Loretta Ross

Reproductive Justice as Human Rights

Wednesday April 12

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm MDT

Virtual Event Please click here to register. 

Reproductive Justice moves beyond choice and access to abortion. The term was coined by African American women, including Ross, in 1994, following the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. It is a broader term that uses a human rights framework and also looks at reproductive oppression, sterilization abuse, immigration restrictions, gun culture, rape culture, the prison-to-school pipeline, etc. This presentation covers all aspects of Reproductive Justice which is  becoming the primary framework new voices in the movement are using to move beyond the paralyzing debates of abortion politics.

Loretta Ross is an award-winning, nationally-recognized expert on racism and racial justice, women's rights, and human rights. Her work emphasizes the intersectionality of social justice issues and how intersectionality can fuel transformation. Ross is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow and associate professor at Smith College (Northampton, MA) in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, teaching courses on white supremacy, race and culture in America, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture.

She was a co-founder and the National Coordinator, from 2005 to 2012, of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a network of women of color and allied organizations that organize women of color in the reproductive justice movement. Loretta has also co-written three books on reproductive justice. Her current book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture, is forthcoming in 2021.

Ross appears regularly in major media outlets about the issues of our day. She was recently featured in a New York Times piece, "What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In?"

Ross is a rape survivor, was forced to raise a child born of incest, and is a survivor of sterilization abuse. She is a model of how to survive and thrive despite the traumas that disproportionately affect low-income women of color. She is a nationally-recognized trainer on using the transformative power of Reproductive Justice to build a Human Rights movement that includes everyone.

Ross serves as a consultant for Smith College, collecting oral histories of feminists of color for the Sophia Smith Collection which also contains her personal archives.