“I’m working for Law Students for Reproductive Justice… It’s a pro-choice group.”  By the fifth time someone asked me what I was doing for the summer, I had become used to the follow-up question.  For the last year, since I became a member, I thought that reproductive justice was simply a nice way of saying “pro-choice.”  To paraphrase Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (and Buddhist philosophy), I quickly learned that I was pointing at the moon… focusing on the finger, and missing all of the heavenly glory.

At the Oakland intern training, we were basically put through a boot camp of reproductive rights issues, getting quick overviews of all of the different issues that we are fighting for.  We learned about the status of reproductive health care access in Africa, what the Obama administration is doing for reproductive rights issues, and what the Northern California ACLU is doing to ensure that students here are getting accurate sex education in schools.  The most important realization that I came to, however, involves the definition of reproductive justice.

The RJ movement is more than ensuring that people have access to abortions.  Reproductive justice ensures that everyone has the right to make an informed decision regarding the time and manner that they reproduce.  This definition encompasses immigrants’ rights, environmental justice, social justice, LGBTQIQ issues, abortion rights, and numerous other issues.  We don’t have reproductive justice if women don’t have the right to an abortion, but we also don’t have reproductive justice when women can’t access prenatal care.  We are fighting for both the ability to procure birth control, and the ability to access assisted reproductive technology.

As part of my internship this summer, I am working with the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative to ensure that chemicals used in nail salons are not harmful to either workers or patrons.  As I learn more about the toxins that are part of every day items, I think about how the term “reproductive justice” enables me to talk about this issue more coherently.  It represents a philosophy that I have always held dear, but have never really been able to express: the hope that everyone will be able to choose when, and if, they want to have children, without any other factors standing in the way of them exercising that right. 

-Jacob Johnson