Freedom for Every Body: How Feminist Health Centers Built and Preserved Bodily Autonomy in the United States

With the United States’ 250th anniversary in full swing, you’re likely to read a common narrative about what freedom means and the men who built it. But our nation was not built by men alone. Throughout our history, women have been at the forefront of bodily autonomy movements, an essential type of independence. Without bodily autonomy—the right to make decisions about our own lives, bodies, and futures—freedom and independence simply cannot be realized. It is imperative that we uplift the foremothers who have been essential to making the abstract concept of bodily autonomy real for everyday people.

Independent reproductive healthcare clinics like Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics are powerful examples of women defining freedom on their own terms. Although these clinics were established on opposite sides of the country, both were created to expand freedom and autonomy to people with uteruses, using reproductive health care as a key tool.

As we move through the United States’ 250th anniversary, we’re resurfacing Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics’ history and how we’ve tenaciously carved a path toward freedom and bodily autonomy. Those freedoms include the ability to have an abortion, choose your own form of birth control, access care, and raise families with dignity.

These two geographically opposing clinics symbolize the present-day dual realities for reproductive health clinics nationwide. In Atlanta, Georgia, Feminist Center faces significant barriers to reproductive liberation including a brutal six-week abortion ban. In Yakima, Washington, Cedar River Clinics benefits from pro-abortion policies but face ever-growing needs due to fractured reproductive rights across the country. Despite our differences, both of our clinics fearlessly demand, defend, and expand freedom and autonomy in the United States. And it is essential our voices and histories are heard.

Space to Restore Connection and Community

Reproductive freedom stems from a larger movement that sees care as a community creation rooted in survival and self-knowledge of the body, guided by people who share similar experiences. This movement has existed for centuries, in many places, and in many forms: enslaved African women offering cotton root to bring on a period, suffragettes passing out illicit condom pamphlets, a Spanish-speaking doula translating for her pregnant patient.

The theme of this movement is universal. Freedom is more than casting a ballot or protesting. It is also about having the knowledge, tools, and communities of support we need to make choices about our bodies. And it is rooted in the acknowledgement that taking control of our bodies is a form of resistance in a world that seeks to contain and control us.

Since the beginning, Black women in particular have played—and continue to play—an essential role in the work for reproductive autonomy. The movement has many communities, and our many voices have converged significantly. Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics are proud to be part of the enduring legacy and transformation of reproductive liberation movements.

Our clinics’ story starts in the 1970s. At the time, women experienced misogyny and contradictions in healthcare as reproductive rights expanded across the United States. Decisions like Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut offered limited access to abortion and birth control. While these rights existed on paper, some of the most important tools we needed to exercise reproductive freedom, like brick-and-mortar clinics, medical knowledge, and research, remained in the hands of white men acting as “authorities” over those needing care. Many of us were in the dark about how our bodies functioned or what was “normal.”

Cornerstone resources like the book Our Bodies, Ourselves changed that by openly critiquing misogyny in health care, offering accessible reproductive health information, and encouraging people to advocate for themselves. Women’s health groups began emerging on college campuses and beyond to discuss the pros and cons of birth control. Feminist organizations started to advocate for an equal rights amendment in our constitution. Women gathered in kitchens and living rooms for “consciousness raising” to talk about their experiences and learn from one another.

As important as these moments were, we needed more than books, awareness groups, and policy to be free. We needed physical spaces to safely provide care and help shape the future of our collective freedom.

In the late 1970s, Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics were established to do just that. We were created to a federation of Feminist Women’s Health Clinics that offered abortion and birth control, led by the people receiving care. More than providing clinical services, we developed community programming to restore our connection to our bodies and build a sense of autonomy after centuries of it being stripped away.

One of our first opportunities to build that connection was a workshop that taught everyday people how to perform a self-examination of their cervix using a mirror and speculum. In a time when the cervix was often only seen by a doctor, this workshop was a revolutionary first step to freedom. The end goal was to create a baseline of self-awareness—and use that knowledge to identify fertility windows and health issues. The workshops were led by people who performed the examination on themselves and those who were already known in the community, which provided a sense of security and safety that was often missing in more institutionalized health care settings.

We did not just keep this knowledge to ourselves; we spread it all around. Inspired by putting women’s health in women’s hands, Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics’ founders traveled across the country offering “OK-to-Peek” kits for cervical self-exams and menstrual extraction—a self-managed way of removing the contents of the uterus, be it a pregnancy or a period—workshops for those eager to learn about their bodies.

During our early years in the 1970s and 1980s, we led reproductive health research to expand the ways we could exercise bodily autonomy. Both Cedar River Clinics and Feminist Center advocated for FDA approval of the cervical cap, a silicon barrier that covers the cervix to prevent pregnancy. Feminist Center was also a clinical testing site for the abortion pill mifepristone, one of the most common abortion methods in the world.

Nearly 50 years ago, our clinics were developing the conditions for freedom to be realized, and we were expanding our concept of what it meant to have control over our bodies.

Maintaining and Reimagining Reproductive Freedom

Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics helped build and shape reproductive freedom as we know it today, but that freedom must also be maintained. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, we staved off attacks to reproductive freedom at multiple scales—backlash against Roe rocked both of our clinics and protestors physically blocked patients from entering our doors—and survived. Our clinics even organized brigades of clinic escorts, a now ubiquitous tool for clinic defense, to ensure patients could get care.

We were also part of systemic solutions to defending freedom, in our own ways. Feminist Center took part in early clinic defense cases that protected people’s right to care. As the violence escalated throughout the 90s, Cedar River Clinics helped build policies to protect clinics throughout Washington State. This law became a precursor to the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, making it a crime to interfere with patients or providers exercising their rights to care.

In addition to being maintained, freedom must also be reimagined to meet the needs of all people. To that end, Black women have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to movement building that wholistically address systemic oppression like racism and sexism. From Claudia Jones to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Black women have forged significant pathways to reproductive freedom from the start. In the early 1990s, another group of trailblazing Black women created the reproductive justice (RJ) framework—the human right to bodily autonomy and the freedom to choose to have children, not have children, or parent children in safe and sustainable communities—which laid bare the shortcomings of second wave feminism, the ideology underpinning our respective foundings. This comprehensive framework moved mainstream women’s reproductive rights to include intersectional and socioeconomic factors essential to reproductive health decisions and the ability to make those decisions.

Icon activist and reproductive justice co-founder Loretta Ross joined the Feminist Center board of directors and helped our clinic incorporate this framework into the work in the early 2000s. It would take several more years before Feminist Center appointed its first Black executive director in 2018 and built a leadership team that truly reflects the communities that we serve. Cedar River Clinics began implementing the more inclusive framework between the 2000s through the 2010s.

Adopting this framework led our clinics to create programming developed by and for the people at the intersections of multiple oppressions. One example is Feminist Center’s the Lifting Latinx Voices initiative (LLVI), Georgia’s first and only Latina-led reproductive health education program to offer culturally competent health information. The program was developed in recognition that culture, ethnicity, immigration status and other factors can impact the tools you use to make reproductive liberation a reality. The LLVI community addresses this reality by hosting a training to develop existing leaders in the Latinx community to become Promotoras who offer resources, education, and linkages to care.

As we committed ourselves to the vision of reproductive justice that Black women set forth, we began reformulating our concept of womanhood. More nuanced understandings of sex and gender came to the mainstream in the 2010s, and we examined our role in expanding access to care for the LGBTQ community—many of whom have been meaningful leaders throughout our movement’s history. We knew our fight for reproductive liberation was intertwined with transgender and nonbinary people, and we knew our services were not just for women—but for all people who needed it. So Feminist Center and Cedar River Clinics reformulated how we frame and talk about reproductive care and began offering hormone replacement therapy and gender affirming care to ensure all people could experience bodily autonomy under our roofs.

Bodily Autonomy for All

Our movement has been unfolding for over 50 years, and it is not going anywhere. For decades independent reproductive health clinics like Cedar River Clinics and Feminist Center, in allyship with other movements and thought leaders, have remained nimble, adaptable, and innovative in advancing our freedoms no matter the obstacles in our path. For many people our clinics serve, we are the sole access to health care they have, providing compassionate, nonjudgmental lifesaving care.

But our clinics’ missions extend beyond simply providing care. It also includes advocating for our rights, educating ourselves, and listening to our communities to reimagine freedom in the face of emerging needs.

The foundation of our movement is community—connecting directly with people on the ground to understand what freedom actually means on our own terms and sharing that knowledge with one another.

We ask you, in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary to join us on the journey to liberation by directly supporting independent reproductive health clinics as we progress our movement with unwavering determination.

Right now, in our country, the freedoms we have on paper are hollow. A right is not a right without the ability to exercise it. But we are in this movement together for our collective liberation, and we have been paving the way towards bodily autonomy and our fundamental freedoms for more than half a century. We have been here, we are here, and we will still be here at the frontlines defending and expanding our collective freedoms to realize true independence and freedom for all.

Cedar River Clinics was founded in 1979 as the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Yakima, Washington. Today, Cedar River Clinics has three locations in Renton, Tacoma, and Yakima, Washington and provides telemedicine services. As a social service organization, Cedar River Clinics combine direct services with advocacy and community education. Cedar River Clinics’ direct services include abortion, birth control, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and more.

Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation (formerly Feminist Women’s Health Center) is a reproductive health, rights, and justice organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. Feminist Center provides compassionate reproductive healthcare including abortion, educates communities, and organizes people across all axes of oppression so that everyone has the rights, resources, and support needed to make empowered decisions.