A reproductive justice and healthcare case study about what we do, even when nobody asks us to.

We’ve been in this field for more than 20 years. From drafting accessible language frameworks that OB/GYNs use in health equity practice to publishing white papers in collaboration with Harvard and writing public-facing sexual health journalism, we actively build and expand the field in which we work

Over time, we’ve noticed two consistent things. Sometimes, people working in reproductive justice use jargon and acronyms that simply aren’t quite part of many Americans’ lexicons. For example: SRHR and TRAP (not the music). Other times, advocates can be so deeply plugged into what’s going on that they assume others are, too. They aren’t. Both of these limitations contribute to the same result: the field’s insights and analysis remain inaccessible to many people.

So, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022 via the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, we immediately understood the US would soon face a crisis of public understanding. Most Americans would understand something had changed, and that “something” was related to abortion. Far fewer would grasp the wider implications: how Dobbs would affect voting rights, interracial marriage, birth control access, IVF, marriage equality, immigration, birthright citizenship, and democracy itself.

Furthermore, on the Atlantic’s other side, we knew most Europeans would likely assume the anti-democratic forces brewing in the United States would never reach the same scale within the EU. We knew that assumption was wrong, too.

Four years ago, in 2022, the connections were already there. We saw them coming. We knew the harm would be swift, and we wanted to build a framework to communicate the full scope of that harm in an accessible and freely available form that would be grounded in both lived experience and institutional credibility. So, we spent two years researching, documenting, and building it.

How We Started

As a kid growing up evangelical in rural Illinois and Mississippi, our founder, Twanna A. Hines, was a recipient of abstinence-only programs. In fact, she built this firm based on her belief that people deserve accessible spaces to talk about sex, bodies, and rights without shame or judgment. That origin shapes everything about our approach to our report: it was formed by someone who grew up in the communities most affected by the rollback of reproductive rights, who then spent decades living and working between the United States and the European Union, and was living in the EU when Dobbs dropped.

When you grow up in the American South inside communities most harmed by policy failures, and then spend decades watching those same dynamics play out across borders, it becomes impossible to see reproductive justice as a domestic issue. You connect the dots more readily and see how systems are interconnected.

That was our frame. Because living between two continents means you can’t pretend forces are contained between either. Or, as the Director’s Note in the report states, “The attacks against bodily autonomy didn’t begin with Roe, Dobbs is not the end, and many of the fascists are friends who strategize across international borders anyway.”

What looks like a domestic legal setback in the United States can show up as a familiar pattern of democratic backsliding in Europe. Attacks on bodily autonomy and sovereignty don’t stop at borders. Neither should the work to defend them.

What Changed

From a US Legal Debate to a Global Rights Framework

Before our report was published, Guttmacher, Human Rights Watch, KFF, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and other institutions produced reports on the impact of Dobbs. Their data was indispensable. Legal analysis, authoritative. Most reports were written from inside the United States, for a US audience, about US law. What we brought was different.

Our founder co-authored Three Acts of Justice from Lisbon. Having lived between the EU and US since 1997, she had already spent years navigating the gap between how Americans understand their own rights and how the rest of the world sees them. 

We explicitly placed a US Supreme Court decision inside a global human rights conversation. By doing so, we created a report with our unique understanding, multiple lived experiences, decades of experience in reproductive justice, and hopes that people worldwide find it useful and grounding. 

From Field Jargon to Public Infrastructure

We used a theatrical structure: a prologue, clear acts, and a finale. Because stories move people even when statistics don’t.

We also included citation guidance in MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, AMA, and Vancouver formats because we knew academics, journalists, and healthcare providers would all want to use it differently.

We linked throughout rather than footnoting, because we were designing for digital readers who would click, share, and return. If a link broke in years post-publication, readers would search for more up-to-date information online anyway.

The discussion guide, the citation formats, the accessible language, the theatrical structure. All of it was designed to travel across sectors, disciplines, and borders.

The goal was not to speak only to people already deeply embedded in reproductive justice spaces. Choirs don’t need more preachers.

A program officer in Brussels. A faith community leader in Mississippi. A graduate student in Lagos. A communications director trying to explain to her board why this moment matters for the LGBTQIA+ community, too. Three Acts of Justice was written to be accessible to them all.

Remember: We started working on it in 2022. This was before the 2024 election, and years before many of the threats we predicted materialized. We were building a public health communications framework for understanding a crisis.

From US Policy Debate to Global Development Framework

All people, everywhere must experience bodily sovereignty. 

Three Acts of Justice demonstrates what happens when democratic institutions are held hostage by anti-democratic actors, and when the people most affected by policies have little or no agency in shaping them. Yes, it’s about Dobbs, but the conditions that made that ruling possible can, and do, happen on every continent.

Throughout all of our work, we are actively building a more joyful, free, and just world. To know whether those efforts are actually working, we measure it against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a universal framework for tracking progress. Take Three Acts of Justice, for example. We wrote a cross-border, multi-stakeholder resource that documents and disaggregates harm by racialized categories, ethnicity, and geography. It gives educators, advocates, and policymakers the evidence and language they need to push for systemic change. That directly supports SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being, SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 5: Gender Equality, SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, and SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.

In fact, its conception is itself an example of the kind of creative research and development infrastructure the SDGs call for in SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.

From Co-Authorship to Collective Intellectual Power Building

Who does the analysis matters. Harvard’s Rachel Florman was the other co-author. She and our founder were supported by our internal, multigenerational team that includes a graphic designer, impact writer and editor, executive coordinator, and social impact associates. Reviewers included anthropologist Dr. Jodi Skipper, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine’s Samantha Berg, and Black Professionals in International Affairs and Council on Foreign Relations Term Member Adom M. Cooper.

At our firm, we actively push young women and people of reproductive age to the front. Because who writes, edits, designs, reviews, and interprets an analysis is just as important as the analysis itself. Our flat leadership structure means the people who did this work weren’t handed a task from above. Everyone brought their full expertise to it, and that shows in the report. Three Acts of Justice was created to bridge movements, audiences, and borders. Its impact reflects not only what we wrote, but also who we are. This kind of collaborative, firm-level contribution to public knowledge was done because it needed to be. Not because anyone asked.

We knew exactly where reproductive justice was headed, and the funding landscape that could have pitched in to help cover the cost of producing the report hadn’t yet caught up.

Published on National Voter Registration Day, September 17, 2024. Our timing was strategy. That November, 92% of Black American women voted in the 2024 election to defend the very rights this report was written to protect. We wish others had joined in.

The Lasting Impact

In its first 90 days post-release, Three Acts of Justice was accessed by approximately 5,000 people across 35 countries and 41 U.S. states, including individuals at Harvard Law School, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Black Women for Wellness, and the Vera Institute of Justice. It traveled to Germany, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and beyond. It reached people working in healthcare, racial justice, human rights, climate justice, higher education, technology, law, journalism, and the political sphere. This is the result of deliberate infrastructure decisions made long before the report’s first word was written.

The report is free to download, cite, and share. It was designed to be used by nonprofits, INGOs, academic researchers, journalists, legal professionals, healthcare providers, community organizers, students, and international human rights organizations. The reach suggests it has already reached many of them.

We believe funders and their grantees, NGOs, UN entities, partners, and campaigns can act earlier and smarter when they have access to forward-looking analysis, rather than reactive reporting. Our report tells the story of how everything is connected, and what people in any field or any country can actually do to support positive change.

Two years later, it is still being downloaded regularly.

If you work at a UN entity, multilateral institution, or INGO, we’re interested in research, embedded partnerships, and consultancies that build this work further. Reproductive justice advocates must work with cybersecurity specialists, gun violence prevention experts, and communications professionals. Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice.

If you work at a foundation, partner with us on our next report. We already have a running start and partners on board. What we’re seeing so far points toward the same pattern: harm moves faster than frameworks do. We believe helping our field get the landscape right is more strategic and cost effective than strictly funding crisis responses after the fact.

If you work at a US-based nonprofit, and your team needs more than a report, get in touch with us. Perhaps you need a partner to facilitate how your organization thinks about any of these issues, communicates them to your stakeholders, or integrates them into your work.

You can work with our founder as a speaker, expert consultant, or strategic advisor—or bring the power of our whole firm to your team.

Start by contacting us here.