After the Supreme Court voted to overturn the landmark Roe v Wade decision, the resulting
reproductive freedom landscape became very complex. Here in studio with us to navigate what
this historic decision means about the future of being female and reproductive health is activist
and advocate Loretta Ross. Thanks for your time today. Thanks for having me. Let's get started
with defining what is reproductive justice. Well, reproductive justice was a concept 12
black women created in Chicago in June of 1994 because we were impatient with the pro-choice,
pro-life binary that failed to adequately express what we needed from reproductive politics,
so basically we joined with the pro-choice movement in fighting for the right not to have
a child and so that includes support for abortion, birth control and abstinence, if you can hold on,
I mean abstinence, right, anyway, but because we were black women always subjected to thinking
that we have too many babies, we have to fight for the right to have the children that we want
to have and the conditions under which we want to have them so that means refusing an
unnecessary C-section or having your birth plan respected when you go to the hospital or using a
midwife or a doula if you prefer. And then the third tenet is the right to raise our children
in safe and healthy environments because neither the pro-choice nor the pro-life movement focuses
on what happens when the baby is here and so the right to have a child, not to have a child, and
to raise your children are the three core tenets of reproductive justice. All right let's pivot
a little bit and talk about what is reproductive futurism. Well reproductive futurism is a concept
I've been thinking about. I didn't coin the term reproductive futurism. That actually was coined by
the LGBTQ movement but I'm applying it to use the lens of reproductive justice to really criticize
if they were at least examine this techno-utopia that all the people who are promoting all of these
unfounded promises of what technical advancements are going to do to the human species they really
need to be examined because first of all, all of our technology like social media may be used to
upgrade present-day inequalities because we have not addressed the underlying causes of misogyny
and racism and homophobia and transphobia. And so we'll just have better means of implementing the
same old ideas if we don't pay attention but also techno-utopia over promises. They convince women,
for example, to pay twenty thousand dollars for an IVF treatment without telling them that only
13 percent of stored eggs ever result in successful pregnancies. So you've got an
87 percent failure rate for something you just spent twenty thousand dollars a try on and many
people have to try multiple times because it's not just one time you got to do it multiple times. And
they're not telling people the medical risk of egg harvesting and, the cancer concerns down the
road, right, they're not telling them. There's no full medical disclosure required of them so
they're not doing it. And so I am concerned that unrestricted reproductive technology that doesn't
have moral boundaries or guidelines will end up exploiting vulnerable and desperate people who
want to express their right to parent in the way that they want to and can be easily manipulated
and suffer mental health damages because of it. Loretta, thank you so much for your time today,
this has been a pleasure. Thank you for interviewing me, bye-bye.