[1] Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, SisterSong is a national membership organization with a focus on the Southern United States.
They include and represent Indigenous, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, Arab and Middle Eastern, Latinx, and queer women and trans people.
[4][5] In 1994, just before attending the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (at which international leaders would agree that the individual right to plan one's own family must be central to global development, rather than population control efforts), a group of black women gathered for a conference sponsored by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance and the Ms. Foundation for Women.
The women who created the reproductive justice framework were: Toni M. Bond Leonard, Reverend Alma Crawford, Evelyn S. Field, Terri James, Bisola Marignay, Cassandra McConnell, Cynthia Newbille, Loretta Ross, Elizabeth Terry, Mable Thomas, Winnette P. Willis, and Kim Youngblood.
[7] They launched the reproductive justice framework by publishing a full-page statement titled "Black Women on Universal Health Care Reform"[6] with over 800 signatures in The Washington Post and Roll Call using the concept of reproductive justice in a criticism of the Clinton health care plan.
These issues included sterilization abuse, forced and coerced promotion of LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives), high maternal mortality, difficulty accessing birth support choices, unsafe drinking water in family homes, police brutality, and parents being separated from children through racially biased immigration and incarceration practices.
Attendees decided to use the opportunity of these convenings to form a national collective of independent organizations that would help them all to achieve greater impact, and SisterSong was born with Luz Rodriguez as its first leader.
After several years of work to develop the collective, SisterSong hosted its first national conference in November 2003 at Spelman College in Atlanta with over 600 women of color in attendance.
[22] Instead of a board of directors, SisterSong was led by a Management Circle of leaders from each ethnic community in the Collective: Indigenous, Black, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Latinx.
[20] In 2012, National Coordinator Loretta Ross decided to return to her roots as a scholar and thought leader working within academia.
[35] In 2003, SisterSong hosted the first national conference on reproductive justice organized by women of color at Spelman College in Atlanta with over 600 attendees.
In 2014, they also launched the RJ Leadership Summit to convene the movement's leaders for insight sharing and movement-wide strategic planning.
[20][36][37][38] From 2006 to 2012, SisterSong partnered with Ipas and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to create and maintain a website mapping the sexual and reproductive laws in every US state to provide a tool for activists.
The campaign culminated with an effort to pass a Georgia bill that would restrict abortions suspected of being motivated by the race or sex of the fetus.
SisterSong disagreed with the accusation against Planned Parenthood and felt that the campaign was claiming that black women have a racial obligation to have babies, which overrides their personal desires and needs.
[45][46] SisterSong convened the Trust Black Women Partnership with nine black-women-led organizations to fight the billboards and abortion restriction bill, and the group defeated both.
[20] In 2014, SisterSong expanded common perceptions of what constitutes a reproductive justice issue by hosting the Standing Our Ground for Marissa Alexander Summit in Jacksonville, Florida.
Yet the Stand Your Ground law did not protect Marissa Alexander, a Black woman who fired a gun in the air to defend her family by scaring off an abusive partner.
SisterSong published articles that called this as a reproductive justice issue, saying that Alexander was imprisoned and separated from her children as punishment for defending herself and them from an abuser.
[52][53] It was announced in a media call with Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who talked about beginning her organizing career in the reproductive justice movement.
Garza has continued to highlight the work of Trust Black Women and SisterSong, including a 2019 article about activism in the face of Georgia and Alabama's abortion bans.
[54] In a July 2014 article, The New York Times interviewed Cecile Richards, the executive director of Planned Parenthood, talking about why the term "pro-choice" has been falling out of favor.
In response, SisterSong published an open letter to Planned Parenthood that was signed by 39 organizations and 24 individuals and asked Richards to correct the article and publicly recognize the leadership of women of color.
In February 2018, SisterSong began advocating for a review of a North Carolina Department of Public Safety policies that allows for pregnant inmates to be shackled to a hospital bed while in labor.
[3] Also in 2018, SisterSong co-founded a collaboration to combat religious exemption laws with Atlanta Jobs with Justice, Women Engaged, and Georgia Equality.