BY JAMES RIVER ROBBINS
I was at an educators’ union meeting recently when a member raised the issue of reproductive care. Their argument was simple: With institutions and governments cutting away at members’ reproductive rights, the union should stand behind its members and, at minimum, connect them with accurate information about reproductive health. Before I could get a word in, the room filled with opposition. The refrain was always some version of the same sentence: “That’s a nice thought, but it’s not in the union’s purview.”
As a reproductive justice scholar and clinic escort, I am no stranger to pushback on this topic; I have been threatened and assaulted over it. I expected debate that night. What I did not expect was active dismissal and an assertion that reproduction is irrelevant to labor, that the union need not even consider the question. This response is not neutrality; it is a political position that defends the status quo and reinforces the underlying issues challenging reproductive rights.
It is also wrong, historically, practically, and especially in education. Reproductive justice is a labor issue because reproduction affects and is affected by the conditions of our work.
Consider what is demanded of faculty in higher ed. The academic job market is national, and often the difference between employment and unemployment is a willingness to relocate—I know, I’m on that market right now. As of this writing, thirteen states ban abortion outright and four restrict it after six weeks, before most people know they are pregnant. Accepting a job increasingly means accepting a state’s reproductive restrictions along with it. Our health insurance is tied to our institution, which decides what reproductive care is covered and where. Graduate assistants often earn stipends below the local cost of living, and an unplanned pregnancy on a $20,000 stipend is a financial tragedy. Higher ed structures around tenure, promotion, and teaching are not consistently made with reproductive lives in mind.
Now, the attack has reached the classroom and scholarship itself. The current federal administration has cut funding for reproductive health research and stripped accurate public health information from government websites, replacing some of it with politically motivated misinformation. State legislatures are dictating what can be taught in public colleges and universities. Unions already recognize academic freedom, the freedom to research and teach without political interference, as core to their mission—if a government can censor reproductive health research and scrub the data the public rely on, then unions are already in this fight.
The history of American labor tells us that “purview” has never been a fixed thing. For decades, unions excluded women and Black workers, and “not our purview” was often the language of those exclusions. Then, when they needed to, and members demanded, unions changed course. Unions helped power the civil rights movement; the UAW supported the March on Washington. Union women, tired of being told their concerns were secondary, founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974 and pushed organized labor behind the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. Today, family-friendly bargaining, parental leave, sick leave, and dependent healthcare are so ordinary that no one thinks to call them outside the union’s scope.
In fact, since the Dobbs decision, unions across sectors have already bargained reproductive healthcare protections into contracts, including coverage for members who must travel out of state for care. Graduate worker unions in the University of California system have made reproductive health a bargaining priority. The AFL-CIO itself made the following statement: “Access to reproductive healthcare is critical for women to be able to work, earn more money, and make our own decisions about our lives and careers. That’s why access to good healthcare, including reproductive healthcare, is a key collective bargaining issue in our union contracts,” said Liz Shuler, the federation’s first woman to serve as president. When someone says reproductive rights are outside the union’s purview, they are not describing the labor movement. They are describing their own reluctance.
Reproductive justice, as the women of color who built the framework defined it, is expansive: the right to bodily autonomy, the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. A reproductive justice–focused higher ed union would thus fight for childcare, sustainable campuses, insurance coverage for abortion, etc. The very minimum it should offer is advocacy and accurate, accessible information about reproductive care and rights. These are not political endorsements, but responses to the basic needs and issues of members.
Some will say this is what Title IX is for. But Title IX focuses on students, not faculty and other workers, and, for all its value, mostly offers pregnant students some accommodations and information while providing limited protections from sex-based discrimination and harassment. It provides little advocacy when reproductive rights are infringed, and it does almost nothing for the financial, social, and political factors that shape nearly every reproductive decision. Rights on paper are not the same as the power to use them. As Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts put it: “Liberty protects all citizens’ choices from the most direct and egregious abuses of government power, but it does nothing to dismantle social arrangements that make it impossible for some people to make a choice in the first place.”
Dismantling those arrangements is what unions do. A right to wages means little until bargaining makes those wages livable. A right to healthcare means little until bargaining makes care accessible. A union that fights for reproductive healthcare access is not wandering outside its purview. It is fulfilling one of its fundamental duties: making sure a right its members hold in theory is one they can exercise in fact.
Every expansion of the purview of union activism started this way: a member raising an issue under political attack, and being told no. The women who founded CLUW were told their concerns were secondary. The workers who pushed their unions toward civil rights were told to wait. The meeting I attended was not the end of an argument, but only its beginning. A union’s purview has never just been about bargaining. The purview is the members, and members do not stop having bodies when they clock in.
James River Robbins (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in applied medical anthropology and MA student in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of South Florida. His dissertation examines language access in abortion care for Spanish-speaking Latine communities, and he serves as communications chair of USF’s Graduate Assistants United, bringing reproductive justice and intersectionality frameworks into his labor work as well as his research.
