Journalism can learn from the Southern reproductive justice movement

Forecasting has never felt spiritually aligned for me — too much grasping for control, too much pretending the future can be summoned on demand. As a Quaker, I trust the slow revelation that comes from silent collective listening and action. I’ve spent the last seven months in a front-row seat to the decades-long fight for reproductive justice in the South. And what I’ve witnessed — what has floored me — is the community infrastructure built to survive political repression, misinformation, and scarcity induced by state abandonment. It is the most sophisticated, agile, humane information-and-care ecosystem in the country.

As Aja Arnold notes in her sharp, deeply reported critique of national media’s disregard for the South, this region has been treated as a testing ground for policies that later spread nationwide. BIPOC Southern reproductive justice organizers in particular have been fighting under higher stakes for so long. The ecosystem these organizers have built — an interdependent network of caregivers, independent clinics, abortion funds, practical support collectives, doulas, and legal advocates — is built to adapt instantly and center dignity. And I believe journalism has everything to learn from it.

Below are five practices from reproductive justice networks that could guide journalism in this era of political and technological upheaval.

1. Be rooted in material needs, and be agile. Reproductive justice organizations begin with the material: What will it take for this caller to access the care they rightfully deserve? Gas money or airfare? Food? Childcare? What clinic can serve them best given their gestation or other considerations?

The mission is not content; it is outcomes. And because they operate under ongoing political repression, these organizations have mastered flexibility. They adapt daily to new bans, lawsuits, clinic closures, and surveillance threats. These are core functions of their support organizations like the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF) and the Lawyering Project. While funds and clinics are working directly with people, NNAF leverages its resources to quickly interpret and act on real-time threats while also redistributing resources to its members.

Journalism could take this seriously by: making the center of your universe addressing material community needs, not abstract narratives. Building the muscle for rapid, principled adaptation via journalism service organizations. Studying how reproductive justice orgs create parallel infrastructures that can survive hostile conditions.

2. Be generative and responsive. Build what people actually need. Reproductive justice groups don’t just respond to callers’ immediate needs, they evolve with them. Where I work currently at Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, co-workers are piloting a childcare doula network because more than 75% of our callers are already parents. They expanded practical support because callers’ lives demanded it. We keep an eye toward how strategy can shift because people’s realities shifted.

The work is iterative, relational, and responsive — not pre-scripted.

This is a model for journalism to: create reporting, resources, and formats that respond to real community needs as they emerge. Build new structures when the old ones no longer serve. Let people’s lived realities — not editorial calendars — shape the work. Create pathways for community members to co-create and lead.

3. Fight misinformation with care, not condescension. In the reproductive justice world, misinformation is constant and dangerous.

And the response is never shame or dismissal — it’s care, clarity, deep listening.

Healthline/hotline workers are trained to meet fear with calm truth, to gently correct inaccuracies, to hold space for confusion, to ensure that people feel safer after the call than before. This is crisis communication as a form of deep care.

Journalism could model this by: meeting misinformation with patience. Building spaces where people can ask questions without humiliation and in turn go teach others. Treating information as a service, not a scolding.

4. Create interstate, cross-regional collaborations. Southern reproductive justice networks have also mastered something journalism desperately needs: a regional information and transportation ecosystem that works because trust has been earned over years of crisis. As the Guttmacher Institute’s 2025 data shows, as bans and restrictions intensify, people are increasingly forced to travel across state lines for care. The states with the harshest laws are linked in a quiet, efficient web to those with fewer restrictions — moving people, information, resources, and support across hundreds of miles. This isn’t theoretical collaboration; it’s survival logistics. It’s adapting together.

This is a model journalism needs: regional networks that see beyond state or outlet borders, circulate verified information quickly, build trust intentionally, and operate with the agility of people whose lives depend on it. (An emerging example of this is already happening with the response to ICE raids — indie news orgs and immigrant rights orgs have piecemealed tech tools to deploy patrolling teams, intervention and documentation of civil rights violations.)

5. Deepen your risk tolerance or get out of the way. After Roe fell and Alabama’s total abortion ban went into effect, the state’s attorney general Steve Marshall shared how he’d potentially further restrict access during a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show.

“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”

In response, Yellowhammer Fund (an abortion fund), West Alabama Women’s Center (a clinic) and others filed a lawsuit against Marshall to stop any such prosecution. In April, the repro advocates won their lawsuit and Yellowhammer was able to re-open their Abortion Access Hotline. Their hotline was closed for nearly three years, and in that time the org pivoted, bought a bus, and launched Repro Raven: a mobile way to provide free emergency contraception, condoms, pregnancy tests, period products, diapers, and connection for Alabamians.

This is just one very public example of hundreds of risks (often silent) taken by reproductive justice organizers.

If you cannot use your journalism to take risks and be creative in the face of injustice, then you are normalizing the conditions of fascism.