This story is shared with permission. Some details have been changed to protect the author's privacy.
I’m a 74-year-old Black woman, and I’ve navigated reproductive healthcare struggles at nearly every stage of my life.
I’ve given birth. I’ve experienced several miscarriages. I’ve had an abortion. Through it all, there have been times when my doctors listened to me and believed me, and other times when I didn't feel heard or seen. So, when people talk about reproductive health as if it’s a single issue or an isolated moment, I push back.
Reproductive healthcare isn’t defined by one decision, one procedure, or one prescription. It is an entire lifetime of care that is influenced by race, by income, by geography, and by whether the systems around us will recognize that our bodies are worthy of care and protection.
Long before the political fights about abortion and access to care that we see today, I realized how uneven that care could be. I watched the Black women who make up my circle of family and friends struggle to get prenatal care, to access birth control, or to be believed when they have legitimate physical complaints. Those barriers weren’t limited to Black women alone. People with low incomes, immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and those living in rural communities face many of the same challenges. Far too often, our pain is minimized, our symptoms are dismissed, and our concerns are questioned, all with real consequences.
Bias and marginalization in reproductive healthcare don’t end with our childbearing years. The same patterns I saw in my younger years show up time and time again in my old age. My symptoms are minimized or explained away, and there's little urgency to explain how hormonal changes can affect my body or overall quality of life.
These disparities aren't new. They didn't come about with the fall of Roe. Rooted in racism, they are reinforced by policies that hurt and deny multiple communities at once. And as abortion access is stripped away, those inequities become harder to ignore. And it only gets worse, as access to abortion care is pushed further out of reach by restrictions or outright bans.
Abortion restrictions don’t stop people from seeking abortion care. They only decide who has options and who doesn’t. People with money, time, transportation, or flexible jobs can still access the care they need. Without those resources, people find themselves faced with delays or dangerous gaps in treatment or are forced to continue pregnancies they never wanted.
The fallout from abortion restrictions ripples across the healthcare system, making birth control harder to access and causing delays in miscarriage care. Providers hesitate or are afraid to act, clinics close, Medicaid coverage falls short, and all these failures ultimately cost lives. Prioritizing ideology over health has real consequences, especially for communities that already face higher risks and have fewer resources.
I’ve been around long enough to see reproductive rights be expanded and rolled back again and again. And I’ve seen lawmakers treat reproductive healthcare as a moral debate instead of what it is: plain old healthcare. Period.
That's why it's impossible to stay silent.
I speak up because I know what happens when access is taken away. I center the voices of those who are most impacted because I know who feels it first. And support all efforts to protect real healthcare because I know how hard it is to rebuild what’s been lost.
Reproductive health is a racial and social justice issue because our bodies have always been political. The difference now is that we’re naming it and demanding better.
