Here’s a Refreshing Way to Think About Election Day

Reproductive-justice pioneer Loretta Ross on not waiting for politicians to save you.

It’s a sweltering Friday morning in Atlanta’s West End, just 12 hours later and a few miles away from where President Joe Biden and Donald Trump faced off in that disastrous presidential debate, but the Mother House is calm. Loretta Ross, one of the foremothers of the reproductive-justice movement, bought the green 19th-century house in 2007 to serve as the headquarters of SisterSong, the organization she co-founded a decade earlier. Here, people can access free HIV testing, computer-lab training, and resources for mothers. “It brings a sense of stability” to the community, she says. “They know the Mother House is going to be here.”

Sitting in a comfortable blue armchair, Ross lacks the anxious energy that is consuming me. Between the debate hangover and the breaking news that the Supreme Court has just obliterated yet another long-standing precedent — taking away power from experts at regulatory agencies and placing it in the hands of judges who are decidedly not — the national mood is understandably freaked out. How’s Ross feeling about it all? She gently places her hand on the walker in front of her and turns toward me. “What the Republicans have going for them is lying and violence,” she says. She smiles, showing a gap in her front teeth that makes her look much younger than her 70 years. “And those are not sustainable strategies in this country.”

Ross is one of the nation’s most prominent Black feminists. Thirty years ago, she was part of a group of Black women who conceived reproductive justice as a political framework, an instrumental step toward understanding bodily autonomy as a human right. That right is at the center of a furious conservative backlash: It’s been two years since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, triggering a crisis of care that has hurt poor people and patients of color the most. Environmental protections, gun-safety measures, and access to education — all pillars that help create safe and sustainable communities where people can decide when and if to parent, which is the core tenet of reproductive justice — also are under attack across the country.

It’s enough to be terrified for our future and feeling paralyzed as a result, but Ross is not. Back when she was still a teen on her way to college, her mother told her: “Don’t let success go to your head, but most importantly, you don’t let failure go to your heart.” She has kept that lesson as a north star since. “Hope is so vital to everything that we do, because we can’t be only defined by what we’re against,” she says. “We have to be defined by what world we build and want.”

In Ross’s world, people would be free to create the family that they want how and when they want, an experience she was denied as she came of age. Born in Texas in 1953, Ross was the sixth of eight children, a curious high achiever who attended integrated schools and loved science. But she was raped by a stranger at age 11 and then again at 14 by a distant family member, which led to a pregnancy. Ross’s parents sent her to have the baby at a home for unwed mothers and place him for adoption. After giving birth, though, the nurses brought Ross’s son, Howard, to her room rather than whisking him off to the agency. “I’ve wondered for 50 years, was that an accident or not?” she says. “There was no confusion about what was supposed to happen. But they put him in my arms and I looked down and I said, ‘Oh shit, he’s got my face.’”

The Supreme Court is not the site of our liberation. It has never been and never will be. Your liberation lies in what work you do with the people in your neighborhood.

Ross couldn’t go through with the adoption after that. She returned to high school while her parents took care of the baby, and at 16 she left for Howard University with dreams of becoming a chemist. But she became pregnant again her first semester and had an abortion later in pregnancy. By the time she was 19, her young son had come to live with her; unable to balance his care with working to pay for school, Ross dropped out. A few years later, a defective IUD that she received following her abortion gave her an infection that led to a hysterectomy. “I was so pissed off,” she says of her early years. “It seemed like no matter what I was trying to do to live my life, my plumbing kept getting in the way.”

Looking back, Ross tells me through tears that one of her biggest regrets is that she wasn’t “more mature” when parenting Howard during this period. (He died of a heart attack in 2016; “I can’t apologize to him now,” she says.) As a teen and 20-something, Ross also didn’t have the language to call out the sexual violence and reproductive oppression she experienced. While she engaged in what she calls the “pretty routine student activism” of the era — Black liberation, opposition to the Vietnam War — at Howard, her feminist consciousness really developed at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. She started there as a volunteer in 1978 and worked up to being director. Talking with other survivors, as well as rapists who wanted to change, was a transformative experience. “I found a lot of words to describe what had happened to me,” she says. “And I finally learned that it wasn’t my fault.”

Ross went on to work at the National Organization for Women, coordinate conferences for women of color and reproductive rights, and research anti-abortion violence. In the summer of 1994, she attended a conference in Chicago where the Clinton administration pitched feminists on its health-care reform. The legislation omitted reproductive health care in an attempt to appease Republicans. Most attendees were furious, and one of them, former Georgia state representative “Able” Mable Thomas, invited Ross and ten other women to her hotel room. “She was like, ‘This ain’t making sense. What are we going to do about it?’” Ross recalls. The group commiserated over their feeling that the women’s rights movement prioritized abortion rights and reproductive “choice” at the urging of well-off white women while ignoring the socioeconomic challenges that impact women of color and poor women. “Both the pro-choice and the pro-life movement always started with the pregnancy,” she says, “not what was going on in the woman’s life before she became pregnant. You have to see what’s going on way upstream.”

Calling themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, the group published an open letter to Congress demanding an intersectional approach to reproductive health care. Mainstream feminist groups — most of which had white women at the helm — were skeptical. Pollsters told Ross that reproductive justice didn’t test well with voters. “The pro-choice movement was saying that women of color weren’t interested in these issues,” she says. “A good portion of our work was to prove them wrong.”

Ross went on to co-found SisterSong to advocate for the reproductive and sexual health needs facing communities of color. By 2003, the collective put together a national conference focused explicitly on reproductive justice and expected 200 people to attend. Three times that number showed up. The framework has become more mainstream in the two decades since, especially after Ferguson and the summer of 2020’s racial reckoning. “I’m actually pleased by the number of organizations that are trying to reimagine themselves as full-service reproductive-justice organizations today, where 20 years ago they were resistant,” Ross says. “When we first came out, all the angry white women that thought we were abandoning abortion used to call us ‘the intersectionalists.’ Like, ‘Oh, they only care about race.’”

Electoral politics, however, haven’t caught up. Since 1994, Democrats have continued to sacrifice reproductive health care and marginalized communities’ needs in the hopes of getting Republican support to pass legislation. To Ross, the overturn of Roe is the direct result of this devil’s bargain. “There’s their timidity at challenging the Electoral College, their timidity at expanding the Supreme Court,” she says. “They are so afraid of the Republicans that they’re not making logical sense. They can be bullied.” So instead of putting our faith in elected officials and institutions, Ross wants people to invest in their communities. “The Supreme Court is not the site of our liberation. It has never been and never will be,” she says. “Your liberation lies in what work you do with the people in your neighborhood.”

The activist sees this spirit in her students at Smith College in Massachusetts, where she now teaches a course on human rights and white supremacy. She gets excited as she talks about the young people she knows who are concerned about gun safety, climate change, the war in Gaza. “Republicans are used to fighting people of color and queer people and all the ‘minorities,’ but the revolution has come home to the Thanksgiving dinner table, where your grandkid is saying, ‘You’ve got to call me “they” now,’” she says. Even if young people are disaffected by Democrats, she adds, it’s not clear that they’re defecting to Trumpism. “They’re more likely to disengage than go to Trump,” she says. “So it’s actually weakening the left without building up the right. If the Democrats had any sense, they would take advantage of this moment.”

These signs make Ross confident that American democracy will survive the test right-wingers are putting it through, if not immediately, then in the long term. “We actually have a winning hand because our opponents think they’re fighting us, but it’s wrong,” she says. “They’re fighting forces way beyond their control. They’re fighting evidence, and they’re fighting history. But most of all, they’re fighting time. They’re going to push us back to the 19th century and hope we don’t notice — I mean, really?”

It’s so delicious to have a prosecutor running against a felon. It’s not just about identity; it’s about experience. Someone who upholds the law versus someone who tries every means to break it.

I chafe against this. Ross may say progressives have the winning hand, but all I see are the nation’s quickly accumulating losses. The grasp white supremacist and patriarchal forces still hold over the country is tightening; American institutions are collapsing; the harm, the pain, the cruelty inflicted on marginalized people feels unending. Isn’t that just magical thinking? She whips her head and gives me a sharp look, her easygoing energy quickly replaced with something else. I know the withering expression on her face all too well; I’ve seen the older women in my family wear it. “I’m using my scientific brain to say they’re up against shit that is bigger than them,” she says. “I will be dead by the time we restore balance to the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”

I am immediately chastised. Not living to see the defeat of these forces doesn’t haunt Ross. “My mother was born in 1922, my father was born in 1918,” she says. “Neither of them ever believed that a Black man would be elected president of the United States.”

And what about a Black woman? Three weeks after our conversation, the country is navigating another tumultuous moment: Biden has announced that he will not seek reelection and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to replace him. When I catch her on the phone, Ross is disappointed that Biden is stepping down because she believed he could beat Trump. But she’s also overjoyed at the likelihood of Harris being on the ballot. “I woke up this morning to emails from everybody who has my address supporting Kamala Harris,” she says.

Plus, she feels the vice-president’s experience meets this challenging moment. “It’s so delicious to have a prosecutor running against a felon,” Ross says. “It’s not just about identity; it’s about experience. Someone who upholds the law versus someone who tries every means to break it.” Harris’s record on abortion rights will be an asset, too, as she says the Dobbs decision turned off Republican women who value their personal reproductive freedom. “Never get in the way of your enemy making a mistake.”

The enthusiasm Ross expresses for Harris and that I’ve seen from others in my own circles since the announcement seems to break the fever of the last several surreal weeks in American politics. I’m reminded of a civil-rights saying that Ross referenced at the Mother House that has stuck with me since we said good-bye.

“You have to stop imagining that your moment in history is the entire chain of freedom, because the chain of freedom stretches back towards the ancestors and forward towards your descendants,” she said in June. “All you gotta do is make sure the chain doesn’t break at your lane.”