A history of Reproductive Justice’s spread across the world

Reproductive Justice is both a social justice movement and a framework for thinking about, commenting upon and analysing reproductive rights and the practical ability to exercise these rights. It is used in different ways by different activists and academics, but is generally held to embody four core values:

• the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy
• the right to have a child
• the right to not have a child
• the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments

Reproductive Justice is often spoken about today as if it were a recent innovation; a neat phrase that captures a wide range of rights, needs, and inequalities. But before the 1990’s, there were decades of organising, testimony, transnational collaboration, and political struggle which embodied some of these core values, from which the concept of Reproductive Justice arose. Its roots stretch across continents, movements, and generations, and in this two‑part podcast we will explore the movements that reproductive justice emerged from.

The History

In Part One, I (Mari Greenfield) talked to historians Maud Bracke and Carolina Topini to trace the emergence of reproductive justice from earlier feminist organising. We began our conversation by discussing the foundational definition of Reproductive Justice from Black women activists in Chicago in 1994.

With the definition we would use established, we moved backwards in time, exploring how earlier movements grappled with the same intersecting issues of race, class, colonialism, disability, and state control. Carolina and Maud described their work in documenting three key conferences in Brussels (1976), Geneva (1981), and Amsterdam (1984) which brought together women from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. These gatherings created spaces where activists could deal with the messiness and potential conflicts embodied in any idea of reproductive rights. Those at the gatherings discussed how societal discrimination affected lesbian mothers’ rights, challenged Euro‑American assumptions, articulated concerns about imperialism, population control and the intersections between disability and eugenics, and insisted that reproductive politics must be understood in relation to global inequalities. As Carolina noted, participants from the Global South placed issues such as maternal mortality, unsafe contraceptive technologies, and migrant women’s access to healthcare at the centre of debate; topics often marginalised in European feminist movements.

Our discussion highlighted how these struggles around contraception, abortion, maternal mortality, and population control were never only about individual choice. They were shaped by wider structures of inequality, from forced sterilisation in Puerto Rico and Australia to the absence of abortion rights in Italy, where illegal procedures led to ‘thousands and thousands of women either dying or suffering severe health complications’. These testimonies, shared at landmark events such as the 1976 Brussels Tribunal, reveal how lived experience was used to redefine what counted as violence, injustice, or ‘crimes against women’.

The Geographies

In Part Two, our discussion shifted from conferences that happened before the use of the term Reproductive Justice, to the international networks that formed after the three conferences, focusing on the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights (WGNRR). Emerging from the 1984 Amsterdam meeting, WGNRR evolved from a small European abortion‑rights campaign into a global organisation with leadership from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The episode traces how the network broadened its agenda — from abortion rights to maternal mortality, contraceptive safety, HIV, environmental justice, and resistance to the privatisation of healthcare.

Maud and Carolina described how WGNRR navigated the challenge of building a transnational movement without imposing a single universal agenda. Instead, the organisation devolved power to regional centres in Tanzania, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, while maintaining shared common denominators such as patriarchy, imperialism, and women’s bodily autonomy. This structure allowed activists to respond to local contexts while remaining connected to global struggles.

The episode also explores how feminist networks engaged with and critiqued the United Nations. While the UN’s Decade for Women (1975–1985) provided infrastructure, funding, and visibility, many activists challenged UN approaches that framed women’s rights primarily in terms of economic development. Yet organisations like WGNRR strategically used UN spaces to influence policy, becoming official advisers and shaping debates at major conferences such as Nairobi 1985.

The Future?

Across both episodes, a clear picture emerges: Reproductive Justice is not simply a legal or medical issue. It is a framework rooted in lived experience, shaped by global inequalities, and sustained by decades of feminist organising. It demands attention to the social, economic, political, and environmental conditions that determine whether people can truly exercise bodily autonomy. Many of the Reproductive Justice discussions we are having today – bodily autonomy, the right to have and not have children, and the right to raise children in safety – focus around the same issues that were discussed in the past, and these issues resonate across different geographies. Perhaps the learning we can take into the future is that reproductive rights are inseparable from struggles against racism, colonialism, homophobia, poverty, ableism and state control.