Black History Month 2024: Dr. Jallicia Jolly
“I would say my dream for true equity and justice for Black birthing people is to have access to the economic means, social protections, and structural and living conditions to give birth, live, and sustain themselves, being free of all forms of harm, including violence, inequality, and coercion.
When you think of mental health, it's the cumulative experiences that build up over time, that devalue your body, your mind, and your needs. And it is reinforced by systems and individuals that perpetuate a belief that your needs do not matter as much. The vision of what it means to birth with joy, and to access care — where health equity is an actual standard of care – is not our current reality. “
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a writer, poet, and reproductive justice (RJ) organizer who is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. She merges community-based research on Black women's health, grassroots activism, and political leadership with RJ organizing and practice in the United States and the Caribbean. Prof. Jolly is the founder and director of the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity, and HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective — a new interdisciplinary, medical humanities lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people.
A public scholar invested in research-informed political action, Dr. Jolly leads with justice and joy as her core intention while centering new legacies of equity and community care beyond inequality and violence. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships such as The Fulbright Scholar Program, Ford Foundation, Mellon Mays Foundation, the National Women’s Studies Association, Yale University’s LGBTQS Center & REIDS Public Health Fellowship, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, Boston Women’s Fund, and the Wagner Foundation. She has written for various media outlets such as USA Today, The Washington Post/The Lily, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, Rewire News, Ms. Magazine, Nursing Clio, and Black Youth Project.
This blog is made possible by a sponsorship from Sage Therapeutics, Inc. and Biogen Inc. All content on this page has been curated by the Mass. PPD Fund without input from Sage Therapeutics, Inc. or Biogen Inc.
February 2024 | Interviewed by Jessie Colbert, Executive Director, Mass. PPD Fund
For Black History Month 2024, the Mass. PPD Fund is honored to present a conversation with Amherst College Assistant Professor, researcher, and activist Dr. Jallicia Jolly on the history of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement, contemporary RJ scholarship and activism, and how it all relates to mental health and wellbeing for Black birthing people. Dr. Jolly researches, teaches, writes, and advocates around Black women’s health, grassroots activism, reproductive justice, intersectionality and HIV/AIDS, Black motherhood, obstetric violence, and much more, and serves as the Co-Chair of Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts, among other leadership roles.
In this very special interview, Dr. Jolly outlines her vision for equity and justice for Black birthing people, lifts up other leaders in the birth justice space, provides important history, and shares how she makes the link between scholarship and activism for herself and her students. She also shares how her own birth trauma catalyzed a growing interest in the connection between birth justice and maternal mental health.
As a reproductive justice scholar and activist, what is your vision for true equity and justice for Black birthing people?
I love this question. I think it's so important for us to think about vision, and to dream, and to enact those dreams in community with other people. I would say my dream for true equity and justice for Black birthing people is to have access to the economic means, social protections, and structural and living conditions to give birth, live, and sustain themselves, being free of all forms of harm, including violence, inequality, and coercion. That vision is informed by a reproductive justice and birth justice understanding of not just birth, but life across the lifecycle. Not just simply pre-birth, or during the pregnancy or gestation period, not just simply at birth, but even beyond that: what it takes to literally sustain a life.
Reproductive justice is more than simply access to legal abortion and contraceptives. It’s also, importantly – this is a part that I think a lot of policymakers and clinicians forget – access to the enabling conditions to not just bear, but raise, healthy children, and to do so while living our lives in safe and sustainable communities. So the same way I'm advocating for birth justice and reproductive justice in hospital clinical settings, I'm also advocating for clean water, I'm also advocating for housing security. I'm advocating for quality health care in general, that doesn't expose us to premature death. And I'm also advocating to be able to live in safe communities that are free from the violence of police brutality, or lead poison.
So, really thinking about how we can live, birth, work, and learn in contexts that are not ridden with so many inequalities of wealth and power and injustice that they undermine our quality of life. That’s my vision.
Beautifully said! Thank you for articulating all of that. As far as your activism with Birth Equity & Justice Massachusetts, can you share a bit about the history of the organization, its mission, and its current priorities?
[In BEJMA] I'm thrilled to be in community with some amazing actors in the state doing really transformative work in their local spheres of influence. BEJMA’s mission is to center Black and Brown leadership and the creation of broad and inclusive tables, and to elevate the voices and experiences of birthing people while advancing maternal health and reproductive health policy, and building community power through a lens of justice.
From that mission, the key takeaway is: expanding leadership, elevating voices, and advancing maternal reproductive health and policy in community, through the lens of equity.
For the broader context, we launched in the summer of 2020 with a focus on providing policy recommendations for equitable and evidence-based perinatal health care in the Commonwealth at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our first town hall was hosted by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Congresswoman Katherine Clark, State Representative Kay Khan, State Representative [now State Senator] Liz Miranda, and State Senator Becca Rausch. We also had pregnant and postpartum mothers, midwives, nurses, and researchers share their powerful stories describing their experiences and challenges for maternal health and wellbeing during the pandemic.
From that experience, we developed a report which provided key recommendations. It was instrumental because it sort of laid bare what we all assumed: that the pandemic would simply heighten the preexistent inequities. And there were key areas of erasure — Black people's experiences, their calls for advocacy, and the various institutional and organizational ways that they were deprioritized over time. And how that is only exacerbated when you have so much pressure on a healthcare system.
Since then, the leadership has changed, but the priorities remain the same. We have become a Black women-led reproductive justice coalition. We met for the first time in person since the pandemic in October 2022, to reframe and reclaim birth in community, while centering wellness, joy, and bodily autonomy. What was so phenomenal is that we brought together people from across the state who were invested in tackling this problem through their innovative lens and model of justice — folks who are addressing the issue from their various perspectives, lenses, disciplines, contexts, and communities. We are multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary, and so we bring together clinicians, researchers, community organizers, advocates, legislators, doulas, and other stakeholders, to really discuss how we can address, evaluate, and implement evidence-based interventions to improve birthing outcomes – while, importantly, addressing the structural racism and medical violence in the care that birthing people receive.
In this current stage of our work, we’re really focusing on how we can do this from a lens of deeper coalition-building and partnership-building, while building bridges across the silos in maternal health. So we can develop a more cohesive and collective way to address these issues, as opposed to kind of how it's done in a clinical context, where you have varying positions of power, but not necessarily always collaborative in how you're devising the responses to these complex issues. We received funds from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, which led us to a strategic plan to really form the foundation of what this work can be, and then were able to get funding from the Boston Women’s Fund to really activate this work.
That’s very exciting. How would you say BEJMA and your other activist work relates to your scholarship and teaching?
I'm glad you asked this question, because I don't think it's a question that academics get to be asked! But this is how I came into this work; I came into my writing work through organizing. So, for me, research, scholarship, teaching — you know, engaged work and pedagogy being in partnership with communities, none of that was mutually exclusive. It was always integral to how I saw myself as a scholar and as an organizer, and as a human.
One of the things that evolved from this approach to the work has been my lab, the Black Feminist Reproductive Justice, Equity & HIV/AIDS Activism (BREHA) Collective, which is really a medical-humanities interdisciplinary lab that bridges research, advocacy, student collaborations, and high-impact learning experiences on the health and movement-building of Afro-diasporic girls, women, and gender diverse people. And the goal is really to be in conversation with public health and scientific discourses, as well as public policy discourses and organizers. It’s like, how do you leverage the resources of higher education to be in service to what is happening on the ground? It’s a call not just for research, but also for action.
I use my teaching and my research to provide context, to give people a historical background to connect it to the contemporary moment, so that people understand that this isn't happening in a vacuum: here are the broader discourses and policies that have unfolded over time to lead to the cumulative de-prioritization of Black birthing people's needs. And then I provide students with exposure to and entrance into the work. Luckily, there are amazing [local] organizations that serve the collective power of reproductive justice that do have opportunities that facilitate students’ exposure and engagement to this work. It’s an exciting place to do this because the Five College Consortium is here, and we have a Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate, and it’s really popular. I'm also encouraged by the transformative work of organizations such as Collective Power for Reproductive Justice to create connections across RJ communities and networks while creating the structures of support to engage students and community members in the RJ movement.
Can you share how you see your current work fitting into the broader RJ movement?
This is a full-circle time to be asked that, because this year marks the 30th anniversary of the term. RJ was co-founded in 1994 when a group of Black women gathered in Chicago for a conference. They wanted to elevate their shared concern that the choices around parenthood and reproductive care were often constrained by things like income, housing, and the criminal justice system. And reproductive justice would have been excluded from the agenda at the particular conference that they were attending. The discourse of the conference was not only led by white women, but also it was heavily focused on choice. And for Black women, for Indigenous women, or for poor immigrant women, the context of choice was certainly confounded by the intersection of race, gender, and class.
Fast forward 30 years later, we may be facing slightly different issues, but there are continuities in the kind of violence and harm and coercion and state violence and inequality that is often experienced. There's certainly been active movement-building that has happened across the decades, but we've also witnessed a conservative backlash and white supremacist resurgence that seems like it's succeeding at the federal and legislative level.
So to answer the question of how do I see my current work fitting into the broader RJ movement, I’m focused on: how can you use intersectionality as a lens to look at the various ways that systems intersect to undermine access to the enabling conditions to exercise our human rights and sustain life? We can look at that in the context of the child separation system, as Dorothy Roberts describes it, and you can look at that in the context of the deportation regime – you know, the country's immigration laws. You could look at that in the context of reproductive health care, and the denial of quality care for certain groups, right? And how that's normalized. I'm really looking at, across these various systems, how do we see decisions being made implicitly – and explicitly – about who is fit and unfit to parent, and whose lives are deemed worthy of being invested in on an even basic level.
While a lot of conversation has been on how do we ensure that people have access to abortion, I think what's also important is that we shift attention to those who are literally raising and nurturing Black lives. What is their experience, in a world that says that some people are unfit to parent, and in a healthcare system that exposes some people to premature deaths more than others? It’s important then to consider: how do you honor life? How do you honor birth? And how do you sustain the lives of Black birthing people in a system that does not honor them?
Since the Mass. PPD Fund’s focus is on mental health, I’d love to hear your reflections on how you see the things that we work for in the birth justice movement – things like choice, bodily autonomy, and culturally congruent care – relating to birthing people’s mental health and wellbeing, particularly for Black moms?
I see an important link here. The idea of a joyful birth is not even discussed, because there's so much trauma. The vision of what it means to birth with joy, and to access care — where health equity is not just a theory and vision, but is, like, an actual standard of care that is reinforced by not just individual providers, but the entire institution — is not our current reality. And we also know that there's a significant relationship between birth trauma and mental health. I didn't know that before I went to give birth. This is something that I learned and researched about right after I came out of the hospital, because I wanted to know if I was experiencing this by myself. I first experienced it through my own lived reality.
I had deep structures of support before entering into [birth]. I had just joined as a member of BEJMA, I had amazing educators, organizers, practitioners around me. I had deep knowledge. I taught this thing [reproductive justice], I could lecture with my eyes closed! I had great planning about the resources that I wanted. I have an amazing partner who supported me along the journey. I had an amazing OB and staff that provided instrumental care before [my birth]. And then I went in and experienced deep birth trauma at Bay State Health in Springfield. That's certainly the reality that is not often named. While certainly it wasn't the majority of the team, there was the presence of disrespectful care that was administered. I wrote to the institution to complain about the disrespectful care that I received.
So when I think about this question around, how do things like birth justice, choice, and culturally congruent care relate to birthing people's mental health and wellbeing, I think about: what are the cultures of disrespectful care that are so normalized that it becomes incredibly difficult for someone even with a high SES [socioeconomic status] background, with an educational degree, even with deep networks to the birth justice work – where it becomes incredibly hard for someone to not just advocate for themselves, but to actually receive dignified care that makes them feel heard? I think that's the connection.
When you think of mental health, it's the cumulative experiences that build up over time, that devalue your body, your mind, and your needs. And it is reinforced by systems and individuals that perpetuate a belief that your needs, and that your concerns, and that you as a person in your body, in your humanity, in your future, does not matter as much. And of course, this is stratified across class, across race, across education background. We know that for Black women in particular, your education status and your SES does not protect you from the likelihood of poor maternal health outcomes. This is documented evidence, and there's ongoing data to prove, clarify, reinstate, reassert, reaffirm this finding. Part of birth justice and quality care is, importantly, respectful care that communicates that you matter, and your mental health and wellbeing matter.
Even if I'm not in the same space that I was in 2021, I will always remember that feeling that I experienced at a crucial moment of celebration of life. At a crucial rite of passage, at a crucial, life-changing moment in the life of my family and myself. I do believe that our silence does not protect us – and I have to name Audre Lorde – Black feminist lesbian, poet, author, and intersectional civil rights activist – who I love, and I have to name her and introduce her all the time! She says, My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt that I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still speaking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
There’s so much work to do to improve birth justice and bring it to scale. What are a couple of good next steps?
The first step is having spaces to talk honestly and openly about the impacts of reproductive injustices, birth violence, and trauma, not just on the advocacy work, but on the people doing the advocacy. Having space to name those experiences, and to heal and repair from that is incredibly important. I'm grateful for the people doing the healing work, the bodywork to remind us of how it feels to get back into our bodies, after systemic racism, violence, harm, and white supremacist violence in healthcare and beyond has done its very best to displace us from our bodies. That’s number one.
Number two, there's amazing work happening around policy and advocacy. I'm grateful to be in community with people who are doing this work, such as Tiffany Vassell around Neighborhood Birth Center, Dr. Ndidi Amutah-Onukagha with her Center for Black Maternal Health and Reproductive Justice, Emily Anesta around Bay State Birth, Dr. Jo-Anna Rorie around her midwifery advocacy work, and the powerful work of Dr. Favorite Iradukunda of The African Diasporic Culture and Women’s Health Collective, and so many others. Folks who are leading in collaborating around this work in their communities, working tirelessly on the frontlines.
I'm thinking also of Soraya DosSantos of Sacred Birthing Village, who is doing amazing work around the spiritual divinity aspect of reproductive justice, but importantly, the work she's been doing in Taunton around the migrants, particularly the Haitian population, that involves the full spectrum of reproductive care. And importantly, using birth justice and reproductive justice to challenge their neglect and deprioritization by the state and city. I think it's important to name the people who are already doing it as we also name the policy and legislation, because without the people, we wouldn’t know a lot of these policies.
I also think one of the things that can be done is culturally concordant care, safe care, and respectful care, while simultaneously addressing the underrepresentation [of Black and Brown providers] in healthcare settings. One way to start is in the context of mental health and that workforce, because I don't see a lot of clinicians who are making those links between birth justice and mental health. Investing in culturally responsive professional development that can address these gaps in research, but also these gaps in the provision of quality care. And not just among perinatal health workers, but also other people who interface with Black birthing people.
I would say equitable budget allocations, the decisions you make about what to invest in are shaping policy priorities. And just the wonderful advocacy happening right now around midwife licensure, doula support, and the critical policy for birth centers is an important thing that needs to be elevated. In closing, making more explicit links between birth justice and mental health is something that I'd love to continue being a part of in terms of conversations, policy, advocacy, and just organizing on the ground.