Loretta Ross is a lifelong feminist and anti-racist activist, co-founder of the Southern-based, women-of-color-led reproductive justice organization SisterSong, and associate professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Ms. magazine, and elsewhere. We spoke by telephone on May 3, the day after the leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade was made public.
When you enter this struggle for human rights, it’s a lifelong journey.
Q: What is your reaction to the leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito?
Loretta Ross: I can’t honestly say I’m surprised because I believe the Republicans have been packing the Supreme Court [for a long time]. Their primary reason is to protect themselves from prosecution for their criminal activities. They always want the Supreme Court to be their backstop in case they lose at the lower court level.
The second reason is to appeal to their base with the culture issues, so abortion and being tough on immigration and pulling back the little bit of inching forward they’ve done on LGBTQ+ rights. That’s also their agenda.
There’s a third possible reason, and that is the threat to elections. They learned in the 2000 election that what matters is not the popular vote but how the court decides who won. And so in a contested election, they get the final decision.
Loretta Ross
Q: What options are now going to be available to people, assuming that the court does move on with this agenda of overturning Roe v. Wade?
Ross: What’s going to happen, in a very practical way, is that we in the women’s movement are going to do what we always do, which is center the needs of women in our lens and ensure that we provide more self-managed abortions. We call those SMAs, where you take abortion pills. There’s going to be more suction abortions because we have abortion kits that were invented more than forty years ago that we haven’t had to rely on as much with the availability of clinics. And there’s going to be an abortion underground where people go to friendlier states to get services if they have the means to get there.
So women are going to be taking care of business, no matter what the law, the state, the church, or the men say, because that’s what we do. It’s the most vulnerable women that, as an activist, I have to keep in the center of the lens. Are we going to have an “Underground Railroad”? Are we going to be smuggling abortion pills? Are we going to be paying for people to take flights? Will we be doing more menstrual extractions? Those are the kinds of things that are already taking place in places like Texas and Oklahoma, where access is already severely limited, and we will have to expand that service delivery network.
Q: State legislatures have been criminalizing assisting someone who obtains an abortion, and some states are using other citizens to enforce these laws against their neighbors.
Ross: Right, the vigilante and snitch culture. Isn’t that so American of us? I mean, I’m from Texas. So the vigilante culture of the Texas Rangers is something that I grew up with, and I am not at all surprised. In many ways, I feel like a Cassandra, because there’s been many years we feminists have been saying that Roe is precarious, that it’s under threat. It started with Ronald Reagan promising to pass the Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. That didn’t work.
Q: You’ve been a feminist activist for decades and you worked at one of the first rape crisis centers in Washington, D.C. Talk about your journey to becoming the person you are today.
Ross: Well, the story starts in Texas. When I was fourteen, I suffered through incest from a twenty-seven-year-old married cousin. I became pregnant as a result of that incest. In 1968, abortion was not an option unless you left the country, and my parents didn’t have those kinds of resources. So they stuck me in a home for unwed mothers, and I had the baby.
The plan was for me to give the child up for adoption, because as you can imagine, that was not the way I wanted to become a mother. But this Catholic hospital, who was supposed to whisk the child away, brought him to me the next day after he was born. I kept looking at him and I kept saying, “He’s got my face. He’s got my face. Oh my God, he’s got my face.” So I couldn’t go through with the adoption.
That was the first time I really had the lived experience of being at the intersection between childhood sexual abuse and reproductive oppression. And that’s what set me on my path. I didn’t want all the things that I’d been through to continue to happen to young, vulnerable women. And, unfortunately, they still are happening to us. And that’s why, when you enter this struggle for human rights, it’s a lifelong journey. There’s no easy solution, no quick fixes.
Q: Talk about SisterSong, the group that you helped co-found a couple of decades ago. Where does that name come from?
Ross: SisterSong was founded in 1997 by sixteen women of color who ran reproductive health and rights organizations. I was one of those sixteen. The name SisterSong came in our first planning meetings when we observed how hard it was to do this work on reproductive health, rights, and justice. We weren’t trusted by the mainstream pro-choice community, nor did our own communities care for us to talk about these sexual subjects.
Half of the sixteen organizations didn’t have computers, didn’t have copiers, didn’t have fax machines. Of course, mobile telephones were in their infancy at the time. So one of our founding members, Juanita Williams, observed that “we were all singing the same song” and wouldn’t it be wonderful if we learned to sing our songs in harmony together? And so SisterSong became our name and our metaphor and our practice.
Our tagline became “doing together what we can’t do separately.” And that became a part of how we organized. A lot of people think we’re a singing group, but we’re not.
Q: You’ve got a book coming out later this year called Calling in the Call Out Culture. Talk a little bit about call out culture and why you see it as a problem?
Ross: Call out culture affects everybody, but it doesn’t affect everybody equally. Attempts to get rich and powerful people canceled don’t work. But it’s the vulnerable people who can lose their jobs, can lose their platforms, can become disposable in our throwaway culture. And it’s doing extreme damage to the human rights movement.
Someone has called this a circular firing squad, where we cannibalize each other based on language policing and tone policing, believing that we have to have politically pure opinions, and we can only work with certain people, and if we don’t have total unanimity, our differences are going to divide us. And I find this counterproductive.
Many people think that by doing the call outs of each other, they’re doing the right thing. But in fact, it’s splintering our movement, it’s making people afraid to join. We seem so lacking in humor, lacking in nuance, lacking in compassion when we use call out culture that way.
We’ve got to learn how to turn to each other instead of on each other, like they used to say in the civil rights movement. So when COVID-19 happened and we were all sent home from in-person learning, I took my Smith College classes online. And since then, I’ve reached thousands of people. I’m trying to create a culture shift within the human rights movement where we really focus on holding people accountable, but doing so with love and respect instead of anger, blaming, and shaming.
Q: You’ve talked about how the right organizes people and the left organizes organizations. What do you think we need to be doing now, moving toward the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential election?
Ross: One thing that the right does better—and they’re so phony about it—is to pretend to care about people’s suffering. I remember when Pat Robertson had Operation Blessing and he would send out these proselytizing trucks in the middle of winter to deliver coats and food to people if they would join in prayer service.
And for us, rather than that direct contact with people, we would prefer to have “Hands Across America” and all join hands to build this human chain across America, and give the money we raise to the top homeless organizations. We’ve got to get out of this navel gazing, this white guilt paralysis. We have to learn to forgive ourselves for our mistakes because we’re all racially illiterate along the continuum, because nowhere did we learn how to be racially competent with each other.
Q: What’s on your plate for organizing right now and moving forward?
Ross: I’ve moved on from working on particular issues to working on our process, as you can see with the “calling in” culture. I believe that calling in will be as important in the twenty-first century to the human rights movement as nonviolence as a strategy was to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. It’s going to determine how we do the work, the values we display when we do the work, and it’s going to win—because there are more people who want to call people in than those who want to call people out.
People are exhausted by the bitterness. They’re exhausted by feeling like they’re walking around on verbal eggshells and will suffer a fatal blow if they say the wrong word or get a gender pronoun wrong or something like that.
We have to model our values of respecting and appreciating the diversity of opinions that’s within the human rights movement. That’s how I plan on dedicating the rest of my life, however much time I’ve got left, because I’m knocking on seventy. I want to make sure we achieve this culture shift because I really do believe we’ve got a winning hand.
When I think about it, our opponents think they’re fighting us, the human rights movement, but they’re wrong. They’re fighting truth, they’re fighting evidence, they’re fighting history, and they’re fighting time. Any one of those forces could kick their asses. And so my concern is that we don’t self-destruct on the pathway to victory.