AAs the 2024 election heats up, there are growing concerns about the rise of fascism around the world and in the United States. Regardless of the word or label used, Black people, who live with the legacy of slavery and multiple forms of reproductive oppression, including rape and forced pregnancy, sterilizations, and the killing of our children and loved ones by vigilantes and police, have extensive experience with authoritarian regimes that oppress and dehumanize.
There is a strategic agenda of the far right—laid out in plain language in Project 2025—to keep power in the hands of a select few and prevent the United States from becoming a truly representative, multiracial democracy that embraces and supports all people, including those who can become pregnant.
According to U.S. Census projections, people of color will become the majority by mid-century. With this looming reality, focusing on controlling our fertility and denying our bodily autonomy is a centuries-old strategy of authoritarian, democracy-denying regimes. And having a conservative-leaning Supreme Court that has proven it will roll back some of the most crucial protections further supports their agenda.
One of those crucial protections was the right to abortion, which was recognized and protected in Roe v Wade. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe – not only denying women the right to abortion, but laying the groundwork for the dismantling of all reproductive rights and aspects of pregnancy-related health care.
For decades, we have seen a focus on reversing Roe v Wade, with countless states implementing barriers to access by proposing Trap laws (targeted regulation of abortion providers), expanding funding for crisis pregnancy centers, and promoting declarations of personhood for the unborn from the moment of conception, all while manipulating states to pack our state legislatures with conservative leaders. We also fight against abortion bans and increased criminalization of those seeking abortions and of pregnant women who are targeted by creating imagined risks of harm to personified eggs, embryos, and fetuses.
And it’s not just about terminating a pregnancy. Before the Dobbs ruling, the U.S. already had a horrific and shameful black mortality rate that was four to twelve times higher. As gynecologists flee states that have banned abortions and women are forced to carry ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, and stillbirths, and continue pregnancies with nonviable or already dead fetuses because doctors have been terrorized into inaction, that rate is bound to rise. As if that weren’t enough, research consistently shows that black mortality in the U.S. is fueled by unchallenged racism and reinforced by our resistance.
While devastating, we can at least note that the Dobbs ruling shocked the nation and brought the longstanding fight for abortion into the mainstream. While many wondered how we got here, Black women and people of color had been warning for decades about the dangers of single-issue litigation and organizing strategies within the historically white-led reproductive health and rights movements.
Thirty years ago, Black women coined the term reproductive justice and launched a human rights movement that fought not only for the right to prevent or terminate pregnancies, but to expand the fight to have the children we want, to raise them in safe and sustainable communities. This new intersectional movement centered the leadership, lived experiences, and bodily autonomy of those historically marginalized.
Fascism thrives when the masses are conditioned to think, organize, and create policies that are not intersectional, creating fertile ground for authoritarianism. I believe the kryptonite of fascism is the work being done by those who laid the foundation for the reproductive justice movement: Black women.
Black women have found every possible way to resist and innovate. We consistently vote our values to save our democracy. From the Black women who formed the backbone of the civil rights and Black liberation movements, to the Black women who redefined feminism at the Combahee River, to the Black women who created new movements like reproductive justice, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too—it’s clear that we have decades of revenue that demonstrates our commitment to dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal authoritarianism.
With this election, we are faced with a serious question: “What kind of world do we want for ourselves and the generations that come after us?” Do we want to live in a world where we do not have the human right to make our own decisions about our bodies, our families, and our futures? Or do we want to live in a world where our lives are determined by devious policies?
Our future is in the hands of those who are ready to fight for our freedom. This is the time not only to vote, but to organize. This is the time to sit at the table and build with people we don’t know and deepen our relationships with our current allies. This is the time to study and learn from the historical victories over fascism. Because fascism always loses when it comes to the collective power of those determined to achieve our human rights.
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Monica Raye Simpson is the Executive Director of SisterSong, the Southern-based national Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Monica is a proud Black queer feminist and cultural strategist committed to organizing for LGBTQ+ liberation, civil and human rights, and sexual and reproductive justice by any means necessary. She was also named a New Civil Rights Leader by Essence Magazine and one of TIME’s 2023 Most Influential People.