Editor's Note: This story is part of a three-part series on menopause, incarceration, and the climate crisis as a collaboration with the authors of The Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause.
Prison was designed to disappear us, to reduce human beings to numbers in cells and statistics in files—bodies slowly fading from memory. Yet within these concrete walls, we have discovered something the architects of incarceration never anticipated: Survival means infinitely more than breathing. It means weaving networks of care that transform isolation into connection, desperation into determination, and the dying they call living into something resembling hope.
The system revealed its true nature last month, when Tammy collapsed during count. Her 52-year-old body finally betrayed her in ways that decades of concrete floors, processed food, and medical neglect had conspired to accelerate. We knew the medical staff would offer little beyond aspirin and institutional indifference, their clipboards more important than her crisis. What they didn't see and couldn't comprehend was how quickly we mobilized—like a NASCAR pit crew operating on pure instinct and love. Poncho unplugged her small contraband fan and carried it three cells down without a word. Carmen tore strips from her cleanest sheet, soaking them in precious cold water hoarded from the ice machine. I held Tammy's burning forehead while Sylvia whispered prayers in Spanish, words that seemed to cool and calm all of us in that suffocating moment.
This incident crystallized a truth we live daily: Our survival depends entirely on each other. We share fans with those who cannot purchase one from the commissary, these precious devices traveling our block like a mechanical heartbeat. From Tammy's cell during her night sweats, to young Destiny fighting surgical menopause at 28, to whoever desperately needs to breathe easier in air thick with desperation and unwashed bodies—these fans carry more than cool air. They carry the message that someone sees your suffering, someone cares whether you make it through another scorching night.
Beyond material sharing, we have mastered the art of reading each other's bodies like sacred texts. We recognize perimenopause in the way shoulders hunch from invisible pain, we understand when someone's silence mid-sentence means their mind is swimming in hormonal fog that guards dismiss as "attitude problems." We decode the subtle signs of diabetes, depression, and trauma that prison medical staff either ignore or criminalize. This literacy of care becomes our most powerful form of resistance.
This convergence of carceral violence, climate violence, and authoritarian detention regimes deepens the harm against aging bodies, turning menopause into a form of criminal suffering rather than a natural transition. Menopause justice and abolition converge in their insistence that no body is disposable, that life in transition is life worth protecting, and that liberation is measured by how we care for those who are aging, bleeding, healing, and transforming.
Abolition is not simply tearing down prisons and policing, it is the reimagining of a world where our bodies at every stage, including midlife and beyond, are held with care, dignity, and freedom. To call abolition "menopause justice" is to reject the systems that criminalize, punish, and neglect aging bodies, especially those of Black, Brown, queer, trans, immigrant, and poor people whose lives are too often deemed disposable.
Reform efforts consistently center the perspectives of those who've never lived this reality, creating solutions that sound good on paper but miss the mark completely. When advocates push for prison reform, they myopically focus on sentence reduction and reentry programs while ignoring the immediate health crises we face daily.
What good is a reentry program if I've been cooked alive?
Perhaps nowhere is this oversight more glaring than in discussions about menopause and aging behind barbed wire. While society debates hormone therapy and women's health advocacy, we're forced to navigate menopause without proper medical care, often dismissed or denied treatment for symptoms that make an already difficult environment unbearable. We age in dilapidated facilities designed for punishment, not care, feeling our bodies change while medical staff shrug off our concerns.
Until reproductive justice and climate movements truly center incarcerated voices—not just as statistics or afterthoughts, but as essential contributors to these conversations—their work remains incomplete. We are not broken people to be fixed, but experts on survival who understand what justice actually requires.
— Kwaneta Harris, former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist and Haymarket Writing Freedom Fellow from Detroit.
Prison was designed to disappear us, to reduce human beings to numbers in cells and statistics in files—bodies slowly fading from memory.
Cheryl Ward, who serves A New Way of Life Reentry Project as the SAFE Housing Network Organizer and is affiliated with "The Council (Free Her)" and "Freed To Heal", said her experience with incarceration echoes that of Kwaneta's. Care comes from the people they're housed with. Ward said, "When I first arrived in prison, the thing going on was they were sending women out to get hysterectomies. They were bringing these same women back the same day, and the common knowledge was we were to take care of them! We weren't nurses, but we understood it was our duty because we were sisters."
The systemic barriers limit access to gender affirming care across the states, making it a human rights issue. Transgender and non-binary people face significant challenges when it comes to accessing medically necessary care. Jack Jackson, a 58-year-old currently incarcerated transgender man in Texas, tells Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause that, though it is easy to gain access to hormone replacement therapy, that's where the buck stops. Jackson said, "I remember when I first got on T [testosterone], they were like, 'Now you have to sign this paper saying that you understand that this is as far as this will go, and that you will not be getting any surgery of any type.'"
"They Didn't Ask What We Needed"
In prison, we intimately know what it means to have our bodies controlled, surveilled, our choices stripped away, and our futures determined by others. Yet, when reproductive justice advocates gather in conference rooms and climate activists plan their next campaigns, our voices are conspicuously absent from conversations that directly impact our lives. The very movements that claim to fight for bodily autonomy and environmental safety systematically exclude those of us who experience the most extreme violations of both.
Even more troubling is how climate resilience work proceeds without acknowledging that we're trapped in buildings with no air-conditioning during heat domes, no proper ventilation during wildfires, and no evacuation options during floods. While environmental justice organizations fight for clean air and safe water in communities, they rarely extend that fight to include over two million people locked away in facilities that are themselves environmental disasters. We become invisible casualties of climate change, forgotten in concrete boxes that transform into ovens and gas chambers when disasters strike.
The disconnect between activism and our reality became painfully clear during the water crisis in Marlin, Texas. In April, activists celebrated when their complaints led the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to issue a boil water notice, requiring water to be "brought to a vigorous rolling boil and then boiled for two minutes prior to use for human consumption purposes." For the two women's prisons located in Marlin, the news was met with frustration. Incarcerated folks don't have access to equipment needed to boil water. We could've told them this if they bothered to ask us. Instead, those of us lucky enough to have outside financial support were stuck purchasing bottled water to brush our teeth and wash our hands and face. What stings most is that these self-proclaimed "activists" didn't ask what we needed before designing programs meant to help us.
Abolition is not just dismantling; it is building. Grounded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore's insight that "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions," this reimagining calls for systems that honor aging and menopausal bodies with care, community, and liberation.
- In New York, the passage of the HALT Solitary Confinement Act was propelled by the testimonies of older incarcerated individuals whose health collapsed under the isolation of solitary confinement.
- In Texas and Louisiana, families and advocates are suing prison systems over heat-related deaths, arguing extreme temperatures are unconstitutional neglect.
- Organizations like Families for Justice as Healing and A New Way of Life, founded by Susan Burton, provide reentry and housing models rooted in community care and dignity. As Burton reminds us, "When women come home, they need a place to heal, they need a place to dream."
Abolition is also creative. The creative power of each other through storytelling lifts the voices of elders, mapping a path forward from harm to collective care. Ritual of witnessing honors bodily transitions, from first bleed to last heat, in ways that state institutions cannot. Intergenerational memory recalls maroon midwives, knowledge of creating healing remedies with limited resources, and culturally rooted practices of community care. adrienne maree brown reminds us, "All organizing is science fiction," the act of building worlds that do not yet exist. By embedding menopausal bodies into abolitionist frameworks, we are crafting futures where aging is not punishment but a deepening of freedom, visibility, and love.
"From first bleed to last heat": Abolition as Menopause Justice
The federal and state prison population aged 55 or older has surged from just three percent in 1991 to approximately 15 percent in 2021. That is nearly 180,000 people in 2022 who are aging in structures built for containment, not care. In New York State alone, being 50 or older now accounts for roughly 24 percent of the incarcerated population, a proportion that has more than doubled since 2008. Carceral institutions also include ICE detention centers.
As of 2025, ICE detains nearly 60,000 people on any given day, the majority of whom have no criminal convictions. Transparency and accountability have never been part of ICE's design, which relies on secrecy and neglect to maintain its surveillance systems and its daily harms of detention. Investigations over the past two decades have documented family separations, preventable deaths in custody, coerced sterilizations, the withholding of medical care, and the detention of children in unsafe conditions. What has intensified in 2025 is not a rollback from transparency but a deepening of secrecy. Reports that once surfaced sporadically are now withheld almost entirely, and even Congress members face barriers to legally mandated oversight visits.
ICE is also expanding at an alarming rate. Internal documents obtained in 2025 revealed plans to double detention capacity from around 50,000 to more than 100,000 by opening or expanding 125 facilities nationwide, supported by a $45 billion budget increase. Many of these facilities are sited in climate disaster zones prone to flooding, hurricanes, or extreme heat. Advocates warn that this expansion, combined with entrenched opacity, escalates the risks for aging and menopausal bodies inside detention, where exposure to high temperatures, inadequate medical care, and unsafe living conditions are already well documented. The camp in Florida's Everglades, known as "Alligator Alcatraz," epitomizes these dangers. Detainees there report relentless heat, swarms of mosquitoes, flooding, limited clean water, and delays in medical and legal access. Lawyers have filed suits arguing that the camp represents not only a humanitarian crisis but also an authoritarian experiment in normalized cruelty.
For menstruating and menopausal people, these conditions carry particular and often unacknowledged harms. Limited clean water and delays in medical care mean that menstrual hygiene becomes nearly impossible, increasing the risk of infections and humiliation. Flooding and swarms of mosquitoes compound these dangers, while the absence of adequate supplies strips people of their dignity. For those in menopause, extreme heat intensifies hot flashes, night sweats, and cardiovascular stress, while vaginal dryness and atrophy heighten vulnerability to painful infections in unsanitary environments. These realities expose how detention regimes turn natural bodily transitions into sites of amplified suffering, while rendering menstruation and menopause invisible in official narratives and advocacy.
Menopausal and older bodies are especially vulnerable to heat stress, a reality that becomes starkly visible in prisons and detention centers without cooling infrastructure. A 2023 study showed that a 10 degree rise above seasonal norms leads to a 5.2 percent increase in total mortality and a 6.7 percent rise in heart disease deaths among incarcerated people. Extreme heatwaves can drive deaths up by 7.4 percent and suicides up by 22.8 percent. In Texas, up to 14 deaths per year are directly attributed to heat exposure in prisons. During the record-breaking summer of 2023, at least 41 incarcerated people died in facilities without air conditioning. Advocates argue these conditions are unconstitutional, and a federal judge agreed earlier this year, yet systemic inaction persists.
Abolition is not simply tearing down prisons and policing, it is the reimagining of a world where our bodies at every stage, including midlife and beyond, are held with care, dignity, and freedom.
In an abolitionist world, healthcare would embody the principles of reproductive justice, offering comprehensive and culturally competent care for menopausal people as part of the right to live and age with dignity. Housing would not be denied to those returning from prison but would be rooted in interdependence and dignity.
The denial of relief from extreme heat in prisons and ICE detention is not simply about the absence of cooling systems. It is the continuation of a carceral logic that dates back to slavery, when enslaved people were forced to labor under lethal conditions because their lives were deemed expendable. That same logic persists today, where incarcerated and detained people, disproportionately Black, Brown, immigrant, poor, and aging, are subjected to sweltering cells, untreated illness, and premature death, all under the justification that their suffering does not matter because they do not matter.
This is carceral violence.
An abolitionist future refuses this dehumanization. It is a future where the conditions that sustain life, including breathable air, clean water, shelter from extreme heat, and responsive and dignified healthcare, are guaranteed to everyone, including those aging and in menopause. It is a future built not on punishment or disposability but on care, interdependence, and liberation.
What We Demand
We call on our communities to recognize that abolition is not only about tearing down cages but also about building worlds expansive enough to hold our transitions, our elders, and our descendants. We name the Menopausal Multiverse as an abolitionist cartography, a map drawn from the wisdom of our bodies, our stories, and our movements. It is a living blueprint for a world where aging, bleeding, pausing, and transforming are honored as sites of power rather than pathology.
In this cartography, reproductive justice is inseparable from abolition. The right to parent, not parent, and to raise children in safe and sustainable communities includes the right to age with dignity, to experience menopause without shame, and to live free from cages and climate collapse. Liberation here means more than release from bars; it means the creation of healthcare systems that are free and intersectional, housing models that are cooperative and community-owned, and climate responses that prioritize those most vulnerable to environmental harm, including aging and menopausal bodies.
We must ask what it means to confront ICE detention and prisons as landscapes of reproductive violence, where menstrual products, hormone therapies, or even basic protections from extreme heat are treated as luxuries rather than necessities. We must imagine policies that abolish these cages while simultaneously investing in care infrastructures that center midlife and elder well-being. The Menopausal Multiverse urges us to move from survival to futurity. It is not enough to resist state violence; we must build a future where menopause justice is seen as one of the cornerstones of abolitionist struggle. This means dismantling every institution that thrives on disposability and replacing them with systems rooted in care, accountability, and interdependence.
The invitation is clear: We must map the future together. We must design an abolitionist cartography where our bodies are no longer criminalized, where aging is honored, and where freedom is measured by how well we sustain one another across every stage of life.
We demand immediate cooling legislation that recognizes extreme heat as cruel and unusual punishment. When your body temperature spikes to unbearable levels and the only air circulation comes from a small fan, you understand that this system was never intended for human survival. We demand comprehensive menopause care that includes hormone therapy, proper medical consultations with specialists who understand our bodies, the ability to freely access cooling devices, cold safe drinking water, and appropriate clothing that doesn't trap heat like these thick polyester uniforms that cling to our skin. We demand the immediate release of our elders—folks over 50 who have served decades and pose no threat to society, whose only crime now is growing older in a system that profits from their slow death. We demand an end to the forced unpaid labor that requires us to work in kitchens reaching 110 degrees, in laundries with no ventilation, in fields cultivating crops we can't consume because they're sold to major grocers, cleaning facilities with toxic chemicals while our bodies rage with hormonal chaos. This labor compounds our suffering, forcing menopausal bodies into conditions that would challenge healthy individuals.
Colette Payne, Director of Reclamation Project with Women's Justice Institute and a formerly incarcerated person, said "Quality and comprehensive care are largely absent in prison. For an abolitionist future, care looks like us caring for one another. We understand our own needs and must organize around issues that stem from listening to our communities."
Prisons are not designed to provide healing, support, or autonomy—they are designed to isolate and punish. The medical care available is often inconsistent, neglectful, or outright harmful, especially when it comes to gender-affirming care. For those of us imagining and building an abolitionist future, care cannot be something rationed or controlled by the State. Care must be rooted in community, mutual aid, and self-determination. It looks like us showing up for each other—not just in times of crisis, but as a daily practice of solidarity and survival. We understand our own needs better than any institution does, and we must trust that knowledge.
These are not requests; these are demands rooted in basic human dignity. Menopause is not weakness but a natural transition deserving honor, not torture. The public must join this fight because our suffering reflects systematic dehumanization. Your silence makes you complicit, but your voice can tear down these walls of medical neglect.
