Believe in justice

We’re inspired by how Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the world a fairer and more equitable place than she found it. She never stopped believing in justice, and neither will we.

At Ipas, our vision is of a world where everyone can determine their own future. As RBG well knew, reproductive rights—including abortion rights—are human rights. We know too that reproductive justice, racial justice, climate justice, and economic justice are intertwined and indivisible.

Like RBG before us, we believe that the way forward is to persist and build our collective power—learning from the people who have inspired us most—to make real and enduring change.

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Our committed teams around the world are fighting for justice every day. You can support Ipas’s work to ensure that reproductive rights are human rights—for all people, no matter where they live. Please donate today.

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Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Reproductive rights are human rights, and true justice for all can never be about just one issue.

Why all social justice movements are intertwined and indivisible

#WhyIBelieveinJustice

The world is a complicated place. And we can’t build a just world for all if we devote ourselves to fighting for simply one issue.

Why?

As Audre Lorde said:

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

People have complex identities. These identities intersect, creating layers of privilege and oppression, ultimately impacting a person’s access to equity

So, for example, even if women’s rights are protected in every way under the law, a woman who is white and wealthy will have a very different experience accessing these rights than a woman of color who has fewer resources.

Knowing this, we can’t only fight for women’s rights and assume that will translate into a just world for all women.

We will predictably and consistently fall short if we are not working against all systems of oppression, like patriarchy, racism, stigma and discrimination.

We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, lawyer and civil rights advocate who coined the term “intersectionality,” in an interview with Time

Intersectionality defined: Intersectionality is a framework for conceptualizing a person, group of people, or social problem as affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. It takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences in order to understand the complexity of prejudices they face.

Source: What is intersectionality, and what does it have to do with me? www.ywboston.org

And this means that any single-issue movement (for racial equality, LGBTQ rights or immigrant rights, for example) intersects with many others. Its success or failure is therefore linked to these many other movements.

The bottom line

We need to look beyond the issues that motivate us personally and see how all movements for justice—racial justice, reproductive justice, climate justice, economic justice and more—are intertwined and indivisible.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights helps us do that. It clarifies that all human rights are indivisible and interdependent—meaning that you can’t fully enjoy one set of rights without all the others.

Reproductive rights, including abortion rights, are human rights.

And the right to an abortion does not exist independently. It relies upon people having other human rights: to health, to equality, to privacy and to live free from violence and discrimination.

To realize a world where this is possible, Ipas works to integrate abortion rights into the broader movements for health-care access, gender equality and social justice.