What I Carried Home from NOVA

On Black reproductive justice, collective heaviness, and the practice of discernment

Recreated summit stage inspired by the NOVA Black Repro Summit, Chicago, May 2026.

I did not attend the NOVA Black Reproductive Justice Summit because reproductive justice is the center of my research. I attended because Black Feminist Future (BFF) invited me into a needed space.

My scholarship lives most centrally in women’s incarceration, abolition feminism, testimony, carceral governance, and the public life of inside voices. Reproductive justice sits beside that work, not outside it. It touches it through forced sterilization, pregnancy criminalization, family policing, birth, medical neglect, safety, care, and parenting without state violence.

What I did not fully anticipate was what the space would ask of my body and spirit.

NOVA was beautiful and generative. It was filled with people carrying language, history, strategy, and commitment into rooms where Black reproductive freedom was treated as a living political tradition. I heard people talk about birth, abortion, trans liberation, HIV, disability justice, sex education, housing, wages, family policing, spirituality, and collective care as parts of one freedom struggle.

I also felt the heaviness.

The heaviness was not a flaw in the gathering. It was the emotional weight of medical racism, maternal mortality, abortion criminalization, family policing, poverty, surveillance, white Christian nationalism, and generations of Black women, girls, femmes, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people trying to live, parent, heal, and be free.

“A beautiful room can still be a heavy room.”

I sensed tiredness, vigilance, and guardedness in the room, and I understood it as part of the weight many of us carry into liberation spaces. At another point in my life, I might have read that energy as rejection or personal failure. At fifty, I am learning not to make someone else’s guardedness a verdict on my worth.

During the summit, I had moments that reminded me to practice discernment. Not every shared political space becomes intimate. Not every familiar face becomes a renewed connection. Earlier versions of me might have chased explanation or tried to prove I was worthy of kindness.

But I am not that girl in the same way anymore.

I reminded myself that all Black women’s spaces are not automatically intimate spaces. Some are community spaces. Some are political spaces. Some are networking spaces. Shared identity does not guarantee shared warmth. That truth does not make the space less valuable. It asks for discernment.

“I can love Black feminist spaces without needing every Black feminist space to love me back in the same way.”

Another part of what NOVA gave me came through the questions I carried into sessions and community conversations. I kept asking about reproductive justice beyond the clinic: What conditions make bodily autonomy, parenting, caregiving, safety, and community flourishing possible?

People named family policing, pregnancy criminalization, maternal health, disability justice, storytelling, cultural organizing, base-building, policy, spirituality, and repair. That was one of the summit’s clearest gifts: reproductive justice is not only access. It is a framework of conditions.

Access matters. Abortion access matters. Healthcare matters. But access without housing, food, safety, childcare, transportation, mental health care, community trust, and freedom from surveillance is a narrow version of freedom. Choice without conditions becomes disconnected from real life.

I kept thinking about my own work on incarceration and testimony. In women’s prisons, reproductive injustice is not theoretical. It appears in forced sterilization, medical neglect, pregnancy behind bars, parental separation, coerced care, and the long shadow of state control over Black women’s bodies and families.

NOVA helped me see, again, that my work is not outside reproductive justice. It enters through the back door: the prison visiting room, the newsletter archive, the parole hearing, the medical complaint, the family separated by bars, the mother whose body and choices have been managed by the state.

“Some of us arrive at reproductive justice through clinics. Some of us arrive through cages.”

I also left with a deeper appreciation for political language itself. Access to political language is a form of power. Not everyone is born into homes, schools, books, rooms, or cultural spaces where Black feminism, abolition, reproductive justice, intersectionality, and liberation are explained with care. I was not raised by parents who grounded me in Black feminist thought. My politics were built through pursuit.

I had to find books, enter rooms, and make sense of the gap between what I had lived and what I had not yet been taught to name. Lived experience needs context, relationship, reflection, and tools.

That is why political education is not decoration. It is part of the foundation.

The same is true for care. I heard people speak about healing-centered organizing and the need to protect Black women and Black gender-expansive people from becoming the unpaid emotional infrastructure of every movement room. Healing cannot become another task handed to the same people already carrying the most. Care cannot be a word that hides extraction.

If we say care, we have to build it into budgets, calendars, staffing, conflict practices, leadership structures, and expectations around labor. If we say accountability, we have to make it more than a listening session.

“Movements do not only need values. They need infrastructure that can hold the values when people are tired.”

That insight felt especially clear in a side conversation about mapping, outreach, and movement ecosystems. The solid gold was seeing how much behind-the-scenes labor movements require: lists, relationships, surveys, follow-up, analysis, strategy, trust, and time. The public version is the panel and the gathering. The hidden version is the spreadsheet, the check-in, the unanswered email, and the person who remembers who belongs in the room.

That hidden labor matters. It is part of how futures get built.

During the summit, I wrote a phrase in my notes that will not leave me alone: Girls in the Hood. I do not yet know whether it is a chapter, essay, or future book. I only know that it carries something I have circled for years: Black girlhood, survival, street life, respectability, criminalization, and feminist becoming before feminist language was available.

The girl in me was present at NOVA, too: the curious child, the resilient child, the good girl, the girl taught to carry before she was given room to understand who she was. Maybe that is part of what witnessing otherwise means: learning to hear the old self and the collective story at the same time.

By the end of the summit, I was grateful and drained. Conferences exhaust me, even when they are meaningful. Interdisciplinary spaces can be expansive, but they also demand translation from every direction. At this stage of my life, I do not want to prove that I can enter every room or absorb every conversation.

Sometimes I would rather be home working on my book. That is not failure. It is clarity.

NOVA reminded me that I can enter a space with humility without surrendering my center. I can learn from reproductive justice without pretending it is my primary lane. I can ask good questions, build relationships, gather what is useful, and leave the rest.

“I can receive what is mine and release what is not.”

On my way to O’Hare, I thought about what I was carrying home: not the whole summit, not every room’s heaviness, not every awkward encounter, but enough. I carried the reminder that reproductive justice is a politics of conditions. I carried the importance of political education. I carried the need for movement systems that sustain the people building them. I carried the girl in me who is still learning what she was taught to carry and what she is now free to put down.

That is what NOVA gave me. Not a new identity. Not a new lane. It gave me a clearer relationship to the work adjacent to my own. It gave me language for heaviness. It confirmed that Black feminist spaces are powerful, imperfect, necessary, and human. And it gave me permission to leave with enough: enough knowledge to deepen my work, enough humility to keep learning, enough discernment to protect my spirit, and enough clarity to know that freedom work is measured not by how much we absorb, but by how honestly we move, how carefully we listen, and how tenderly we return to ourselves when the room has been heavy.