Loretta Ross: "Women's Rights as Human Rights"

Loretta Ross is an expert on women’s issues, racism, and human rights. Her work emphasizes the intersectionality of social justice issues and how this transforms social change. She is a nationally-recognized women's rights and human rights leader.

Ross is the co-author (with Rickie Solinger) of Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (2017), a first-of-its-kind primer that provides a comprehensive yet succinct description of the field. Putting the lives and lived experience of women of color at the center of the book and using a human rights analysis, Reproductive Justice provides an essential guide to understanding and mobilizing around women’s rights in a period in which women’s reproductive lives are imperiled.

Ross is also a co-author of the award-winning Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, and author of “The Color of Choice” chapter in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She has written extensively on the history of African American women and reproductive justice activism and is a member of the Women's Media Center's Progressive Women's Voices. Ross appears regularly in major media outlets about the issues of our day.

She was a co-founder and the National Coordinator, from 2005 to 2012, of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a network of women of color and allied organizations that organize women of color in the reproductive justice movement. 

She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree awarded in 2003 from Arcadia University and a second honorary doctorate degree awarded from Smith College in 2013. She is pursuing a PhD in Women’s Studies at Emory University in Atlanta.