The Floor Was Never Enough
The future of reproductive freedom must be built on liberation—not patriarchy’s terms.
Three years ago today, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision—a ruling that didn’t just undo 50 years of legal precedent, but confirmed what many of us already knew: that the law had never gone far enough to guarantee true reproductive justice. Roe was always the floor, never the ceiling. And on June 24, 2022, even that floor was pulled out from under us.
Like 9/11, I remember exactly where I was when the draft opinion leaked—and again when the final decision came down. I sat in press conferences with the Mayor, heartbroken, afraid, overwhelmed. But I also felt a quiet kind of fortitude—a knowing, shared with the leaders around me, that we would not stop fighting.
That fear was not abstract. It came from reading the decision itself—especially the dangerous words of Justices Thomas and Alito—and understanding what was coming. And it has come: three years of cruelty and chaos and they are nowhere done. The reality is this: anti-abortion extremists—rooted in White Christian nationalism—have out-organized us for decades. While many of us celebrated narrow legal wins, they built a machine. And it’s still winning.
Earlier this year, just blocks apart in New York City, two very different gatherings unfolded: the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), and the "Conference on the State of Women and the Family" hosted by the Heritage Foundation (architects of Project 2025) and C-Fam (a designated hate group). At the CSW, activists strategized how to defeat anti-feminist movements. At the Heritage event, they celebrated Trump's declaration that there are only two genders.
But here’s what didn’t make headlines: for the first time, the official CSW political declaration made no mention of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). It had been included in the draft, but disappeared from the final text—quietly and deliberately. These declarations may seem symbolic, but they shape how countries write policy. The erasure of SRHR at a global level mirrors the consequences of the attacks we’re seeing in the U.S. It’s not just our fight—it’s the same playbook, used globally, with chilling efficiency.
And the truth is: we keep playing defense.
We’re still trying to win on their terms, in their language, within their framework. We keep fighting the patriarchy with patriarchal tools. We shout “my body, my choice” as if choice is the whole story. It’s not. That framing doesn’t disrupt the systems that make abortion inaccessible or parenthood impossible. It doesn't confront the structural rot—pronatalism, heteronormativity, and White supremacist patriarchy—that drives the anti-abortion agenda in the first place.
Look at one of the right’s latest moves. Trump is now calling for “baby bonuses” and “menstrual cycle education” to incentivize people to marry and have more children. Our immediate response? A counter-list of what moms really need—paid leave, childcare, economic security. I’ve spent years fighting for those policies, and I will continue to. But our reflex response still plays into their framing. It assumes people should be having children (pronatalism!) – but the only problem is lack of support.
What if we challenged the premise?
Not everyone wants children. Not everyone can have children. And not everyone should be expected to. We need a reproductive justice framework that centers freedom—not just choice. Dignity—not just access. A vision expansive enough to hold, and frankly be defined and led by, queer, trans, immigrant, disabled, and Black and Brown lives as worthy on their own terms.
The pronatalist push isn't just about babies. It’s about who gets to be a parent. Who is deemed “fit.” Who counts as family. The answer, in their world, is narrow: cis, straight, married White men and women. The same people who champion “family values” are ripping children away from their immigrant parents, criminalizing trans people for seeking gender-affirming care, and rolling back protections for LGBTQIA+ communities. They’re not pro-family. They’re pro-White Christian dominance.
They’re also not subtle. The push from the White House to encourage people to have more babies and incentivize stay-at-home motherhood reveals exactly how patriarchy is driving both policy and cultural narratives. If moms are being sent back into the home, we have to ask: who’s being positioned to lead? Who stays in the rooms where decisions are made? The men—specifically, White men. That’s not accidental. It’s by design.
Reproductive justice is not just about the right to have a child or not—it’s about the right to live freely and fully in our identities, bodies, and families, whatever they may look like. That’s the future worth fighting for. And three years after Dobbs, we can’t afford to keep playing defense.
Every step back on immigrant rights, every deleted reference to LGBTQIA+ people, every ban on gender-affirming care—it’s all connected. It’s all part of a larger vision of control. We cannot fight for abortion rights without fighting against that vision. We cannot separate reproductive justice from trans justice, from racial justice, from immigrant justice, or from economic justice.
I admit: I struggle with the how:
How do we grow the movement beyond our own echo chambers?
How do we resist the trap of competing oppressions and zero-sum narratives?
How do we stop erasing people from our platforms in the name of political convenience?
How do we interrogate what’s broken so we don’t just rebuild the same thing under a new name?
I know change is often incremental. But incrementalism has a cost—and too often, it leaves the most marginalized behind.
The Dobbs decision leaned on a revisionist history rooted in 17th-century English common law—written by White, cis men who enslaved Africans and hoarded power and property. That’s the legal foundation we're told to work within. And even as we fight to reform these systems, we keep crashing into the limits of what they were built to do.
So the question isn’t just how we restore what was lost—but how we imagine and build something that was never guaranteed to us in the first place. What might a future rooted in liberation—not compromise—look like?
