The Politics of Reproductive Violence

Shana is also the cofounder of the New Orleans Women's Health and Justice Initiative (WHJI)-a community-based organizing project centered on improving the social and economic health and well-being of women of color and low income women, while mobilizing communities to engage in reproductive and gender justice activism that challenges the violence of poverty, medical experimentation, housing discrimination, forced sterilization, economic exploitation, partner abuse, incarceration, environmental racism, and punitive social policies. While this is extremely important, when you identify the state as the main orchestrator of violence in the lives of many communities, it's hard to make appeals to the state to mitigate the violence the state is committing. Because the state is not going to mitigate itself.