I began writing Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation in the summer of 2017. At the time, I was leading the reproductive health, rights, and justice project at the National LGBTQ Task Force,1 and I was exhausted by the past six months of assaults by the new Trump administration. As someone who graduated from law school during the Great Recession, and who began my professional legal career during the height of the Obama administration, up until 2017 my work had mainly focused on challenging my allies and the administration to do better and create progressive policies for people of color, queer communities, women, and poor folks. On January 20, 2017, my work quickly shifted to primarily defending the gains that we had made in the name of social justice throughout the Obama administration and throughout the last sixty-plus-years since the 1960s civil rights movement.
I started writing this book in an effort to share the deep culture change and policy work that many folks within the Black and brown and LGBTQIA+ community were leading—in collaboration with so many advocates in the reproductive health, rights, and justice space—despite the immense losses we were facing during the Trump regime. I also wrote this book to remind us, the advocates, that transformational movement work itself outlasts presidential administrations. Yes, our work often shifts focuses; nevertheless, it continues to exist and evolve. I also began writing this book when abortion was still a constitutional right, though for many women and femmes of color, gender-nonconforming folks, and transgender individuals, Roe v. Wade was not enough because the decision itself did not ensure access to abortion. Thus, for too many, abortion was not a reality even in 2017.
As I fast-forward to the summer of 2024, I’m struck that so much has changed—we no longer have the constitutional right to abortion in the United States due to the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization2 decision—yet so much has remained the same, as Black and brown reproductive justice leaders are still advocating for intersectional solutions to reproductive health issues while we raise our own families, support our communities, and grieve systemic violence and oppression.3
For me personally, since 2017, I became a professor of sociology and criminology at Howard University where I now teach a course on “reproductive justice, health, and social activism.” However, the biggest change in my life is that I became a mom to a beautiful boy. My son has transformed my world, my orientation to movement making, and has reminded me why queering reproductive justice as a movement-building framework is so important: it is a direct call to shift power, change systems and institutions, and demand that progressive movements do the work to actually center the needs of those most impacted by policies and practices. In the world of reproductive health, that includes the need to center Black and brown queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming folks, particularly those who are experiencing poverty, incarceration, and those who are otherwise negatively system impacted. In the world of LGBTQIA+ rights, that call means we must include reproductive health and access to the praxis of policy priorities and movement making. As a Black queer mother, I find this work to be even more personal and powerful than ever before.
Queering reproductive justice is my life’s work. My hope for this book is to invite new readers and seasoned advocates alike to learn, grapple with, and ultimately bolster the queering reproductive justice framework and its corresponding movement. This book offers a particular queering reproductive justice framework that is both a vision and a practice that intentionally, and respectfully, builds from the reproductive justice framework first developed by SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, LGBTQIA+ scholarship, movement literatures, Black feminist storytelling, kitchen table conversations, and a few of my own experiences as a Black queer feminist movement-building policy lawyer and professor.
The ultimate goal of this book is to center a conversation that too often gets pushed to the margins of the reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights movements: the reality that we must try to ensure that movements, policy, law, and research actually center the reproductive needs, and desires, of LGBTQIA+ people, our families, and our communities.
Queering reproductive justice asks us to create more space around the collective human rights table, so that we can all partake in the feast of liberation. Reproductive justice, from which queering reproductive justice stems, emphasizes the importance of the Black feminist storytelling tradition, because all of our voices matter and we are all experts in our own experience. Thus, in order to pay homage to and live into the teachings of Black feminism, as the author of this book, I, Candace Bond-Theriault, want to provide you as readers with a proper introduction. Who I am affects my writing because writing is subjective by nature. More importantly, you and I cannot be fully in community with one another if I do not start this book by leading with a little transparency and authenticity.
From my hospital bed, I looked over at my son’s bright newborn face in his bassinet as he looked up sweetly and inquisitively at nurses taking his temperature, measuring him, and checking his vital signs. I sat in disbelief that in the last few hours, after a successful emergency C-section, I had become a mother, to a son who would share my features, my namesake, and my many mornings and midnights on this earth. I gave birth on May 12, 2021, the same day that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that certain requirements like mask mandates in response to the COVID-19 crises were no longer necessary in certain spaces.
My pregnancy experience was not perfect—I found out that I was pregnant during the height of the pandemic and spent my entire pregnancy in my house with my loving husband and dog, but without my family or friends. My son’s birth story was not perfect.4 Yet I survived,5 which, unfortunately, for a Black woman giving birth in the United States, survival is itself a huge success.6
I also recognize the many privileges that I had during my pregnancy. As a queer/bisexual woman married to a man, I have so much undeniable privilege compared with much of the queer community. I conceived easily. I had professional privilege as a lawyer who has a job with good health care benefits. I was also able to apply for and receive Washington, D.C., paid family leave. I am privileged to be a homeowner in a neighborhood that I could bring my son home to and feel safe and supported. My birth story is one of recognized privilege that far too many Black pregnant people, LGBTQIA+ folks, and those experiencing poverty do not get to experience—regardless of the reality that we all deserve to live, birth, and raise our families in safe environments, with dignity and support.
1. Queering Reproductive Justice, National LGBTQ Task Force, last accessed October 2, 2023, https://www.thetaskforce.org/programs/queering-equity/queering-reproductive-justice/; Zsea Beaumonis and Candace Bond-Theriault (eds.), “Queering Reproductive Justice: A Toolkit,” National LGBTQ Task Force, 2017, https://www.thetaskforce.org/resources/queering-reproductive-justice-a-toolkit/; Bridget (“B”) Schaaff, National LGBTQ Task Force, Queering Reproductive Justice: Mini Toolkit (Candace Bond-Theriault, ed., June 2019), https://www.thetaskforce.org/resources/queering-reproductive-justice-a-mini-toolkit/.
2. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022).
3. See Shannon Dawson, “Black and Brown Led Reproductive Justice Orgs Leading the Way for Change 50 Years after Roe v. Wade,” Newsone, January 22, 2023, https://newsone.com/playlist/black-and-brown-led-reproductive-rights-groups/item/4; “Re-imagining Policy: In Pursuit of Black Reproductive Justice,” In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice, SisterLove, Inc., last accessed October 2, 2023, https://blackrj.org/blackrjpolicyagenda/; Danielle Mangabat, “The Fight for Reproductive Justice: Pass the Women’s Health Protection Act Now,” Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, April 14, 2023, https://civilrights.org/blog/the-fight-for-reproductive-justice-pass-the-womens-health-protection-act-now/.
4. Candace Bond-Theriault, “My Emergency C-section Was an Act of Radical Mothering—Not a Failure,” Self, March 1, 2022, https://www.self.com/story/c-sections-arent-failures.
5. See “Working Together to Reduce Black Maternal Mortality,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 3, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/features/maternal-mortality/index.xhtml. (“Racial disparities exist: Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. Multiple factors contribute to these disparities, such as variation in quality healthcare, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism, and implicit bias. Social determinants of health prevent many people from racial and ethnic minority groups from having fair opportunities for economic, physical, and emotional health.”)
6. Unfortunately, there are too many examples of Black women who have died from pregnancy, birthing, or postpartum complications—many of which are preventable—to name here. Here are just a few of their stories: Zinhle Essamuah, Kayla Steinberg, and Hannah Rappleye, “Maternity Ward to Close as Family Calls for Justice in Death of Black Mother,” NBC News, September 11, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/maternity-ward-close-family-calls-justice-death-black-mother-rcna103497 (April Valentine died from a blood clot during labor); Nina Martin and Renee Montagne, “Black Mothers Keep Dying After Giving Birth. Shalon Irving’s Story Explains Why,” All Things Considered, NPR, December 7, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dying-after-giving-birth-shalon-irvings-story-explains-why (“At 36, Shalon had been part of their elite ranks—an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the pre-eminent public health institution in the U.S. Then the unthinkable happened. Three weeks after giving birth, Shalon collapsed and died from complications of high blood pressure. The researcher working to eradicate disparities in health access and outcomes had become a symbol of one of the most troublesome health disparities facing black women in the U.S. today: disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality”).
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