick or whether or not a woman can get reproductive health care. Instead, it allows us to diagnose the factors that contribute to, or detract from, overall wellbeing, not merely for a single woman but also for her family and the community in which she lives.

What is reproductive health? A woman’s ability to control her body and its reproductive capacity is central to securing overall health. It is more than access to abortion. Including comprehensive reproductive care like abortion and contraception are the tip of a very deep iceberg. Acknowledging a history of eugenics and population control, the reproductive justice approach aims to ensure that women have all the medical and social resources they need to have children, as well as the right to control when and how they become mothers. This awareness means that we must advocate for abortion and contraception as well as:

• Maternity care, including pre- and post-natal care and infertility treatment;
• A range of birth options including midwives, doulas and alternative care providers;
• Mental health services;
• Preventative care, including but not limited to, pap-smears, vaccinations (i.e. HPV), childbirth education, and mammograms;
• Services that are ethnically and culturally competent;
• Care that is sensitive to people of all different genders and sexual orientations and addresses their unique concerns; and finally
• Ensure that any and all health care services are economically and physically accessible to women and their families.

How do we ensure health? A vision of women’s health that utilizes the reproductive justice framework calls on us to strategically consider incorporating the leadership of women of color, poor women and young women in order to determine their needs and decipher a course of action based on their lived experiences. Here are some strategic considerations:

• We must advocate for health care that is not exclusionary on the basis of race, gender, age, sexuality or citizenship. Expanding current healthcare systems will not be sufficient -- we must acknowledge and actively address these disparities.
• In order to address the depth and breadth of these disparities we must mobilize people from allied social justice and human rights organizations and think of “health” as expansively as possible.
• We must integrate this broad-based grassroots organizing into this advocacy and use it to inform our legal strategies in health care advocacy.

It is a broad brush with which reproductive justice paints a picture of women’s health. But in order to effectively ensure that our communities are viable and healthy, we must commit to a comprehensive and inclusive reproductive justice approach. I’ve only outlined a few of the key components, I look forward to a dialogue with the reproductive justice community on how to make sure our communities are safe and healthy.

Eesha Pandit is currently Director of Advocacy at Merger Watch. She is also a weekly staff writer for RH Reality Check. Recently, Eesha served as Associate Director of Programs at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, and has also worked with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and Amnesty International USA's Women's Rights Program. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Chicago.