A Career Dedicated to Reproductive Justice

oretta Ross, who won a prestigious MacArthur fellowship in 2022, began her career as a reproductive-justice and human-rights advocate as a teenager. Activism was a way for her to push back against the injustice and insecurity she experienced when, at 14, she was raped by her cousin and became pregnant. Abortion wasn’t legal then.

“I couldn’t determine if and when I’d have sex, and then I couldn’t determine if and when I’d have a baby,” she says. “And so I also determined that I wouldn’t let what happened to me determine who I would become.”

Early in her career, Ross led a rape-crisis center and directed programs at organizations including the International Council of African Women and the National Organization for Women. In 1994, she joined 11 other Black women in expanding the scope of the abortion debate by devising a framework for reproductive justice — a term they coined to describe the overlap between social justice and reproductive rights.

“What we felt was missing was a focus on what’s happening in the woman’s life before she becomes pregnant,” Ross says. “When a person is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, it’s going to exacerbate things that weren’t right in her life beforehand.”

In 1997, Ross’s human-rights education organization, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, was one of the founding members of SisterSong, a national collective of reproductive-justice groups led by women of color. In 2005, she became the group’s national coordinator and ran it from the Mother House in Atlanta (above).

Black intellectuals and leaders like Audre Lorde and Martin Luther King Jr. have inspired Ross to stay laser focused on human rights throughout her career, she says. As an advocate, she aims to educate people about their human rights and make sure they can claim them — the same motivation that inspired her to become an activist as a teen. More than 50 years later, Ross says, “I’m still that pissed off 14-year-old girl.”