Reproductive Justice Glossary

As we continue to talk, organize, and build power, it’s helpful to have a shared vocabulary. We’ve pulled together a series of working definitions curated from our community that we’ll continue to evolve.

Whenever we embark on a project like this, we keep in mind that words, like the people who use them, are imperfect, ever-evolving, and powerful. Words both fail and help define us. What we’ve outlined here is not the end all be all, but a jumping off point for a conversation that we hope continues forever into our feminist future.

Reproductive Justice

Reproductive Justice (RJ) encompasses not just pregnancy and birth (and, of course, the power to plan and continue or terminate a pregnancy), but recognizes the intersections between housing, schools, financial security, and building safe and thriving communities for our families. Yes, abortion is a part of it and reproductive justice organizing blends bodily autonomy with economic, environmental, racial, and gender justice.

SisterSong, a leader in the Reproductive Justice movement, defines RJ as, “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

Reproductive Rights

Reproductive rights focus on the legal framework that codifies one’s ability to determine when and whether to have children - this includes sex education, access to birth control, abortion, and healthcare before, during, and after pregnancy.

Abortion Access Rights

Instead of looking at the legality of whether or not a person has the right to an abortion, abortion access looks more deeply at the practicality. For example, are there operating abortion clinics close by? Do you need access to transportation?

Are you able to take time off of work? Can you afford the procedure or the medications you need? Discriminatory bans, like the Hyde Amendment which prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion services, makes abortion that much harder to access for people who are on state-supported insurance like Medicaid.

Gender

Gender is about how a person identifies and stretches far beyond the binary of male and female. Gender identity does not need to align with physical anatomy and can change and evolve over time. For example, this is part of why we use the term “birthing people” or “pregnant people” as folks across the gender spectrum with uteruses should be able to choose to be pregnant or not.

Sex (Assigned at Birth)

Sex is more focused on the anatomy or chromosomes of a person than how they identify. For example, some people ask a pregnant person if they know the sex of their baby - not the gender- because that is something the baby will figure out as they grow up. Check out Trans Student Educational Resources for more helpful definitions (transstudent.org).

Birth Control

Birth control in its various forms like condoms, the pill, IUDs, implants, etc. (and please note that not all birth control is created equal) provides people with the ability to have some degree of control over whether or not pregnancy is a possible outcome of sex. Birth control is a way to exercise bodily autonomy.

Healthcare

Abortion is healthcare. Healthcare is made up of services and systems that support our bodies to be the happiest, healthiest, and whole versions of ourselves.

Eugenics

Lots of reproductive “health” has its roots in racist and ableist eugenics philosophies which believe it is possible to “improve the race” and society by controlling who could and couldn’t reproduce; particularly people of color, Indigenous folks, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ people.

Transmisogyny

Perhaps unsurprisingly, transmisogyny describes the coming together of transphobia and misogyny creating a culture that devalues transwomen and makes their experience particularly dangerous.

Patriarchy

Something to be smashed ASAP. A system in which power runs directly to and from cisgendered men.

Privilege

Privilege is all sorts of stuff you have access to - networks, opportunities, resources, jobs, schooling, nationality, etc, that you didn’t earn. There are lots of different layers to, and kinds of, privilege.

Rematriate

Our bodies are our original homes. Land is our secondary home. Rematriate is a word generally used in the context of “rematriate the land”. It is generally understood as “give back.” Perhaps more than that, rematriation is about the process of decolonizing, restoring the sacred relationships between Indigenous people and their ancestral land, and transforming towards our shared future.

Bodily Autonomy

Bodily autonomy means having the agency to decide what you do with your own body in all manner of forms. It includes being able to decide if and when you would like to be pregnant, how you express your gender identity, who you love, and how you create your family.

Intersectional

Intersectionality, coined by legal professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, was originally used as “a prism to bring to light dynamics within discrimination law that weren’t being appreciated by the courts” and so much of our culture. The word has since evolved to describe the taking into account how our intersecting identities (as a Black woman, as a queer Latine, as a sexual assault survivor, etc) impact our lived experiences and our needs as we pursue our feminist future.