Loretta Ross

Loretta Ross is Associate Professor at Smith College and one of the twelve Black women who created the reproductive justice framework in 1994 at a meeting convened by the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in Chicago. She is co-author of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction, published by University of California Press in 2017; Radical Reproductive Justice, published by Feminist Press in 2017; and the originator of the calling-in practice that she now teaches at major universities, community organizations, and movement-organization training contexts.

Her organizing background spans the National Black Women's Health Project (later Black Women's Health Imperative), where she was Program Director for national programs, the National Center for Human Rights Education which she founded and directed, and SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective where she was National Coordinator. Her movement work spans over five decades, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through her current academic and training work at Smith and beyond.

Her mentor focus is reproductive justice in policy and practice. The framework itself — the three pillars of the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. The application of the framework to contemporary policy and movement decisions. The teaching of the framework to younger generations of organizers and scholars.

Her secondary mentor focus is the calling-in practice and conflict resolution that does not require disposal. The discipline of staying in difficult conversations rather than terminating them. The teaching of calling-in as a movement and community skill. The intergenerational movement transfer work that has been central to her practice across the past decade.

Mentees who book with Loretta come from three primary populations. First: organizers and advocates in reproductive-justice and adjacent movement organizations. Second: academics and writers working in fields that draw on the reproductive-justice framework. Third: emerging activists in the first five to ten years of movement work considering long-arc commitments.

Her style is plain and deeply intergenerational. She has a five-decade view on movement-organization history that she brings to mentor sessions when the conversation merits it. She is candid about the framework's history, its current state, and the structural work that remains.

Outside the Smith position she is a frequent lecturer at universities, community organizations, and movement-training contexts. Her calling-in workshops have been delivered at many of the country's largest movement organizations and at major university and corporate-training contexts. She has been recognized with numerous awards across the reproductive-justice, human-rights, and movement-organization sectors.

She is a founding-member of the Reproductive Justice Network here and contributes substantively to discussion threads on the application of the framework. She is also active in the Continent-to-Diaspora Reverse Conversations network on the topics of international reproductive-justice work and movement-history transfer between US Black-women-led movement organizations and African-continent counterparts. She hosts the Reproductive Justice Roundtable event series with Dr. Dorothy Roberts through the platform's events program.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV or movement-organizing summary, the specific question, and the decision in front of the mentee. She reads the brief. The session structure is loose; she works the question with the long arc as frame. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing the specific reflections, references, and next-step decisions discussed.

Her work across the past five decades of movement organizing represents one of the longest sustained Black-women-led movement careers in the contemporary United States. The trajectory spans the early reproductive-rights organizing of the 1970s, the founding and leadership of multiple movement organizations including the National Center for Human Rights Education and SisterSong, and the academic and training work of the current period. The long-arc perspective is real and is one of the central values she brings to her mentor practice.

The 1994 reproductive-justice framework founding moment is documented in oral-history interviews and in subsequent published scholarship. The twelve founders worked across a particular convening to name what would become a field. The framework has evolved across subsequent decades. She is open about how the framework has been received, what has shifted in its application, and where the current structural work needs to go.

Her calling-in practice represents a deliberate response to the call-out dynamics that have been observed in contemporary movement contexts. The practice is structured: it has specific steps, specific conditions for use, and specific limits. She teaches the practice at universities, movement organizations, and adjacent training contexts. Mentees who book with her can engage on the specifics of the practice.

Her work on radical reproductive justice specifically — the more expansive framing that connects reproductive justice to broader abolitionist and anti-imperialist frameworks — is part of the contemporary work. She is candid about where the field is and is not ready to receive those framings, and about the slow institutional work that has to ride alongside.

She has been recognized with numerous awards across the reproductive-justice, human-rights, and movement-organization sectors. The recognitions have not slowed her pace; the work remains the primary commitment.

Her engagement in the platform's Reproductive Justice Network as a founding-member contributor is foundational to the framework conversations the network holds. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of reproductive-justice history, calling-in practice, intergenerational movement transfer, and the radical-reproductive-justice framing are central reference points for the network. Her Reproductive Justice Roundtable event co-hosted with Dr. Dorothy Roberts has been one of the most-engaged events the platform has hosted.

The clinical-medicine-and-public-health workforce continues to evolve in ways that affect Black women clinicians and public-health practitioners specifically. The under-representation at consultant ranks in many specialties is structural. The clinical-bias literature continues to document differential treatment of Black women patients by clinicians regardless of clinician demographics, with the implication that Black women clinicians carry particular advocacy work for Black women patients alongside their general clinical responsibilities. The mentor practice connects specifically to the long-arc career questions that determine whether individual clinical careers progress through the senior bands or stall at earlier stages.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV or movement-organizing summary, the specific question, and the decision in front of the mentee. She reads the brief. The session structure is loose; she works the question with the long arc as frame. Mentees leave with written notes summarizing the specific reflections, references, and next-step decisions.

The platform's mentor infrastructure is designed to support the kind of long-arc mentorship that African and African-diaspora women have historically had to build informally across years and decades. The structured booking, the prepared briefs, the in-session discipline, and the post-session follow-up documentation make the mentor exchange durable in a way that informal conversations across career-arc moments often are not. Mentees who engage with the structure benefit from the discipline; the mentor practice benefits from the structure too because it permits sustained engagement across many mentees without the time-overhead of informal arrangement.