Introducing the Learning and Accountability Project

To our reproductive health, rights, and justice colleagues,

The years we’ve survived together under and out of Roe v. Wade have forced us to witness suffering, oppression, and injustice. We share in the grief of having to make impossible choices as advocates. We, too, have been addressing immediate harm while dreaming of a liberated future for all people to experience bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom.

This crisis has also revealed the vulnerabilities we, as advocates, are experiencing in a new era of pro-abortion policy work. We recognize outside interest groups and established political entities are entering our communities and co-opting efforts to restore abortion rights. They, and even leaders in our own movement, are purposely de-centering Black, Indigenous and Latine communities, people with low-incomes, LGBTQ+ people, young people, and other marginalized groups. As a result, advocates and allies in state after state are permanently amending their constitutions with Roe’s outdated and harmful limitations, forever inviting the government to interfere in our bodies and lives. This ties us to the past rather than building a better future.

In response to this troubling trend, the National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH) has convened a growing group of concerned advocates, providers, scientists, and allies to challenge the policies, practices, and systems that undermine true reproductive freedom. The organizations and individuals are advising on the inception of the Learning and Accountability Project (LAP), which will focus on creating culture change in our movement, education for the public and for movement advocates, and building strategies that support a landscape that centers marginalized communities who have historically — and currently — been left out of reproductive rights policies. This advisory group continues to grow beyond the list of signatories below.

Because ballot initiatives and campaigns are expensive and require a lot of resources, groups with big pockets, often without any ties to the communities, are drowning out the community voices and organizations that have been working on the ground for years. This project is an opportunity to equip advocates with research and tools to wage a campaign against compromise and to hold the movement (ourselves included) accountable to its values. We are committed to shrinking the gap between our values and our actions, and to doing it together.

Many of LAP’s co-leaders are organizations with roots in the single-axis white feminist legal and policy frameworks that venerated Roe. These frameworks perpetuated a reproductive health landscape that consequently erased and harmed BIPOC communities and other marginalized groups. The LAP advisory committee commits to holding itself accountable to these impacted communities and that history. In doing so, we aim to join in the work to dismantle white supremacy within the policies we champion and the processes in which we engage. This also means we remain in solidarity with decriminalization and abolition models spearheaded by expansive BIPOC communities.

As a collective, we are:

• creating a body of evidence, data, legal analysis and opinion research that supports expansive policy thinking, including affirming stances on later abortion care;
• building trainings that sharpen our legal and policy analysis, and ability to interpret polling data;
• launching public education and accountability campaigns;
• calling for widespread divestments from status quo initiatives, and pushing for a movement-wide shift to invest in expansive policies that center marginalized communities;
• and most of all, we are creating a safe space for willing advocates to think boldly and strategize together about how to build just and equitable reproductive freedom policies.

LAP is working in service to every advocate of expansive policy. Too many pressure tactics are stifling our ability to take advantage of historic momentum that followed Dobbs. We must answer the call from communities across the United States calling for true reproductive freedom without government interference.

We know our strategy is more effective when we can push together. This project is an effort to create a unified front in our quest to create a just and equitable reproductive freedom landscape that knows no state borders. We are heartened at how many of you have already reached out, eager to plug in. We know that together, we can co-create conditions that normalize bold ideas and expansive thinking at policy tables across the country.

The public has never been more with us, more willing to reject government interference in our reproductive lives and futures. In each election since the Dobbs decision, we’ve won. But voters can only vote for what we put in front of them. It’s time to offer something more.

In waging this campaign against compromise, we are aligning efforts to liberate abortion with reproductive justice values guiding our work. We hope you’ll join us. Sign up here to join the listserv and receive invites to upcoming programming including trainings, webinars, and other actions in service to any advocate pushing for expansive reproductive freedom policies that center justice and equity.

In solidarity,

National Institute for Reproductive Health (NIRH)
Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights (COLOR)
Dr. Colleen McNicholas, abortion provider
DuPont Clinic
Medical Students for Choice
Patient Forward
State Innovation Exchange (SiX)
Society of Family Planning

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