This season we are following stories of people touched by incarceration, all pushing forward to find their way into a better space. Episode one introduces you to Marcus, a 28 year old serving a life sentence in prison. How does an aspiring actor, who can play the piano by ear and have such a desire to help and inspire people end up serving a life sentence.  He told us his story over the course of dozens of prison calls.

American Dreams: Reproductive Justice  is a podcast that will explore exactly what Reproductive Justice means. A thoughtful framework  born in 1994, by 12 Black women in Chicago.

The four principles of Reproductive Justice are:

1. The right to have a child

2. The right to not have a child (which includes sterilization, which many doctors won’t do)

3. The right to have a child in a healthy environment and then raise them safely free from violence and with access to resources

4. The right to bodily autonomy and sexual pleasure

Season 2 of American Dreams will expand upon last season’s exploration of reproductive justice, centering stories of those touched by incarceration. Highlighting the effects of the carceral system and its effects on the directly and indirectly impacted people through the lens of reproductive justice. 

​American Dreams: Reproductive Justice Season 2 is executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is associate produced, written and edited by Simone Endress. Music by Wil Black for Black Gypsy Music. Graphic designs by Mingo Collaso. A special thanks to Flobots for the use of their song ‘American Dreams’. 

Special thanks to KUNV 91.5 

This podcast is empowered by Make it Work Nevada, a Project of Tides Advocacy

For more information please visit Make It Work Nevada.org and find us on all the socials to learn more about our work to create a world we all can thrive in.

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Information in this episode found on:

Websites:

Childrensrights.org

sciencedirect.org

This last episode of American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is about the best practices for achieving healthy pregnancies and births, and that involves working together.

We spoke to Dr. Saraswathi Vedam with The Birth Place Lab, a division of the University of British Columbia. This lab conducts research and helps provide equitable access to reproductive care. As stated on their website, the lab focuses on four sections of reproductive care: person-centered measurement of equity, quality, and safety; (2) designing and implementing accountability tools and systems; (3) improving health professional education on anti-oppression, anti-racism, and cultural safety; and (4) expanding representation in the perinatal research and clinical workforce. 

We also spoke to Rosanna Davis, the President of CAL Midwives. CAL Midwives is an association of licensed midwives who provide reproductive care to patients and fight for reproductive justice in the state of California.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

Ashlee Hernanz Alvarez was 18 when she had her first daughter, Mimi. She was on Medicaid, and went to the only public hospital in Southern Nevada. She was not treated well. The labor and delivery nurses were understaffed, her doctor was not around, and when a fill-in doctor walked in, he treated her as if she was disturbing his night. Ashlee describes the birth as "savage." For her second birth four years later, Ashlee turned to a midwife. Her experience was far better. She got to watch comedy when her labor started, so she would be distracted by laughter. She got to use her oils and her birthing ball. And she caught her baby herself, as the midwife was cupping her hands as a back-up. 

These choices are not ideal for everyone, but birthing at home used to be the norm. Until professional medicine took over. We talk to Ashlee, her midwife, Jollina Simpson, and sociologist Alicia Suarez about the history of home birth, and why and how it's making a comeback.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

Three women tell the stories of their traumatic experiences giving birth.

Amy Courts Koopman wanted a natural birth, despite a family history of pregnancy complications. She was in good health, but the pregnancy was tricky. Her birthing in-hospital midwife didn't read the notes in her chart. She was at one of the premiere hospitals in the U.S.

Brenda Zamora got pregnant at 18 with no insurance and working two jobs. She knew her diabetes was a complication to her pregnancy, but the high-risk clinic didn't flag anything. She gave birth at 30 weeks. Her daughter was born with a litany of issues, and would face multiple surgeries.

Erika Washington was giving birth to her second child. She went to the hospital and told the doctor to call her regular OB. They didn't. Instead they disbelieved she was in labor and sent her home with Ambien. She gave birth delirious and, as a 23-year-old Black woman on Medicaid, was accused of taking drugs and assumed to have no prenatal care.

These stories are told as one, with no narration. Might wanna grab your Kleenex.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

Three women tell the stories of their traumatic experiences giving birth.

Amy Courts Koopman wanted a natural birth, despite a family history of pregnancy complications. She was in good health, but the pregnancy was tricky. Her birthing in-hospital midwife didn't read the notes in her chart. She was at one of the premiere hospitals in the U.S.

Brenda Zamora got pregnant at 18 with no insurance and working two jobs. She knew her diabetes was a complication to her pregnancy, but the high-risk clinic didn't flag anything. She gave birth at 30 weeks. Her daughter was born with a litany of issues, and would face multiple surgeries.

Erika Washington was giving birth to her second child. She went to the hospital and told the doctor to call her regular OB. They didn't. Instead they disbelieved she was in labor and sent her home with Ambien. She gave birth delirious and, as a 23-year-old Black woman on Medicaid, was accused of taking drugs and assumed to have no prenatal care.

These stories are told as one, with no narration. Might wanna grab your Kleenex.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

 Personhood. It's a concept pushed by anti-abortion activists that says fetuses are people, who deserve rights - often at the expense of the pregnant woman. We look at how pregnant people are criminalized, and often serve time in prison while pregnant, because of this misguided philosophy. 

The U.S. has a dark history of "Master Race" thinking - which the Nazis studied and learned from. In this episode, we look at eugenics, forced sterilization and supremacy.

In 1961, 44-year-old Fannie Lou Hamer went to Sunflower County Hospital in Mississippi to have a minor tumor removed. Instead, the doctor gave her a "Mississippi Appendectomy." In other words, they sterilized her. Without her knowledge or consent. A year later, Hamer attended her first Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee meeting, launching her civil and voting rights activist career. She has said her forced sterilization was the catalyst for her activism.

Hamer wasn't the only Black or Brown woman who faced forced sterilization in early and mid-20th century America. It was actually quite common, and purposefully put forward by many of the elite in the U.S. through the theory of Eugenics - or race supremacy - which the Nazis actually copied to formulate their own theories.

In this episode of American Dreams: Reproductive Justice, we look at how white America has tried to control women's bodies - both by keeping "undesirables" from getting pregnant, and keeping "desirable" pregnant women from having abortions.

Sociologist Alicia Suarez notes that anti-abortion sentiment was coopted by the religious right in the 1980s, but was actually propagated by early medical leaders who wanted to keep WASP women controlled by saddling them with children, and non-WASP women controlled by taking away their ability to procreate.

One of the ways the state of California forced sterilization on its residents was through the Sonoma County Children's home, where "deviants" were sent for punishment - for being poor, for not speaking English, for already having too many kids, for being a teenager raped by her father -  and given a choice: stay imprisoned or get sterilized.

We talk to journalist Phil Barber about his stunning investigative piece in The Press Democrat in 2021. And with Alexandra Minna Stern and Natalie Lira, who help put our history in context. Hint: It doesn't reflect well on us.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

Reproductive justice cures the injustices birthing people face. In this episode, we explore the historic and current challenges to reproductive health, safety and autonomy.

In this episode, we’re exploring medical systems in Black and Brown communities. The maternal mortality rate for Black women is THREE TIMES the rate than it is for white women. More surprisingly, the ALMOST mortality rate is higher than most of us realize.

Chi Chi Okwu, who you heard in episode 1, starts us off by pointing out that the likelihood that you will have a healthy pregnancy, which includes the postpartum experience, is embedded in the history of our country. And it can mostly really be described with one word: Racism.

"Like a lot of things in our country it was founded on racist ideology," said Okwu, executive director of EverThrive Illinois. "A lot of research was done on slaves, and in ways that were really harmful."

Historian Alicia Suarez of DePaw University in Indiana notes that Black women are - still - seen as being "obstetrically hardy" and that "they don't feel pain."

Tufts University researcher Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha breaks it down even further, noting that almost every gynecological procedure we used today was "tested" on enslaved Black women, often without anesthesia.

We also talk to Wanda Irving, whose daughter, Shalon Irving died in January 2017, three weeks after she had given birth. Wanda was featured in an NPR segment by Renee Montagne and a ProPublica story by Nina Martin, and we talked to her for this podcast. Shalon Irving was a CDC researcher in pregnancy mortality. She had two PhDs and two master's degrees. "But yet and still," says her mother, "none of those degrees, experience, awards protected her.

"I used to think the system failed Shalon," said Wanda. "It didn’t fail her, it operated exactly how it was set up to operate. And she was just one more victim of a system that does not value women, and especially does not value Black women."

This is echoed by Martin, who found Shalon Irving's story when she was writing about maternal mortality for ProPublica.

Two things struck Martin. One, the number of deaths that occur after childbirth far outpaced the number of deaths during pregnancy. And, the fact that over 60,000 people "nearly die" after pregnancy. "That’s a lot of people," said Martin.

Martin agrees that it's about race - Okwu and Suarez talk in this episode about the idea of "weathering" in Black women - but she notes "this is about gender."

"It’s about women being treated as if they are less than - less than men, less than doctors and nurses, less than babies. For women of color - particularly Black and indigenous women - it’s so much worse... In that intersectional way, there are profound disparities around race and class. But it starts for me as a gender issue."

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music, with The Flobots. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

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The voices you heard on today’s program are Chi Chi Okwu from Everthrive Illinois, Las Vegas midwife Jollina Simpson, historian Alicia Suarez, Dr. Toni Bond - who was one of the founders of the Reproductive Justice movement, Tufts researcher Ndidiamaka Amutah-Onukagha journalist Nina Martin, and Wanda Irving, who lost her daughter, Shalon to a postpartum infection that was preventable.

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In our next episodes, we'll look at how hard it is for women who want children to have them.

Related Links:
Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment, Washington Post. Sept. 2014
Maternal Mortality Rates in the U.S. - CDC

We also want to pay homage to the 12 women who were in the room in 1994: 

• Dr. Toni M. Bond
• Rev. Alma Crawford
• The late Evelyn S. Field
• Terri James
• Bisola Marignay
• Cassandra McConnell 
• Cynthia Newbille
• Loretta Ross
• Elizabeth Terry
• Rep. ‘Able’ Mable Thomas
• Winnette P. Willis
• Kim Youngblood

Reproductive Justice was an idea birthed in 1994, by 12 Black women who felt unseen by the white establishment. We talked to two of those women, as well as women working in the Reproductive Justice space now about what RJ is and how it affects real people.

In 1994, 12 women walked into a hotel room in Chicago. They came out with a blueprint for what would become the Reproductive Justice movement.

The Mothers of Reproductive Justice - as they are known now - were the only Black women at a conference on universal health care reform held by feminist groups. The meeting took place after a presentation by someone from the Clinton Administration on their universal health care plan. The plan didn't include any coverage of reproductive health.

As Founder Toni Bond told us, "It was as if women didn't exist."

We talk to two of those 12 women - Dr. Bond and Loretta Ross. And we talk to women working in the Reproductive Justice space now about what RJ is, what needs to be in place for it to work, and how the concept of Reproductive Justice touches every aspect of our society.

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American Dreams: Reproductive Justice is co-executive produced and hosted by Erika Washington, powered by Make It Work Nevada. The podcast is co-executive produced, written, and edited by Carrie Kaufman of Overthinking Media LLC. Music by Wil Black of Black Gypsy Music. Artwork by Brent Holmes.

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In our next episode, we will set our bearings by looking at the history of reproductive INjustice in the U.S.