On the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness in the abortion rights movement

We Testify has always deeply believed that workers’ rights, Black liberation, abolition, and abortion access are quintessential to liberation for all. It is impossible to decide if, when, and how to grow your family if you fear the loss of your job when speaking out about fair wages, anti-Blackness and racism in society, or the far-reaching impacts of criminalization and policing in our communities.

The firing of workers for speaking out about anti-Blackness or toxic workplaces at any organization is detrimental to our movement and our calls for reproductive justice. It’s damaging to our workers’ lives and their families. Anti-Blackness is damaging to the workers in this movement’s spirits and souls, it destroys any hope that we have towards achieving liberation. It creates a brain drain of Black workers and their brilliance. And, as we have seen time and time again, it puts the Black workers in a precarious space of having to solve the very issue that they bear the brunt of. It breaks down trust. It dehumanizes them. It’s antithetical to reproductive justice.

We are holding the fired workers of All* Above All in our hearts and stand beside them in solidarity. And the unfortunate reality is that this is not about any one organization or one incident. This happens time and time again; some incidents are reported publicly while other incidents are ongoing or swept under the rug. We have cut ties with organizations that do not uphold our values of how we expect abortion storytellers to be treated and Blackness to be centered, both privately and publicly. We choose our partnerships carefully. We are tired of seeing the ways that Black storytellers are pushed aside in favor of non-Black storytellers to appease white guilt and moderate politics. We are tired of the ways Black colleagues are overlooked in the meetings or for opportunities. We are tired of dealing with anti-Blackness in reproductive health, rights, and justice movements.

As Renee Bracey Sherman wrote for Rewire in 2021,

“The pro-choice movement has largely avoided confronting the anti-abortion movement’s racism because that would require it to confront its own. The desire to control Black bodies and Black liberation is a function of white supremacy and it permeates every strategy and goal—even for well-meaning reproductive freedom advocates.”

This work isn’t easy. Addressing racism and anti-Blackness within our organizations is an ongoing effort that needs to be as central to our work as crafting our visions for abortion liberation. We Testify is a Black-founded, multi-racial organization with a community of multi-racial abortion storytellers, and given that, discussions of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, criminalization, and abortion stigma are core to our programming and curriculum. That’s not by chance, that’s because it’s the only way to do this work.

What’s exhausting is that anti-Blackness is more than one organization—it is the entire way the reproductive rights movement was constructed. It’s the way our movements are funded—through tax-avoidant philanthropic dollars generated by capitalism that are doled out through chosen disbursements rather than funding abortions, housing, food, schools, and other public goods for Black people and all in this nation and around the world. In order to liberate abortion, we will have to dismantle the very systems that we are benefiting from.

Abortion justice cannot be achieved while anti-Blackness is pervasive in our movement. We are committed to continuing to train abortion storytellers centering Blackness and only partnering with organizations that model our same values of centering Blackness and people who have abortions for any time and for any reason, as we always have.

In solidarity,

Renee Bracey Sherman, Nikiya Natale, Kenya Martin, Sarah Lopez, Emma Hernandez, Tunisia Tai, and Carina Reyes.

We Testify is an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions, increasing the spectrum of abortion storytellers in the public sphere, and shifting the way the media understands the context and complexity of accessing abortion care. We Testify invests in abortion storytellers to elevate their voices and expertise, particularly those of color, those from rural and conservative communities, those who are queer-identified, those with varying abilities and citizenship statuses, and those who needed support when navigating barriers while accessing abortion care.