Abolition As the Only Reproductive Justice: A Conversation with Zoe Bambara

INTRODUCTION.

In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health (2022)—the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade—the criminalization of abortion has skyrocketed. Between 2022 and 2024, Pregnancy Justice reported over 400 cases charging individuals with pregnancy-related crimes. Last year, the Repro Legal Helpline fielded 2,500 calls from across the United States, with the top five states with calls to the Helpline being: Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and North Carolina. The Repro Legal Defense Fund spent a total of $2.5M on bail and litigation across 26 states.

The United States has a long and brutal history of punishing pregnant people, but the punishment for ending a pregnancy—or supporting another in doing so—is a clear escalation. In response, a critical conversation has emerged about the role of police, sheriffs, and prosecutors in perpetuating this distinct form of reproductive injustice.

In the sigh of relief that follows a prosecutor's decision to refuse abortion-related criminal charges, some in our movements have confused a ceasefire with allyship.

The problem is that this approach exceptionalizes abortion from the rest of carceral reality. It asks only one question of the State: "Do you promise not to wield this specific tool of oppression against this specific group of people?" And with that single question answered in the affirmative, agents of incarceration become partners, allies, or even friends — platformed during our gatherings, in our media, at our organizations, and on our nonprofit boards. 

We ignore that a prosecutor who refuses to charge a person for ending a pregnancy will, on the very same day, fight to keep a pregnant person in a cage—a cage where they will be shackled during labor, denied essential prenatal care, and coerced into procedures they do not want. If our movement's engagement with carceral realities begins and ends with the narrow exception of abortion, we have not engaged with the reality of Reproductive Justice at all.

ABOUT ZOE + THE INTERVIEW.

Zoe Bambara (she/her) is a certified full-spectrum doula, community organizer, writer, and co-founder of the Toni Cade Bambara Community Arts Center. At present, Zoe is a prison doula and childbirth educator, traveling across Georgia to provide support to incarcerated Georgians during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Through this work, she has witnessed firsthand how routine practices like shackling during labor, reproductive coercion, and denial of abortion access are not anomalies in Georgia's prisons—they are the status quo.

Through this conversation, Zoe (ZB) and I (JO) attempt to move beyond the myth of the "prosecutorial ally" toward a genuinely abolitionist Reproductive Justice. We explore how abortion exceptionalism sidesteps carceral reality, why the core function of prisons is antithetical to building the communities we deserve, and how abolition sharpens our shared commitment to bodily autonomy for everyone.

Our anchoring question is this: Can you be an accomplice to Reproductive Justice while wielding the power to incarcerate, separate families, and deny medical care—as long as you agree to look the other way on one specific charge?

UNDERSTANDING THE MATERIAL CONDITIONS FOR PREGNANT INCARCERATED PEOPLE IN GEORGIA.

To talk about abolitionist Reproductive Justice is to first reckon with what reproductive care actually looks like inside prisons and jails. The conditions that incarcerated people experience during pregnancy are not merely inadequate—they are absolutely depraved.

ZB: "Jail is disgusting. It doesn't matter who you are [out here], it's disgusting. The water's disgusting. The environment is disgusting. [I]t's literally the worst place imaginable for pregnant people to be. And so you're going through the first trimester, you're going through morning sickness, you're going through all these things. Your body's already sensitive. So the smells and the water—like all of that's already making them nauseous and unwell—and then they're being malnourished too. The food there is not up to par. It's usually molded, rotten, and not cooked all the way."

Jails and prisons exist, by definition, as sites of punishment. Every aspect of the environment is intended to dehumanize, to torment, to degrade, to remind the people inside that they have been totally stripped of their personhood. 

However, we are told from the time we are very young that the punishment is only supposed to be the time—the loss of freedom, the structured schedule, the separation from community. Colloquially, included: "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime." Following that logic, food should still be edible, medical care should still be competent, and family contact should still be possible. Right?

JO: "Being here [in prison or jail] is supposed to be a punishment. Every aspect of everything you interact with is a punishment…[w]hich I don't think that people fully grasp unless they're doing work like you are…[B]y virtue of this [prisons and jails] being our response to social ills, all of this has to be part of the punishment as well. You can't have the conditions that are [characteristic of] prisons and jails and then think that you're going to get really great healthcare somehow."

ZB: "I've talked to so many moms where they're like, 'This is my punishment. This is what I deserve.' And it's like, you deserve food that you can actually eat. You deserve health care and equitable health care. That's what's so hypocritical about not even just the state but this country—the Global North [overall]."

One of the most glaring hypocrisies that emerged during our conversation is the apparent disconnect between the rhetoric of caring about mothers and "unborn children" and the material conditions imposed on pregnant people and mothers in cages.

ZB: "They claim to care about unborn children, so to speak, but then they will malnourish a pregnant person their entire pregnancy. Of course, your body needs nutrients to give birth. And so you're malnourishing the mother throughout her entire pregnancy, and then the baby—it's not a healthy birth. It's a traumatizing birth because they're not getting the care that they need while they're pregnant."

This hypocrisy is front and center in both of our daily lives. I reside in Texas, where abortion is totally banned. Zoe resides in Georgia, where abortion is banned after six weeks—before most people even know they're pregnant. In both states, maternal and infant mortality rates are among the highest in the country. In both states, the rate of women's incarceration continues to climb. In both states, mothers and children are denied access to basic necessities like nutritious food, clean water, and adequate healthcare. The same politicians who claim to be "pro-life" are the ones who defund prenatal nutrition programs, refuse to expand Medicaid, and maintain the carceral conditions that make pregnancy a life-threatening experience for incarcerated people.

Zoe has been going into Georgia jails and prisons for nearly two years now. She's seen doctors who are supposed to be providing OB/GYN care but don't have that specialty, who prescribe the wrong medications, who perform ultrasounds without knowing what they're looking for. If a pregnant person needs to see an OB/GYN or a high-risk specialist, they never know when they'll be taken—or if they'll be taken. Death, often, feels more likely, if not known to be a certainty.

Many of the people Zoe works with are not first-time parents. They've been through pregnancy before – some prior to their incarceration and others multiple times during their incarceration. For these reasons, Zoe frequently instructs them that their lived experience matters far more than what a doctor on the inside says about their pregnancies.

ZB: "[I]n the past two years, I want to say I can count on maybe one hand how many first-time moms I've met—first-time parents. A lot of them already have children. So I tell them that their lived experience means more to me than anything else. I don't care what your doctor's saying [in] there. [Y]ou've been through this process before. What is your body telling you? But all that to say, the care is not consistent. It's not up to par. If they were out here getting care, that doctor would no longer work [because it's not their specialty]. It's like, that's not acceptable [by healthcare standards] out here, but it's somehow acceptable [in] there."

What Zoe is describing—and what too many well-intentioned advocates miss—is that you cannot separate these conditions from all others associated with incarceration. If the punishment is the deprivation of a person's dignity, then pregnancy while incarcerated will continue to mean shackling during labor, denials of adequate nutrition, and the indifference of medical staff. It's all of it, down to the last detail. 

The states that claim to care most about "life" are the same states where prisons and jails are both the most plentiful and the deadliest for pregnant people. While it's absolutely a contradiction, it is also the point.

UNDERSTANDING THE GAPS BETWEEN LIVED EXPERIENCES OF INCARCERATION AND PUBLIC POLICY

If the conditions inside prisons and jails are this horrific by design, then what are we to make of the policies that supposedly exist to protect incarcerated pregnant people? Right now, it is a violation of federal law and, in roughly 40 states, a violation of state law to shackle an incarcerated person during birth. Yet personal accounts, media reports, and ongoing litigation confirm that this practice continues in prisons and jails across the United States.

ZB: "I truly believe that this may be a controversial policy, when it comes to this work, it doesn't really matter if we're not in the jails making sure that things are being implemented. Georgia has an anti-shackling law. You can't be shackled in your second and third trimester. Do you think every jail is doing that? I'm not in every jail. I can't tell you that."

Zoe then referenced California, where advocates recently passed legislation requiring (among other things) that pregnant people be given two water bottles per day. But when she spoke to doulas who had worked on that bill, she learned that the water bottles were being left in hot storage facilities—useless, if not actively harmful due to the plastic leaching from the bottles.

ZB: "If you don't have people that are inside these spaces making sure that things are moving, then it's just a whole bunch of bullshit, to be honest. If no one's making sure that things—people are not sticking to their word. Because I'm not going to create these policies to keep these jails and prisons in check and then leave it up to them [in the jails and prisons] to do it. We needed policy to begin with. So I'm not going to leave it up to them to make sure it's being implemented. That's stupid."

The gaps are everywhere. Moms stuck in transitional pods without double mattresses or double trays. Jails on lockdown all day, preceding and continuing since the start of the COVID pandemic. No tablets to connect with family. No money on their books to make phone calls.

If you pass a piece of legislation that claims to make incarceration "more humane" —which we're already clear is impossible—and you leave the same institution that you've condemned as immoral to monitor itself, you haven't done anything. You've created an imaginary prison—one that exists on paper but never materializes in practice.

This is not an argument against policy. There are people today who will not eat without food stamps tomorrow. But policy without presence is hollow. Policy without people on the ground making sure it's enforced is a performance. And the organizations that pride themselves on policy wins too often stop there—celebrating the bill signing, the press release, the legislative victory—without ever stepping foot inside the facilities where those policies are supposed to be protecting real people.

ZB: "We need resources to back [up] letting birth workers into these spaces. We need more transparency. We might not get it, but at least I would feel a little bit better if we could have a doula who's aligned in every jail across this country, and we're also able to connect with one another to know what's going on and how we can move forward, and learning from each other, because there's so many gaps."

What Zoe is describing is not a failure of policy—it's a failure of movement infrastructure. We have built organizations that can lobby, that can draft model legislation, that can testify at hearings. But we have not built the relationships, the accountability mechanisms, or the on-the-ground presence that would actually make those policies matter.

ZB: "Do you think I want to go to jail every week and talk to cops? No. That's terrible. That's not fun for me. But I also understand there's a group of women that look forward to seeing me every week. And not just like childbirth education—or I've even had moments where I'm bringing in food and I'm trying to rush them to eat because they just want to talk. Like, they just need to know that people have their back."

It should not be nearly this challenging for us to, in fact, have their backs. While it's easy to buy into the false separation between "the innocent" and "the criminal," Zoe explains that many of us are likely one moment away from incarceration at any given time.

ZB: "I've had moms apologize to me [when I'm there]. And I'm like—'Girl, what the hell are you apologizing to me for? You're trying to survive in a system.' And I always tell them, I'm one road rage incident away from being in the same place you are. Don't you apologize to anybody in here. We're all just trying to survive."

"Crime is not real. I always say you can make yellow shoes illegal tomorrow, and it may not stick, but it can stick for five minutes. But if I go out there in yellow shoes while it's in the law, I'm going to jail. So it's like we have to build more systems of—not even—but just more communities of care. We're not going to be able to fill every gap, but at least we're attempting to."

BUILDING MUSCLES TO DISCERN BETWEEN OUR OPPOSITION AND OUR ALLIES

This brings us to the question of who we build those communities of care with. If policy without presence is hollow, and if presence requires navigating systems we hate, then who are our actual allies and co-conspirators in this work?

Our position that policing and imprisonment in any form is incompatible with Reproductive Justice is frequently dismissed as "purity politics": You're never satisfied with anything. We're never going to get anything done this way. We can't let perfection be the enemy of progress.

But the problem isn't perfectionism, or the height of our expectations. We are demanding exactly what is owed to us. Reproductive Justice, at its core, is built on the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities. Prisons, jails, and policing are antithetical to that third pillar. You cannot build safety through cages. You cannot sustain a community through surveillance and punishment. Yet we have been conditioned to believe otherwise—conditioned to accept that our society can only run on punishment and the fear of it.

Women are the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the United States. Studies show that up to 95% of incarcerated women have experienced domestic or sexual violence during their lives. This trauma functionally pipelines women into prison—whether through criminalization for acts of self-defense against abusive partners, or through survival strategies that the state labels "crimes": stealing to feed oneself or one's child, using illegal substances to cope, trading sex for shelter or money. The system doesn't respond to trauma with care—it responds with cages.

And yet, in movement spaces, we entertain the idea of "unexpected alliances" with those whose core function is to fill them with our loved ones?

JO: "There was no such thing as an RJ-oriented prosecutor, police officer, whoever, because somebody is in jail experiencing reproductive violation now. That person who is in jail—their offense might not be having an abortion, providing an abortion, texting their friend about abortion—whatever it is that they decide is a crime about abortion tomorrow. But they're in jail for something."

The difference between us and the person in the cage is not morality—it's luck. Most of us have done something that could land us in jail. We just haven't been caught. We speed. We smoke weed. We set off fireworks in the summer. We do rolling stops at stop signs. Cognitive dissonance is the only explanation for what could possibly allow us to wash our hands of the people who are experiencing reproductive violations inside the very systems those prosecutors uphold.

JO: "Too many abortion advocates are approaching this discussion with the idea that all our movement is responsible for is making sure that the people who get violated in those structures aren't getting violated because they had an abortion. As if that is the extent of what Reproductive Justice is supposed to mean."

ZB: "It kind of feels like eugenics a little bit. To quickly support prosecutors when it comes to criminalization of pregnancy loss, but when it comes to actually helping people who want to continue their pregnancies and are going through [that] and are part of a particular class or race—and now crickets—it feels really disgusting to me."

This is not a matter of being a political purist. It's a matter of being honest about what these systems do. A prosecutor's core function is prosecution. A cop's core function is policing.

This position does not immobilize us. Zoe deals with prison and jail staff every time she walks through the doors. Her ability to see them for who they are only sharpens her.

ZB: "Even in movement spaces, you're going to deal with people who you would never be friends with and who you don't like. But that's not what the focus is here. It's the people. So, it's the same thing in these systems. It's the people who are my focus."

She gave an example: a mom who lost 40 pounds in three months. Zoe and another doula brought in food to help her gain weight so she wouldn't be put on bed rest. That meant dealing with people at the jail to get permission.

ZB: "Those aren't my comrades. But that's not even my focus going into it. I'm thinking about her and her delivering this baby. That's where my focus is."

The muscle for discernment between allies and our opposition is built by being laser-focused on who you are accountable to. Zoe's measure of success is simple:

ZB: "If the hood knows me, I'm good. If the niggas know me and I'm walking down the street and they're like, 'What's good?'—I'm straight. That's how I know I'm fulfilling what I'm supposed to be doing. The people that I continue to be in community with and advocate with, they know me and they put their trust in me."

And it really is that simple.

ABOLITION AS A MANDATE FOR REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE PRACTITIONERS

Abolition is not abstention. It's not pretending these institutions don't exist. It's not standing at a safe distance, pointing at the evil thing, and going about your day. The idea that, because you're an abolitionist, you just leave people to figure out survival on their own and maintain your strong political objection from way over here—that's not a political practice.

As praxis, abolition requires that we show up wherever in the world our people are. Not where we wish they were. Not where they'd be in a world without cages. But where they are right now—in jails, in prisons, on parole, on probation, navigating systems that were never designed to keep them safe.

This brings us to a question that we rarely answer from the affirmative: What are we actually building, and how is what we're building serving our people?

ZB: "I've yet to see something about how to get an abortion when you're on parole or on probation. I would love to see something like that. Or having an abortion doula that's centered on helping people who just got out of jail or out of prison. That's the type of stuff that I would like to see."

She's calling for a dedicated group of advocates focused specifically on the needs of pregnant people who are incarcerated or recently released—not as a replacement for abortion work, but as a necessary complement.

ZB: "If you want to keep doing abortion work, I think it's very important—you should still do it—but there needs to be a group of people who are also doing this work as well."

And she's calling for organizations claiming to be RJ-centered to start talking about the systems they've been ignoring: family policing (the child welfare system), the conditions pregnant people are living through in custody—not just pregnancy loss criminalization.

ZB: "They need to talk about not just pregnancy loss, the criminalization of pregnancy loss, but also pregnant people who are currently incarcerated and the conditions that they're currently living [in] across the country—but especially in the South. Even thinking about the heat wave that we've been having—jails and prisons, I always say: if it's cold outside, it's freezing in there; if it's hot outside, it's hell in there."

This is the work of abolitionist Reproductive Justice. It's not waiting for the revolution. It's showing up, every day, in the spaces that the State intends to make isolated. It's recognizing that we are all closer to incarceration than we think. It's building communities of care that can hold us all—not just the people who have "luck" on their side, and will likely never see the inside of prison or jail.

The revolution will not arrive fully formed. It will be built in the gaps—in the moments between policy and birth work, between rhetoric and relationship, between the world we have and the world we deserve. It will be built by people who refuse to look away, who refuse to settle for half-measures, who refuse to mistake proximity to power for alignment with our values.

ZB: "I do dream of a better world, and it is coming. But I always say too, there will be no revolution if we're the only ones with pitchforks."

She's right. The work is not for the few. It's for all of us—and it demands all of us who claim to believe in Reproductive Justice. Not as saviors, not as theorists, not as distant critics. But as people who show up, who build trust, who stay in relationship with the ones the system tries to make invisible.

That is what abolition asks of us. That is what Reproductive Justice requires. And that is what we owe each other.