Judith Hardes WGSS Reproductive Justice Undergraduate Student Award

With generous support from the Judith Hardes Fund in the College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is pleased to invite its undergraduate majors to apply for funding to support their reproductive justice work, including research costs, conference attendance, thesis support, community-based initiatives, internships, creative projects, and trainings.

Reproductive Justice (RJ) is both a critical feminist theoretical framework and social-political movement. Developed in the 1990s by Black women and women of color in response to the limitations of the reproductive rights framework, RJ accounts for historical and on-going reproductive injustices experienced by Black women, Indigenous women, women of color, poor women, queer people, individuals with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. As an intersectional framework, RJ focuses on how interlocking institutional forms of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, and heterosexism curtail reproductive freedom.

The four core principles of RJ are:

1. The right to have a child
2. The right to not have a child
3. The right to parent children in safe and healthy environments
4. The right to express sexuality freely without threat of coercion or violence

Bodily autonomy and an individual’s ability to control the material conditions of their lives are central to RJ. Scholars and activists identify several broad conditions necessary to ensure RJ, including access to a comprehensive sex education, a full spectrum of reproductive health care options, affordable housing, clean air and water, nutritious food, equitably funded schools and childcare options, living-wage jobs, paid family leave, and protection from interpersonal and institutional violence.