Resistance and Reproductive Justice Post-Dobbs:
An Interview with Rickie Solinger

by Mary Thompson (James Madison University)

It was a pleasure to introduce Rickie Solinger at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s annual convention in Boston in March 2024. Solinger earned her Ph.D. in history from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. For many years, her work on Reproductive Justice has informed how feminists and scholars understand pregnancy, motherhood, and sex. An independent scholar, she has produced rich scholarship on the history and politics of reproduction, gender, race, and welfare in the U.S. by using a critical, intersectional lens to examine the feminist concept of choice. She is the author of Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race Before Roe v. Wade (1992, 2000), which exposes not only double-standards in attitudes about men’s and women’s sexual activity post-WWII but also those presiding over unwed, pregnant White women and women of color. Solinger has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous other volumes, the newest of which is Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade. In addition, Solinger has curated gallery exhibits and is the founding editor of the Reproductive Justice book series at the University of California Press. This interview was conducted via email.

MT: Your new edited volume Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade gathers essays that respond to the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. Your volume is impressive for many reasons, not the least of which is how quickly you and your co-editor assembled experts in activism and scholarship to address racial politics, disability, immigration, adoption, the carceral state, and religion. I am inspired—and I’m sure others are—by its timeliness and power given the disarray in healthcare that Dobbs created. About the volume, you write that “creating a platform to share all this work felt like both a service to readers and therapeutic respite for ourselves” (6). Could you discuss how the book came together? 

RS: I’d describe my motivation to put this book together this way: When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and I knew what the Supreme Court was poised to do, I felt like I could either slit my throat or I could make a book about resistance. At the same time, I was hearing lots of comments by other people outraged and frustrated by the decision. They were asking, “Where are the anti-Dobbs demonstrations in the streets? Don’t the women in Texas care about what’s happening in their state?” I instinctively knew that people were organizing all over the country.  Maybe in new ways. Maybe not in the streets. But I knew there was a tremendous amount of effective resistance going on. To prove that, I invited the brilliant sociologist Krystale Littlejohn to make a book with me—as a team we cover a lot of demographic categories—and we got to work, like mad. 

I contacted people I’d known over my many decades of work in the field of reproductive politics.  I combed the post-Roe/Dobbs-era columns of a Boston Globe reporter who was reporting vigorously on the aftermath of the Court’s decision. I scoured various media and talked to colleagues. I acted like a reporter myself, digging up information about what was happening in Kansas, in Louisiana, in Kentucky, in Oklahoma, and everywhere else. And Krystale was mining her contacts, too. We specifically asked for short pieces describing the creative visions and workable systems people were inventing all over the country to undermine, subvert, resist the impacts of Dobbs, to ensure that people could still access reproductive health care, even in the most oppositional states.  We worked quickly.  And quickly, we had an excellent, very motivated, and expressive group of writers who seriously wanted to join the project. 

MT: The expectation that the response to Dobbs would look like previous forms of resistance is interesting. I heard similar concerns about a lack of high-visibility protests—until the 2022 midterm elections, when an anticipated red wave failed to materialize, sending a message of disapproval to Republicans. What are some of the new ideas, practices and/or strategies for resistance that Fighting Mad highlights?

RS: Well, I think you’re correct that voting behavior since Dobbs makes clear that people opposed to the criminalization of abortion and coerced childbearing began organizing to get out the vote in unprecedented ways, and they have been successful. Not that voting for choice is a new tactic. But this time, a critical mass of voters, nationally, and especially in traditionally anti-abortion red states were determined to sharply interrupt the red wave many people predicted, and thus, to preserve the abortion rights that Roe had delineated. Also, the turn out in red states—Ohio, Kansas, Kentucky—to support state constitutional amendments favoring abortion access has shown that electoral politics at the state level has become a targeted tool of resistance. 

Beyond voting strategies, activists in so many states, regions, and cities have developed a raft of quick responses, figuring out ways for people to access abortion services as close to home as possible, with subsidized travel when necessary. I’m thinking of the Brigid Alliance based in New York City, that provides guidance, funding, and whatever other supports a person needs in order to travel to abortion services, focusing particularly on the needs of people who find out months into their pregnancies that the pregnancy or the fetus is not viable. I’m thinking of all the abortion-access funding organizations that have emerged, strengthened, and gathered in ever-larger numbers of donors in the past couple of years. I’m thinking of the burgeoning, wide-ranging, strategic organizing efforts to get abortion-inducing pills (that now account for more than half of abortions annually in the U.S.) to people all over the country, whether state laws permit them or not. This is what Fighting Mad documents, all these and many more strategies of resistance.

MT: Readers who are familiar with your books Wake Up Little Susie and Beggars and Choosers know that you approach pregnancy, sex, and parenthood with particular attention to power imbalances that are authored and maintained by the state. Would you explain these imbalances and why, as you noted, Roe was never enough to protect reproductive freedom?

RS: Yes, the central point of my work across the decades, both the books that I’ve written and edited, and the traveling exhibitions I’ve curated that complement and illustrate the themes of the books, is that since White settlement on the North American continent, government policies and community attitudes and practices have used the concepts of race and population to treat different groups of pregnant and mothering people differently. These concepts have relied, consistently and variously over time, on deploying racial categories to degrade different groups of people differently. For example, racialized views of reproductive identity have accorded specific kinds of reproductive value to people defined as White and reproductive valuelessness to others, both the reproducers, themselves, and the children born into these groups.

We open Fighting Mad with a section titled “Roe was Never Enough.” The section features short pieces by seven writers/activists, focusing on examples showing how legal, public policy, and service delivery regimes from 1973 (the year of the Roe decision) to 2022 (the year of the Dobbs decision), excluded targeted groups of people from reproductive healthcare and reproductive safety. The ones excluded have generally been people whose location, identity, and relative resources in effect disqualified them from access to Reproductive Justice: the right to be a parent, the right not to be a parent, the right to the resources to raise their children with dignity and safety, and the right to bodily autonomy, generally, including the right to love and reproduce with the person of their choice. 

The essays in the opening section make ultimate—comprehensive—Reproductive Justice claims for people – those who have disabilities, or who are queer, incarcerated, Indigenous, Asian, or poor White people living in Appalachia, among others. For millions of people in these and other categories, Roe was never enough. Roe never guaranteed all the kinds of access and resources that people require in order to manage their own bodies and their own lives.

This point underscores the basic fact that while abortion rights are crucial, these rights are not sufficient by themselves. In order to achieve reproductive dignity and safety, all persons must have other basic rights and resources such as the right to medical care, decent housing, environmental justice, economic justice, and educational justice. Only with these rights can individuals make what we cavalierly refer to as a choice. How can people safely make free choices about reproduction when they lack these basic human rights?

MT: Abortion rights have functioned for many Americans as an index of reproductive freedom. I can imagine some readers may think you are deprioritizing them—maybe even ceding ground to anti-abortion forces—when you say their defense is not sufficient. How/why did abortion become the focus of reproductive rights discourse and how does broadening that focus, in fact, strengthen its defense?

RS: In the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist campaigns around the world and in the United States, feminists began to revive and sharpen older demands for women’s rights, especially as some new educational and work opportunities were opening for females, clarifying what an updated agenda must include. The mainstream media paid attention—sometimes derisively—to the movement that was headed, funded, and mostly populated by White women.  The same media generally ignored feminist organizations formed and driven by women of color, such as The Third World Women’s Alliance. Instead, they featured endless treatments of misbehaving Black girls and women, the ones who got pregnant without husbands and the ones the press and many politicians called welfare queens.

The truth was that even given the treacherous chasm between the White feminist activists and the women of color feminist activists (due to long histories of the American slavery regime and both older and modern manifestations of White supremacy), all mid-century feminists across race defined ending reproductive subjugation as a key goal. How else could women assume the status of full persons, pursue the kinds of opportunities that would bring them economic security and other forms of social dignity? Being able to control one’s reproductive body was obviously a first condition. Thus, the right to abortion, so long and so consequentially, if ineffectively, criminalized, was at the center of this project, along with, for women of color, the project of stamping out sterilization abuse.

From the 1960s forward, especially after Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision that legalized contraception nationally, feminists concentrated on waging struggles for the decriminalization of abortion. It took eight years beyond Griswold to achieve that, and then almost fifty years of struggle to defend Roe, until that ruling fell in 2022. Generally, the big, White-led, abortion-rights groups defended their cause in a narrow fashion, focusing only on the abortion right, not so much on abortion access, hardly at all on sterilization abuse, and rarely on the structural obstacles to reproductive dignity, safety, and access to reproductive healthcare for millions of people; but also rarely on the broad impacts on the lives of people denied these kinds of access.

Twenty-one years after Roe, in 1994, a group of Black women, centering all these challenges, defined and articulated Reproductive Justice, at the moment when the Clinton Administration was attempting to craft a national healthcare policy that excluded reproductive healthcare for low-income women.  These Black women laid out the weaknesses of policy, practice, and access in 1994 and underscored the weakness of the governing concept of choice, the watchword of White feminists’ creed. Reproductive Justice shows how choice emphasizes the individual life and the decision-making of individuals, as if each of us in this country can make any choice we want.  Reproductive Justice-founders emphasized, in contrast, structural obstacles to real reproductive choices for so many people and the unequal impacts of those obstacles.

Since 1994—and accelerating in recent years—Reproductive Justice has become absolutely central to reproductive politics, describing what people—all people—need in order to make genuine, safe, and dignified reproductive decisions. This puts abortion rights and access in noble company: Reproductive Justice defines the right not to get pregnant and the right not to stay pregnant as an equal right to the right to be a parent and the right to live in a community that provides people with medical care, environmental safety, good schools, and all the other resources people need to raise their children. Reproductive Justice doesn’t downgrade abortion; it puts abortion in a broader and way more realistic context. The Reproductive Justice framework puts abortion in a dynamic context in which the most fundamental of human rights depend on and vitalize each other.

MT: In Fighting Mad you note the hostility of current policy and describe it as “brutal,” “harsher,” suggesting that Dobbs signals a change. At NEMLA you cited Loretta Ross’s comment, “It’s always been ‘times like these,’” suggesting that Ross does not perceive a dramatic shift between the pre-Dobbs and post-Dobbs times. Which awareness does Ross’ comment speak to/from, and (how) is this historical moment new or different?

RS: After fifty years of a significant degree of reproductive freedom for many people—for example, until the second half of 2022, every state had functioning abortion clinics—the majority on the Supreme Court determined in Dobbs that the right not to be coerced to reproduce is nobody’s right. States now have the right, which they did not have for fifty years, to force a pregnant person to give birth against their will. And even against their health and potentially against their right to live. This is new in my adult lifetime. And it is brutal. 

We know that before Roe, women’s status was conditioned and degraded by their reproductive function in racially specific ways and also according to a person’s access to economic resources.  Women had to leave school, had less education, lower-paying jobs, and fewer kinds of jobs, experienced life-defining forms of economic dependency, and faced many other constraints because they were forced to carry pregnancies and have children they may not have wanted to have. As a result, adding reproductive vulnerability to other vulnerabilities, women’s status in society was degraded and constrained.  Inevitably, women’s status-gains over the past fifty years will be challenged and harmed now. That is brutal. And, again, we must understand that abortion rights do not stand alone. Their absence will have a deforming impact on every feature of life for many people. But it’s especially important to understand that while abortion rights are necessary, they are one part of a fabric of necessary rights.

When Loretta Ross says, “It’s always been times like these,” I think she is reminding people that a person’s assessment of the current moment tends to depend on where they sit.  For people without resources, “times” have regularly and generally been brutal. As we say, “Roe was never enough.” The Reproductive Justice perspective asks us to center the reproductive life experiences of the most vulnerable people, so that, for one thing, we all understand what every single person needs access to, in order to reproduce or not with dignity and safety. And this focus underscores how reproductive control has functioned to facilitate managing and valuing different groups of people differently. I like to enumerate the resources I, a White woman, depended on having access to, in order to manage my pregnancies and my motherhood in the 1970s and 1980s. This enumeration is a way of showing what the basic needs of a fertile person amount to, then and now.

MT: In your opening address at NEMLA, you cited the title of Laura Briggs’ volume: All Politics are Reproductive Politics, which was published in the book series that you edit. Many people believe that family-making decisions are deeply personal but not political. How do reproductive politics and larger relationships of power shape and get reflected in these seemingly personal decisions?

RS: As I’ve described, the ability to have and raise children involves so many social systems.  In the presence of robust and affordable childcare provision, strong educational systems, safe neighborhoods, and other social supports, the majority of people can parent with reasonable confidence. In the absence of strong systems, they often cannot. The politics of funding these social resources—or not—associates each and all of them, including our taxation and zoning structures, with reproductive politics.

Whose children are worth supporting with well-funded schools, for example? And whose are not? The level of funding determines which children will grow up with skills adequate to obtain higher education, for example, and economic security and which children will not. As political actors make decisions about these matters, the politics of school funding becomes reproductive politics: who gives birth to children of value and who does not? Immigration politics is reproductive politics: politicians and others who wish for the United States to be a White country use immigration policy as a cudgel, making the issue of who gets born here, who becomes a citizen, and who should be excluded, based on race, religion, nationality, a facet of reproductive politics.

When poor women fall victim to systems of punishment in the United States (typically incarcerated women are of prime childbearing ages), the criminal justice system becomes an agent of population control and another feature of reproductive politics. Foreign aid, including funding to poor countries with too many people, has, since the mid-20th century, featured funding to slow or terminate the reproduction of targeted populations, (what Reproductive Justice defines as population control) both abroad and in the U.S.. Along with the international environmental movement, the carceral state blames poor populations for social ills and vulnerabilities instead of looking, for example, at the impacts of unequal distribution of social supports, corporate financial practices, the malfeasance of toxic industries, and military weapons programs that threaten and harm the present health and the future of the planet.

MT: The Reproductive Justice movement and framework for human rights arise from the historical knowledge and experiences of BIPOC women and activists. As this framework gains broader, popular momentum—along with concepts like intersectionality—why is it important to keep this historical awareness central?

RS: Ah history. Maybe I became a historian so that I could hang out in the past.  Evade the awful present. And here I am, a breathing example of the inevitable, vital connection between the present and the past. 

I wrote a book called, Pregnancy and Power: A History of Reproductive Politics in the United States (2005, 2019) in order to show that ideas about race, racially-driven subjugations, White supremacy and allied drivers have characterized the reproductive lived experiences of people on this continent since White settlers arrived in the seventeenth century. I sincerely believe that it is simply impossible to understand the present, to understand the United States, to understand, really, much of anything without understanding what came before. You might not want to have dinner with me and suffer my insistence on this subject. 

But, really, these topics—who gets to be a legitimate parent, who does not, and who decides; who gets to manage one’s own sexuality and fertility and who doesn’t; whose children are defined as valuable (affectively, economically) and whose children are not; what do the answers to these questions have to do with access to full citizenship and full personhood—are long-contested matters. Answers depend on knowing what came before now. Resistance to law and policy depends on understanding where law and policy and public attitudes came from and why we are where we are now. Without this basis, our claims are urgent but shallow.

MT: You are the founding editor of the Reproductive Justice book series at the University of California Press (https://www.ucpress.edu/series/rjnv/reproductive-justice-a-new-vision-for-the-twenty-first-century). In addition to volumes of original research, the series includes several primers for students and those who are new to Reproductive Justice. What does the genre of the primer bring to your series and why did you make it integral to the series?

RS: Readers who want to understand the domain of Reproductive Justice come from many intellectual, political, subject-area locations. We want to draw readers in by highlighting and exploring the essential connections between, say, Reproductive Justice and Disability Justice, Reproductive Justice and Environmental Justice, and so forth. So, the primers invite a deep and accessible dive into the specific and necessary connections between Reproductive Justice and its reciprocal justice-partners.

I have to say that these primers are being issued in the series more slowly than the extraordinary monographs that keep rolling out. So far, we’ve published the launching primer that Loretta Ross and I wrote together, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. A couple more terrific primers will be out within the next year or so, about youth organizing and Reproductive Justice, about abortion and Reproductive Justice, about queering Reproductive Justice, and several other topics. I’m very excited about these forthcoming books. And, I have to say, I’m also thrilled about the excellent monographs we’ve racked up so far and the ones coming up. Also, I’m looking forward to a short, consumer-friendly little publication that the University of California Press will put out next year, about the seven most important things to know about Reproductive Justice today.

MT: Thank you, Rickie, for this interview and for all the work you’ve done on behalf of women and Reproductive Justice! I’ve greatly enjoyed our conversation.

RS: Thank you, Mary. I really enjoyed talking with you too.