Dear friends,

We are now six months into Covid-19, with barely any respite in sight. Indeed, the pandemic has rapidly reshaped this country’s social landscape, including our sexual and reproductive health, and autonomy. As jobs are lost, bank accounts disappear, rent payments continue, and stay-at-home orders limit our options, opportunistic abortion bans have gone mainstream. Despite an attempt by Sedgewick County Commissioners to restrict abortion as a non-essential procedure amid the pandemic, Governor Laura Kelly unequivocally stated, “Women’s reproductive health is considered an essential need and health care clinics will fall under that category”.

Through our Abortion Hotline, we hear the desperation in caller’s voices, and the relief when they know we can help Kansas residents fund their abortion. The relief is palpable. Their stories break our hearts.

Here in Kansas, we are preserving access to abortion for friends and neighbors in need, in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thank you all for continuing to support the Kansas Abortion Fund and for supporting them.

Sandy Brown

President

Let’s be clear, though: Black folks are not victims in the story of our nation or our movements. Black cisgender and transgender women have always led work for social justice, originating groundbreaking concepts and strategies and leading revolutions despite their work being erased from the historical record. In 1989, Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw invented the term “intersectionality” to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect,” a concept many women of color leaders had championed for decades prior. In response to a white, middle-class dominated women’s rights movement, Black women invented the term “reproductive justice” in 1994 to describe “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” 

To be sure, abortion funds ensuring access to abortion-rather than only the legal right or “choice”-is a reproductive justice issue. But so is freedom to raise children free from police violence. So is freedom from miscarriage-inducing lead in drinking water and other environmental injustices. It’s incumbent upon white folks who show up for abortion rights to show up for Black Lives Matter, in person (with masks and distance!) and online. As Renee Bracey Sherman, Executive Director of We Testify, said over three years ago, “Yes, it’s essential that black women have the choice about whether to conceive and give birth. But this choice, without the ability to protect a child from violence, rings hollow. That’s why it’s important to understand that the fight for reproductive justice and the fight to end police brutality go hand in hand. State violence and control, whether through racist policing, the criminal justice system or the welfare system, are all issues at the core of reproductive justice. They are fundamentally about whether you, or the state, has control over your own body and destiny.”