A Conversation with Research Fellows Laury Oaks and Bri Reddick
by Katie Von Wald
Over the past years the landscape of reproductive rights in the United States has drastically changed. From the historic overturn of Roe v Wade and resulting abortion bans sweeping many states, to more current debates and legislatures targeting reproductive health services such as IVF treatments and even travel to access care, the historic crisis of reproductive justice has escalated to a harrowing degree. With the upcoming election, abortion has once again taken the spotlight in public consciousness and yet, despite its nearly constant coverage, little attention or action has been taken by political candidates about larger reproductive and sexual health concerns. Feminists have long fought for a more expansive and intersectional approach to reproductive life, arguing that Roe was never enough, and that reliance on the single-issue of framing of abortion to cascade larger reproductive rights issues will never lead us to liberatory futures. This is particularly true when considering how the lack of reproductive health and justice disproportionately affects the overall well-being of communities of color– particularly Black women– LGBTQ communities, and poor and working class communities. These same feminists were not surprised at Roe’s overturn as they had been working to provide the many necessary services to communities left in its wake. They have developed strategies and networks to continuously care for reproductive bodies so often targeted by state violence and oppression.
Luckily, there is a network of such feminists doing this working here at UCSB, and it was all of these complex issues, disappointments, fears, and even hopes that messily ran through my mind as I tucked my infant into his sling pressing him close up to my body to carry him into my office to meet with Department of Feminist Studies Professor Laury Oaks and PhD student Bri Reddick. Laury and Bri have received the Center for Feminist Futures inaugural research cluster grant to continue developing their work on reproductive justice– the term coined by Black Feminist organizations to describe the human rights to bodily autonomy, access to quality healthcare, safe and sustainable environments, and parenthood– to include the larger UCSB community. Over the decades, Laury has dedicated her work to exploring, teaching and writing about reproductive politics, health, and justice. Her book Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive Justice (2015) has generated a new wave of interest following US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s support of baby safe havens as justifying abortion bans, a topic she revisits in her most recent publication “The Multiple Dangers of Baby Safe Haven Laws” in Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v Wade (2024, Krystale Littlejohn and Rickie Solinger). With her Irish co-author Jo Murphy-Lawless, she published her latest book The Salley Gardens: Women, Sex, and Motherhood in Ireland, a series of reflections on growing-up, forming sexual relationships, and motherhood. Many graduate and undergraduates, including myself, have had the pleasure of working with Laury whose mentoring centers feminist ethics of wisdom and support.
I’ve known Bri Reddick since she joined the Department of Feminist Studies and has since become an integral part of feminist organizing and action on campus. She is an inaugural Racial Justice Fellow at UCSB and her award-winning MA thesis, “Black Blood: Black Menstruation, Disembodiment, and Erotic Autonomy,” explores the history of Black menstruation through enslavement and its afterlives and posits Black menstruation as an erotic and autonomous project that resists the culture of disembodiment from the Black reproductive body. She continues this research rehabilitating the bleeding reproductive body in her research which reimagines swamps and menstruation as Black feminist cycles of replenishment that negate the death-making imposed on “unproductive” bodies and landscapes. Bri is also a trauma-informed yoga instructor who teaches yoga to survivors of sexual misconduct and has recently gone through menstruation doula training.
I pass my baby between Bri and Laury as I lay out some of his toys and with him happy in their arms we all sit down to discuss feminist reproductive histories, practice, and futures.
K: It’s so good to see you both. Could you tell me a little bit more about your collaboration and what you hope to achieve with your research cluster?
L: We’re in the development brainstorming stage right now but we aim to bring together scholar- activists at and beyond UCSB who are committed to reproductive justice, collaborating across ages, disciplinary backgrounds, experience with RJ. We don’t want it to be just experts, but people who want to learn about RJ. We are also interested in more collaborative creative activities to raise awareness and work toward creative reproductive futures.
B: I think the only thing I would add is, I like that we are framing it as “Reproductive Futures” because I think that so much of the current discourse is all Handmaid’s Tale-doomsday-apocalyptic undertones of reproductive health. I like the idea of highlighting reproductive futures that play or navigate within the confines of our current political landscape.
K: I remember when Roe was overturned there was this outcry of “what are we going to do” and then of course brilliant feminist and RJ activists came out and said “listen we’ve had abortion before Roe, we had it during, we will have it after.” Basically, saying the nation-state, doesn’t get to tell us not to have safe abortions. I wonder what your thoughts are about the current political climate with reproductive justice as we come into this election.
L: Well I think it’s a both/and situation. It does matter that there are candidates willing to talk about abortion rights and all the suffering and loss that’s happening in the states that have bans, talking about the unfairness of people having to cross borders. But that can’t be the only action. The reliance on a Roe framework is just not adequate to the needs that we see. We need to talk about real access and how Roe was not equitable. The state is powerful, but not all-powerful. I mean facilitating high quality access to high quality care is really urgent, as is educating people about the roots of the restrictive oppressive policies we see in many states. What is really interesting is how to work through extra legal channels and how to be collaborative. The US is in a position where we have to learn from other people, other countries. The US is 1 of a handful of countries that has regressed on reproductive rights while so many other countries have liberalized. We don’t talk about the effect of individualization and the emphasis on individual rights which puts the onus of every person themselves without adequate support. We don’t talk enough about reproductive justice within a human rights framework. I constantly like to recite what Sister Song defines as reproductive justice which are the human rights to personal bodily autonomy, the right to have children, to not have children and to parent the children we do have in safe environments. I use that as the guiding light. I think the most urgent feminist concerns are about the Christian white supremacist power base, the voices and discourses that are very clearly working against reproductive justice writ large and overlapping with LGBTQ rights with immigrant rights; it’s all interconnected. So, abortion rights is just one part of RJ and reproductive futures, and I know that politicians are being strategic and intentional in their messaging ,but I just wish there was more political attention to reproductive justice writ large in this moment.
K: What else do you see are the most urgent of feminist concerns?
B: I do think that there needs to be an emphasis on other reproductive processes that deserve some of the limelight. Like menopause, or that absence of menopausal care. My work, as a menstruation doula, is part of that because menstruation has been seen as the antithesis to reproduction, when it’s not. So I think highlighting how to care for your reproductive body and decentering health institutions to center body literacy, personal autonomy, bodily autonomy. It’s so much larger than abortion.
L: I think it’s hard to get across the urgency of care. That is what we are talking about, the actual lack of care taken and given to the reproductive body. That’s what’s at the center of so much of this, right? Care is in the reproductive justice frame. How do we see societies, communities have care at the center, and how can we move in that future direction?
K: Thinking about feminist action in the US and globally, what are some lessons that we as feminists can learn from previous generations of reproductive justice scholars and activists? I wonder if you have any remaining thoughts on the future, what are some of your guiding lights as we talked about?
B: In the face of such overt fascism that we see today, I think a lot of people tend to look towards religion and as a feminist I have some difficulties with that. My girlfriend always says that her religion is Black women, and for me, I think that they have become my kind of spiritual practice when I do feel very unmotivated to exist in the world. I have been really inspired by women from the 70s, the Black feminists of Kitchen Table Press. I’ve been reading the new biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline-Gumbs as well as the disagreements about Palestine between Audre Lorde and June Jordan. So I look towards the Black feminist canon as kind of a spiritual practice.
One of the quotes guiding my research is by Ntozake Shange who says “I am not wounded, I am bleeding to life.” That is kind of guiding my thinking about vulnerability, of thinking about blood outside of violence, and thinking about the ways that we can become more healed for ourselves and one another.
L: I also think remembering all the histories of work that has been done and is being done despite the state. All the work toward caring reproductive futures despite the policies.
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As we talked I thought of all the different policies which would and could lead to just reproductive futures. The ironies of being an emerging feminist scholar focused on and working in reproductive justice are not lost on me as I balance working, writing, researching with the very tender and vulnerable days of postpartum and new motherhood.
It is sometimes hard to imagine the future in times of crisis. Jose Muñoz cautions us against stagnating in the present, that we must “see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” . If I was to feel beyond the pressures of reproductive injustice today it would feel something like how I felt seeing my baby held by these feminist scholars working in community to care for the reproductive body, engaging in collaborative and world building reproductive strategies, and in advocating for liberatory reproductive futures.
Laury and Bri, and others joining the Reproductive Futures Research Cluster will be hosting events throughout the academic year. For more information contact feministfutures@ucsb.edu.