Pregnancy-related mortality rates among Black women are over three and two times higher, respectively, compared to the rate for White women. Post-Roe v. Wade Black women in Southern states face particularly tough challenges when seeking the health help they need. Research shows they are less likely to receive abortion care, barriers to securing adequate child care and often grapple with inherent stigmas in the health care system.
In Our Own Voice, National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda (IOOV) was launched to address and eradicate all of that.
The first and only national organization focused on reproductive justice and policy change for Black women, IOOV was formed a decade ago as a national/state partnership to uplift the voices of Black reproductive justice leaders.
“There were three things in particular they were concerned about, but the most important was the two-tiered healthcare system that we live in the United States, which basically says, if you can afford it, then you get better health care,” says IOOV CEO and President Regina Davis Moss. “You can either pay for access or you can afford it to your insurance provider because you have a job. But if you don’t, then you have to go on public insurance. So, these women were talking about reform, what services that would be covered. And up for debate was the reproductive health services.”
Davis Moss says that White feminists in the room solely focused on access to abortion, but she knew the issue was much larger than that for other groups.
“The Black women were looking around and they were like, this is not right,” Davis Moss tells ESSENCE. “Number one, how can you be talking about reproductive health services, but not provide the basic care for that? Then we were also, very much like we are now, dealing with high maternal mortality rates, high infant mortality rates, HIV/AIDS rates, intimate partner violence. We can’t even have this conversation about abortion access without having the other conversation about all the social justice, all the other issues that we are concerned about.”
A decade later, IOOV is working to advocate and ideate policy solutions that directly address the challenges Black women when seeking care for their bodies. Now, the organization is doing even more substantive work with the launch of it own fund.
On August 22, In Our Own Voice launched a new 501(c)4, In Our Own Voice Action Fund, during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
The fund aims to educate and engage voters in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio,Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado on key Reproductive Justice issues and hold policy makers’ feet to the fire for change.
“The In Our Voice Action Fund is an extension of the work we’ve been doing for decades,” Davis Moss says. “We are not only educating and organizing the public, we’re registering, informing and mobilizing voters to help promote our policy agenda. We’re also endorsing candidates including VP Harris for President. We are also working with candidates to create reproductive justice champions at the federal and state and local level. We’re standing in solidarity because we want to build and expand that powerful base because long term, we want to be able to seed and resource other Black women-led, Black women-focused organizations so together we can shift the future for all of us.”