Bans Off Our Bodies Rapid Response

“If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.” - Harriet Tubman

Attacks on abortion access are rooted in the legacy of white supremacy and a desire to control the reproduction of Black women and birthing people and other people of color.

Our Demands for Black Body Freedom:

We must address maternal health, wellness, harm reduction, and freedom disparities in tandem with increasing access to abortion to ensure that Black birthing people have immediate comprehensive affordable and affirming care for all reproductive realities.

  1. Bans Off Our Bodies: Abortion sanctuary legislation passes the DC council and US Congress.

  2. Black Migrants Matter Here: Access to abortion and funding for all people regardless of their citizenship status. Interrupt the deportation of Black women.

  3. Hands off DC: DC residents should not be used as political bargaining chips with or without statehood.

  4. If Southeast Don’t Get It, Shut It Down: We need access to quality birthing options in all settings east of the Anacostia River. Ensure full access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, and eliminate discriminatory barriers to health care for all people.

  5. Free Black Mamas DMV: End pre-trial detention as a false deterrent for crimes of access, poverty, and care, as we fight to decriminalize reproductive care. End the criminalization of Black women.. Develop and support non-criminalizing and non-coercive, voluntary, accessible, harm reduction–based, and trauma-informed responses to unmet mental-health needs, drug use, involvement in the sex trades, survival theft, and community and interpersonal violence.

  6. Care Not Cages: We must fund a 24-hour harm reduction center and decriminalize drugs. Ensure that Black women have access to resources that will enable them to escape and avoid interpersonal and community violence, including living-wage employment; quality, accessible, and affordable housing; immigration status; universal, quality, and accessible health care; comprehensive, culturally appropriate community-based mental-health care; universal, quality, and accessible childcare; and healthy environments.

  7. Biden Better Have My Money: Reparations for descendants of American chattel slavery, forced sterilizations, mass incarceration, and violence at the hands of white supremacists, and police.

We Keep Us Safe Demands:

  1. Our power and freedom come from movement, not courts.

  2. Step away from policing each other’s reproductive choices and care.

  3. Everyone and their neighbor needs to be an abortion doula.

  4. We must couple donations to abortion funds with donations to bail funds.

  5. Join Harriet’s Wildest Dreams in multiple campaigns for freedom in DMV. www.harrietsdreams.org

Press Inquiries: Contact Sharell Jarvis at sharell@harrietsdreams.org



TEXT this KEYWORd: Choice

To this number to take action:

(833) 454-1214