Advancing Solutions for Reproductive Justice
This series highlights some evidence-based policy solutions that can help advance reproductive justice.
Every person should be able to choose whether and how to have children. Everyone also deserves to have the supports they need to care for their children, keep them safe, and help them grow up as healthy as possible. This extends beyond the legal right to reproductive healthcare: it’s about reproductive justice.
Reproductive justice means every person has the right to:
- Bodily autonomy and privacy
- Have children
- Not have children
- Parent children in safe and sustainable communities
But barriers built in front of some people put reproductive justice out of reach. These barriers—often driven by issues of race and class, and built up over generations—include lack of access to quality healthcare and job opportunities, food insecurity, and poverty. These barriers are linked to health challenges and rising rates of maternal mortality, especially among people of color.
Key Findings
Research underscores the importance of strengthening family support programs and expanding access to promote health equity, with evidence-based policy solutions such as expanding Medicaid coverage, ensuring access to paid family and medical leave, and investing in essential economic supports like SNAP, WIC, and tax credits—all crucial steps toward advancing reproductive justice.
Health during pregnancy is deeply connected to maternal health before and in between pregnancies, making access to comprehensive healthcare—from primary care through postpartum support—critical to ensuring every person can experience a healthy pregnancy and birth. A growing body of evidence demonstrates how Medicaid supports maternal health, and how expanding the program could help advance reproductive justice nationwide.
- Expanding Medicaid reduces maternal and infant mortality, increases participation in preconception counseling and prenatal care, and reduces postpartum hospitalizations.
- A nationwide adoption of a 12-month postpartum coverage extension would benefit more than 25% of new mothers who are uninsured—including more than 33% of non-Hispanic Black mothers.
- In 2022, researchers determined that if the non-expansion states were to expand Medicaid eligibility, there would be a 29% reduction in the number of uninsured people.
State Medicaid agencies should prioritize comprehensive preconception care, improving prenatal care, optimizing care during labor and delivery, and ensuring continued access to care in the postpartum period.
Paid family and medical leave policies are essential for allowing working parents and caregivers to care for a newborn or newly adopted child. A growing body of research demonstrates how critical paid family leave is for advancing reproductive justice. These policies do more than help parents continue to work: they also improve the health of mothers and babies and help address health, racial, and gender inequities.
- Paid family and medical leave protects jobs for working parents, especially Black mothers, improves the health of new mothers recovering from childbirth, and reduces rates of infant mortality, low birthweight, and infant hospitalizations.
- Programs should offer 12-24 weeks of paid leave with full job protection, be universally accessible and portable, extend eligibility to all workers including independent contractors and gig workers, cover various family and health-related situations, and define 'family' broadly to include close personal bonds beyond biological or legal relationships.
Raising a family is expensive. Nutrition assistance programs and tax credits help people make informed choices about how, when, and whether to start a family. They help ensure caregivers have resources and opportunities to provide their families with enough nutritious food, a safe, stable home, and other basic needs while protecting against financial hardship. Research shows how these supports are critical for advancing reproductive justice.
- The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC): reduce the risk of preterm birth and infant mortality, improve infant birthweight, and boost children’s health and academic performance.
- Opportunities for strengthening WIC include extending eligibility for postpartum mothers and children, making permanent the increased Cash-Value Voucher benefits, reinstating pandemic-related service waivers, ensuring participation regardless of citizenship status, and advancing racial equity through culturally relevant foods and equitable program participation.
- Opportunities for strengthening SNAP include permanently eliminating work requirements, increasing benefit levels to cover modest meal costs nationwide, expanding resources for programs promoting healthier food purchases, and streamlining eligibility and enrollment processes with a focus on underserved communities.
- Tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit: lift children and families out of poverty, improve caregivers’ mental health, and help more mothers keep their jobs.
About these Resources
These research roundups provide an overview of significant takeaways, data, and policy recommendations based on RWJF-supported research, aimed at advancing reproductive justice.
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