The Past, Present, and Futures of Reproductive Justice

Reproductive justice, a framework coined by 12 Black women in 1994, names the human right to have a child, not have a child, raise children in safe and healthy environments, and live with bodily autonomy and sexual freedom. The convening builds on this legacy by centering reproductive justice futurisms, which uses Black feminist theories of reproductive science and technology to resist techno-eugenics and imagine futures where those most targeted by structural harm are centered as architects of change.

That matters for philanthropy.

Too often, funders treat universities and grassroots movements as separate worlds: one produces knowledge, the other produces action. The Reproductive Justice Futurisms Think Tank showed what becomes possible when that divide is intentionally bridged. Universities can provide convening power, archives, research infrastructure, student engagement, and public legitimacy. Grassroots movements bring lived expertise, community knowledge, strategic urgency, political clarity, and accountability to those most affected. When philanthropy supports the bridge between them, it does more than fund a program. It invests in a knowledge ecosystems that shape generations and drive lasting impact.

This is especially important in health equity and reproductive justice work, where the stakes are not abstract but remain matters of life and death. Decisions about reproductive technologies, fertility care, abortion access, public health funding, maternal health, disability rights, immigration enforcement, and data surveillance shape who is deemed worthy of care, safety, parenthood, and deserving of a future.

The Think Tank’s Sankofa framework—looking backward to move forward—offered a powerful model. Participants asked: What futures are we imagining? What pasts and legacies can we build upon? How will we get there? What challenges and opportunities are we facing? These are not only academic questions. They are funding questions, policy questions, and leadership questions.

Lessons the Reproductive Justice Think Tank Offers for Philanthropy:

1. Social change requires more than rapid-response funding. It requires long-term investment in spaces where analysis, strategy, healing, and imagination can happen together. The convening reflects a Black feminist understanding that knowledge production is not only what happens in peer-reviewed journals or policy briefs. It also happens in story circles, student panels, archives, labs, community organizations, cultural work, and embodied practices of care
2. Funders need to not only support outputs, but also conditions. Funders should ask: Are we supporting the people who build the relationships? Are we funding the coordination, facilitation, care work, student labor, documentation, accessibility, and dissemination required to move ideas into practice? Are we investing in Black women’s leadership only when crisis is visible, or are we resourcing the infrastructures that make crisis less inevitable?
3. Another lesson is that Black women’s leadership is most transformative when it is not isolated. The Think Tank modeled leadership as collective and intergenerational. Ross and Jolly opened the gathering by naming the need to “future-proof” reproductive justice against neo-eugenic and pronatalist movements. The program then moved across generations, disciplines, and sectors, from movement elders to students and emerging leaders. This is the opposite of the leadership model that expects one charismatic individual to carry an entire movement. It is leadership as infrastructure: shared, distributed, mentored, documented, and sustained.

For funders, the takeaway is clear. If philanthropy wants to support reproductive justice, health equity, and democratic futures, it must fund the bridges. It must invest in Black women-led spaces that connect universities to communities, research to organizing, archives to action, and imagination to policy.

The question is not only how to respond to reproductive injustice after harm occurs. The question is how to build the worlds where fewer people are forced to survive it. Where we can collectively thrive.

Black women leaders are already doing that work. Philanthropy’s task is to resource it with the seriousness, trust, and long-term commitment it deserves.