Trigger Warning – gendered violence
Reproductive Justice Ancestors
In the spring of 2025, I took a trip back to my motherland of Andhra Pradesh. In a small village on the coast of eastern India, I visited, for the second time in my life, my paternal grandmother’s home. Up until that point, all I knew about her death was that she died at home in poverty.
Standing on the soil where my dad and his seven siblings were raised, my cousin shared with me a secret about my grandmother. Kamala died of cervical cancer. She bled out and no hospital care came in time to help her. It was graphic and ugly, and not how I had imagined my grandmother, who I never met, would leave this earth. My grandmother’s name was Kamala, which means ‘lotus flower’ in Sanskrit.
When I returned home from India, I looked up cervical cancer and learned that too many pregnancies increased the risk of HPV and cervical cancer. Kamala carried out at least eight full-term pregnancies. When I looked up from my laptop, I thought of my other grandmother, who lived till nearly 95 years old and had all the medical care western medicine could cover. The stark contrast between my two grandmothers and the way their bodies left the earth was unsettling, and yet it perfectly explained why I came into the work of reproductive justice (RJ) in the first place. I had always had a strong conviction that no person should be without bodily autonomy. Not a person living under systems of colonialism and imperialism that continue to shape our world, not a person subjugated to economic inequality, not a person whose gender or sexuality is denied, not a person whose body has been violated. No person should have to pay for the cost with their body, their happiness, their freedom.
Before I left for SisterSong’s Let’s Talk About Sex Conference (LTAS), I saw that their social media reels referred to Chicago, Illinois, where the conference would take place as “the birthplace of reproductive justice.” I had never heard that before. I knew that there was a group of 12 Black women who coined the phrase reproductive justice and was familiar with the four pillars of Reproductive Justice. What I didn’t know was that my visit to Chicago was a visit back to RJ’s own