From navigating parental notification laws to being under state supervision, Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds and co-founder of Access Reproductive Care Southeast (ARC), shares with Rafa Kidvai the various factors that can make accessing abortion care difficult and how abortion funds can help. Oriaku discusses their mission to shift attitudes around abortion in the South and what organizers in that region can teach others in the fight for reproductive justice.
Visit Repro Legal Defense Fund to learn more. Follow Oriaku on Twitter @Oreawku.
If you have questions about your legal rights or access to abortion, go to the Repro Legal Helpline or call 844-868-2812. If you are being criminalized for something that happened during a pregnancy, go to reprolegaldefensefund.org.
Rafa Kidvai: This is No Body Criminalized: How the State Controls Our Bodies, Families, and Communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. On our podcast we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. Sister Song, a reproductive justice collective led by women of color, defines reproductive justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate this shared commitment throughout our interviews. Because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create.
Our guest today is Oriaku Njoku. As the executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds and co-founder of Access Reproductive Care Southeast, Oriaku's work focuses on community care as a pathway to abortion access and achieving reproductive justice. Her organization navigated the limitations of Roe v. Wade even before the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion.
Oriaku Njoku: It's easy to catastrophize the situation that we're in, do like, "Oh my God, we don't have any rights. Why should we even be engaged?" But this is a moment within our movement and this moment is not going to be the thing that brings us down.
Kidvai: Oriaku and I discuss how Roe was never enough and why she's encouraging organizations and repro justice activists to think differently in the fight for safe abortion access.
Welcome to No Body Criminalized, Oriaku. It's such an honor to have you here.
Njoku: Thank you for having me, Rafa.
Kidvai: I guess for people who aren't really familiar with what an abortion fund is, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of support that your member funds provide?
Njoku: Yeah. Each of our member funds are all autonomous organizations, meaning that you could do targeted care and care that makes sense in the state or region or city or town that you live in. So we have abortion funds who really do the work around providing that financial and logistical support, helping folks in the community navigate around various economic injustices like insurance bans or low wages or lack of paid time off and unaffordable childcare that make abortions feel unaffordable or make them unaffordable. Abortion funds also do work around supporting callers, where the people in community who call their phone, they either have health lines, hotlines, however one you want to call it, but as folks reach out to abortion funds, they're working together as a network to really support callers in traveling across regions now with the overturn of Roe, which essentially has made abortion illegal in about half the country.
Kidvai: That was my next question, which is how has your work changed after the evisceration of Roe?
Njoku: Oh my goodness. Before I got into this position as the ED of the National Network of Abortion Funds, I was a co-founder and the executive director of Access Reproductive Care Southeast, which ARC Southeast is a regional abortion fund working in six states in the southeast. So the idea of what a post-Roe reality would be like was actually our lived experience every day. So we're working in states that are increasingly more difficult to access abortions. Every year there was some TRAP law or targeted regulation of abortion providers that made abortions even less accessible to folks, restrictions on the types of abortions that you can do, and that's something that we were able to tell our partners like, "Yeah, we've been doing this in incredibly hostile legal and political climates." The beautiful thing is that our network feels like it's gotten stronger as far as the relationship with our funds, but it has not been easy. Working in the political climate that we're in right now and the legal climate that it varies from state to state-
Kidvai: The rollercoaster.
Njoku: So it is. It's an emotional rollercoaster. It is this mental rollercoaster. It is something even spiritually for a lot of folks that you're like, "Wow, the ups and downs." It takes so much to really embody reproductive justice values and put it into action in the way that you choose to do the work. So when you feel like you've got to win and then the law tells you otherwise. And to be honest, regardless of what environment that we're working in, people are still going to have abortions. And even with or without the legal rights to abortion, which is what Roe did for us, that never guaranteed that abortions were going to be accessible or available or even generally accepted by the public in a way that we wouldn't keep having various levels of reproductive oppression that we're having to overcome literally every single day.
Kidvai: It sounds like a real task to take on the piece of creating culture shift around abortion and right now we're in a moment of extreme stigma and I think the culture feels even harder to shift.
Njoku: Yes, and that's one of the things where as a movement, a lot of the focus is on the legality, the rights, the rights. And I'm like, "Y'all, we cannot keep doing the same thing in the same way and expect different results. It's literally the definition of insanity." So it's like how do we actually show up and do this work differently? We know what the work is, but the something different is how we're doing the work and what is the framework or the lens that we're using to do the work. So I feel like it's an opportunity, but it is also an adjustment.
Kidvai: I think one of the pieces that you said earlier that resonated with me was this piece about how you were living a post-Roe reality anyway. I think there's a way in which the movement talks about the South with extreme paternalism, and instead we should really be looking to organizing there to learn how to push back, how to center our communities. We have experts that we should be listening to. I would love to hear a little bit about what you think the fight for reproductive justice in the South shows us across the country in terms of what we should be doing or how we should be organizing.
Njoku: Yes. I love this question because it's important to note too what we're talking about when we're saying reproductive justice. Something I've noticed over the years in doing this work is that there's been this whitewashing of reproductive justice, this co-opting of reproductive justice in a way that it has lost the radical and bold nature of what the 12 founding mothers of reproductive justice intended when they decided to coin that phrase. When we're talking about reproductive justice, it's really acknowledging the human right to bodily autonomy. Also, whether to be a parent, not to be a parent, raise your children or your families in safe and sustainable communities. This is all part of it.
Talking about this work with a reproductive justice lens is inherently intersectional, meaning you can't just think about choice or abortion on this choice binary. It really is what are all the things that impact the choices that we make every day because as Audre Lorde says, we do not live single issue lives. And so thinking about how race and gender and the economy and your zip code and your access to food and global warming or climate change, all of these things have an impact on why people make the choices that they make.
So when thinking about what is happening in the South, first of all, the South is beautiful, and the South is a place where there have been so many movements, whether we're talking about the civil rights movement, workers movements, so many things have come from here. And I think the places where we are able to have these really great wins and success is when our groups are working together within reproductive health rights and justice movements using the reproductive justice framework or lens to guide the way the work is happening. Meaning that we're able to make connections with our work and other work that is happening outside of the repro movement.
So working with folks who are doing Fight for $15, working with folks who are doing things around childcare, working with people who are doing work around Medicaid expansion and knowing that a majority of the South does not have Medicaid expansion, which means that access to healthcare, including abortion, can be criminalized, can be inaccessible, even with insurance that is here from the government. It's like the determination, the planning, the working with people, not working for people because we have acknowledged definitely in the South, that this is for us. We live here too. The activists are like, "We want it for us and we want it for everyone in our community."
Kidvai: Absolutely. You also said this piece about how caught up we've been in this conversation about legality and we know that we can't rely on the state or on courts to really help us achieve liberation. That's not what they're there for. That's not what they were set up to do. And I'm wondering how important is it to have organizations like NNAF, like ARC Southeast to help people navigate the process when you can't really rely on the government to make access a reality?
Njoku: That is one of the main things. We talk about funding abortion and building power. But when we get to the reason why abortion funds even exist, our members exist because it's essentially this bridging a gap between what it means to have abortion access and the concept of abortion access in reality. So what we think it is and what it is in real life. And what we're seeing is that when abortion funds are essentially a form of mutual aid, but when we talk about mutual aid, we're talking about this really beautiful history of organizations that are coming together to show up and show out for their communities, meaning that we're doing this work to make sure that the material conditions of folks needing abortions are being met. So if you think of orgs like the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, we've got doulas, community midwives, folks have been always working together to make sure the needs of their communities are being met, when, where and how they need it.
And that is because we also live in a country that is rooted in white supremacy and cis heteropatriarchy, and those systems of oppression, like the systemic racism is working, it's doing its job. And so for us to show up to be like, "There has to be another way." We cannot think about building a new movement or building this next iteration of our movement if we're still thinking about it in the confines of white supremacy and patriarchy. And so abortion funds that are really taking on the reproductive justice framework and using that to guide the way that they do the work, it really not only calls for policy changes, but it's actually transforming policies, transforming the ways that we think about what policy means.
There are a lot of ways that I feel like abortion funds are showing and encouraging folks not just the work, but doing the work differently in a way that allows people, regardless of where you're from or where you live, to be able to participate in meaningful ways. Because we talk to thousands of people every day that are trying to access abortions, the beautiful thing about it is we're touching people at so many different points in so many different places, and even meeting someone with that who's offering you safe and compassionate care, sometimes we're like, "Oh, this is what we do." But that can change something that's traditionally been transactional into a really transformative experience for a lot of people.
Kidvai: And not only are you doing this now, you've obviously been doing this. I imagine in the wake of Dobbs, you had a lot of people reaching out, wanting to start up new stuff. Do you have anything you want to say as to folks who listen and are like, "Well, I want to start something."?
Njoku: Yeah, I would say that there is this abundance of opportunities and possibilities of what can happen. There are nearly 100 abortion funds in this country, meaning that there's just about an abortion fund in almost every single state. There are people on the ground that are doing this, they've been doing this work, and they're doing it in a safe way. I've heard folks be like, "Yeah, I'll just open up my house, people can sleep on my futon." And I'm like, "So you're wanting a young Black woman to travel from Louisiana to New York to sleep on your couch and not know you, and you not know anything about them and not know what it took for them to get there?" And you're like coming from the savior complex.
This is one of those moments where it's like, yes, we love people to stand in solidarity, but we actually need co-conspirators to make the beautiful work that has been already happening to help us take that to the next level. So I would say, yeah, do your work, do your research, do a little Googling and seek out the experts that are in your neighborhood, in your state. And honestly, it'll blow your mind.
Kidvai: I feel like do your work so you can do the work is a very good title for the podcast episode.
Njoku: I mean, it's not a joke. It's like, y'all, this is not going back to where we had Roe. We know Roe wasn't enough. That was never enough. Abortion funds have been around for 30 years. That was 20 years after Roe. And there are abortion funds, like Our Justice in Minnesota who've been around since before Roe. And it's not like we're giving up. It's just like, okay, that system has done that thing, but in this future, there's no place for this current system. So how do we restructure? How do we do that work? So it means doing your work, doing your research.
Kidvai: I love that. I think on the conversation about legality, I have one more question, which is that we have states like Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, where abortion access has been dwindling for decades, and then the conversation has really been about the legal battles and it's not really about the impact. What does dwindling abortion access mean for individuals, for communities?
Njoku: An example is that in 2019, the Georgia legislature introduced a six-week ban, which is essentially two weeks after you're missed period, you have those two weeks to decide whether or not you want to have an abortion in the state. I don't think people understand when they're like, "Six weeks, you have six weeks.", I'm like, "No, no, no. You've missed your period. You realize you've missed your period and then you have two weeks." It's effectively making abortion illegal or inaccessible within the state. So one of the things that ended up happening is that Atlanta is sort of like a Hollywood junior right now. There's a huge filming industry that's happening here, and so there were so many producers movies that are like, "Pull out. Pull out of Georgia, let's leave. We're not standing for this."
By y'all divesting from Georgia because you want to not be in a state that has a really harsh abortion ban, it's like you're then not thinking about the people who are providing food service, who are cleaning up your sets, who are providing hair and makeup and costume design and all of the other pieces that give people a living wage in order to be able to live their lives in the ways that they want to. By you deciding to leave that also is going to make abortions even less accessible because now people are talking about, "I don't have the money, I don't have the time." And I was like, if anything, we need y'all to work with us in order to really show what is going on and show your commitment to Georgians, not the law, but your commitment to the actual people.
The other thing too is if you are looking at the southeast, Georgia at the time was the abortion hub of the South. So we're talking about folks who are traveling from Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee. People were traveling from all over to be able to get their abortions in Atlanta. This six week ban means that that is no longer a place. You could either go to Florida, you could go to South Carolina, or you go to North Carolina and then outside of that you're going to Chicago, you're going to DC, you might travel to California. So logistically, it's making it even harder for people to access abortions. We're talking about 20 to 22 states in the US where you cannot get an abortion. That's a huge portion of the map that's like, "Where do I go?" It's a lot on people accessing abortions, but it's also a lot on the people providing the direct service.
There's this commitment to folks that they're like I'm going to do what I can to make sure that you get seen, whether that is from our abortion funds, who you have some members who are like, "Yeah, we were on the phone until midnight to make sure that they could get checked into their hotel, making sure that they had someone to talk to because they're making the drive alone." As resilient people, folks are finding a way. And I wish that it didn't have to be such where you have to find a way. It should just be. We should just be able to get this care without all of the extra hoops and hustle and hassle.
Kidvai: Of course. And the extra hoops and hassle are impossible if you think of someone's life in the abstract outside of an individual that lives at the intersection of complex systems and interpersonal violence and trauma and structural violence. And so throw into this any life stuff, any hard life stuff like an abusive partnership or being on some sort of state supervision.
Njoku: Or being a young person under the age of 18.
Kidvai: Yes.
Njoku: You've made a decision that you want to be able to get your abortion, but you live in a state where you might need to get parental notification, which means you have to tell your parents. Or parental consent, which means that your parents have to sign something being like, "Yes, you can get your own abortion." Or they have to come with you, even in instances where they may not be safe. There's queer and trans folks. I'm thinking about trans folks who live in Texas but need abortions. That is something that's so mind-blowing to me that you're in a state that not only doesn't want you to get gender-affirming care and recognize you as a being that you are, but then to talk about healthcare and have that be stigmatized when your existence is also stigmatized in that state, it's a lot.
So in the same way that there's not a monolithic Black experience, there's not a monolithic abortion experience or abortion story, and we can give these worst case scenarios like a fetal anomaly, the health of the mother, rape or incest, or whatever that may be, but sometimes it's just like, "I'm poor. I don't have money to pay for this abortion, and I'm already trying to use the money I have to pay for the kids that I have." These are things that folks may not think about when talking about what is at stake and what folks are having to go through and add on abortion on top of that.
Kidvai: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for being really clear about your position on that. It's what I anticipated, but it was nice to hear it nonetheless. So this podcast is called No Body Criminalized, and we've been asking all of our guests this, what does this phrase mean to you?
Njoku: Even when I looked at it, I was like, "Nobody Criminalized? Or No Body Criminalized?" Both should be true. Nobody should be criminalized. But when we're talking about our bodies, that should not be criminalized either. But when you think about, "Oh, bodies are criminalized? How so?" To me, it's like an invitation for curiosity to be like yeah, give yourself some permission to explore what it means to have your body criminalized or your body be seen as a threat or your body being seen as not sexy or not worthy of getting adequate healthcare. I think of me being like a queer Black fat femme and the various experiences that I've had in the healthcare system, the comments, the innuendos, the actual criminalization of bodies. I remember in high school, I went to high school in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and I remember it was around the time that short shorts were coming in and it was a cute early 2000s vibe.
Imagine the era of Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, all the people, all the outfits. And one of my friends was like, "Yeah, I'm not doing any of that. I'm literally going to wear pajama pants." And because she did that, she got written up. My friends who decided to wear the short shorts, and they're like, "Oh, no. Oh, your body shouldn't be wearing that outfit. We're going to criminalize you or put you in detention or whatever that may be. Call your parent to bring you another pair of clothes to wear." When more than likely they saw you leave the house. It's everywhere. It's like criminalized, stigmatized, nobody should have to experience anything that creates that fear, that shame. You should just be able to live your life. And I think calling it No Body Criminalized, again, it really just invites people to be like, "Well, what are you talking about?" So I liked the invitation/ secretly I feel like there's a call to action.
Kidvai: Thank you. This conversation has been so, so lovely. I feel like you crystallized a lot of really important ideas for me, and it's just a joy to see you.
Njoku: Oh, so good to see you too. Thank you. Thank you so much.
Kidvai: One big takeaway from our conversation is if you want to help in the fight for abortion access, as Oriaku puts it, do the work so you can do the work. Look for and support existing abortion funds and repro justice organizations instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Right now, it's probably most important to look to leaders who have been navigating a reality without abortion access long before a Roe was overturned. Accessing abortion is a uniquely personal experience that varies greatly from person to person. Whether you live in a state where abortion is illegal, can't afford care, or face discrimination when seeking medical care, the obstacles and challenges in accessing abortion are all unique to individual circumstances. Oriaku reminds us that while Roe v Wade was important, it was never enough to build a world where we all could create the families and lives we want. But together we can care for our communities and build a future that is just that.
Oriaku Njoku is the executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds and the co-founder of Access Reproductive Care Southeast. You can find her on Twitter @oreawku. Find an abortion fund in your area at abortionfunds.org. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Funded at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for anyone criminalized for something that happens during pregnancy. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812.
No Body Criminalized is produced by LWC Studios for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Sage Carson and Jen Girdish are the media and marketing team at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Paulina Velasco is the managing producer at LWC Studios. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed episode. And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.
CITATION:
Kidvai, Rafa, host. “The ‘Hoops and Hustle and Hassle’ of Abortion Care.” No Body Criminalized, Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. April 10, 2023. Reprolegaldefensefund.org.