Sexual and Reproductive Justice Hub

Dr. Sabrina Das joins SRJ Hub as Harkness Fellow

Dr. Sabrina Das has joined the SRJ Hub as a Harkness Fellow, supported by the Commonwealth Fund, for the 2024-25 academic year. She will be studying the abortion landscape, harm reduction, and the health care equity work around abortion care in New York.

She is a consultant obstetrician and gynecologist at Queen Charlotte’s & Chelsea Hospital in London and an honorary senior clinical lecturer at Imperial College. She is also a national maternity improvement advisor at NHS England and a member of the board of trustees for Medecins Sans Frontieres UK.

After graduating with honors from Glasgow Medical School in 2004, she worked in Scotland, South Africa and London, completing specialty training in northeast London. She has advanced training in high-risk obstetrics, abortion care, maternal medicine and medical education. As a consultant, she has led local, regional, and national teams in quality improvement, recently completing a senior leaders apprenticeship with Henley Business School. She believes passionately in service to vulnerable communities and the single most disenfranchised group in the world – women and girls – which led her to Medecins Sans Frontieres, with whom she has worked in war-torn Yemen in 2021 during the COVID pandemic.

SRJ Pioneer Byllye Avery Keynote Speaker at 2024 Commencement

CUNY SPH celebrated the Class of 2024’s commencement on Tuesday, June 4, at the historic Apollo Theater in the heart of Harlem. The beloved activist Byllye Avery gave the keynote address and inspired the crowd with recollections of her own journey as a founding mother of reproductive justice and a fierce leader in the movement to address and improve the health and wellness of the 19.5 million Black women and girls in the U.S. At a moment when every tenet of reproductive justice is threatened in the U.S. and globally, Avery urged students to love themselves and live courageously, despite the very real fear they will experience as advocates for health as a human right. You can listen to her full remarks here.

CUNY SPH has launched the Byllye Avery Sexual and Reproductive Justice Professorship Endowment Campaign, which will create the nation’s first endowed public health professorship in sexual and reproductive justice. Learn more about the professorship.

From 16 to 365 Days of Activism to End GBV

In 2024 the CUNY SPH took over as host of the Global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence Campaign. For over thirty years this civil society-led campaign has brought together local and global feminist activists and movements to raise awareness of the many forms of gender-based violence, its root causes and impact, and pathways to prevention and accountability. Historically the campaign has run for 16 days, from International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November 25) to Human Rights Day (December 10).

Under CUNY SPH, the campaign will transition into a year-round initiative, reflecting the 365-days-a-year work of feminist activists to shift norms, secure accountability, and transform power structures that oppress women, girls, and gender diverse people. This as an iterative, collaborative process that will evolve over time as we continue to learn together.

SRJ Scholarship

Byllye Avery SRJ Professorship

Named for the incomparable Byllye Avery, a pioneer in women’s health, thought leader in Reproductive Justice, and founder of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, this professorship will centralize SRJ programming, research, and scholarship at the school. The program also focuses on leadership development with an emphasis on challenging political environments and anti-evidence trends. This will empower the next generation of public health leaders to dismantle barriers and proliferate justice. Learn more about this endowed professorship.

SRJ Curriculum at CUNY SPH

The CUNY SPH curriculum provides MPH and PhD students with an understanding of the socio-historical and political contexts that have and continue to shape related health outcomes across the lifespan, as well as a foundation for research and programmatic activi­ties in maternal, child, reproductive and sexual health. CUNY SPH embraces a holistic approach to sexual and reproductive health within an SRJ framework that recognizes the diversity of human sexual expression, relationships, and family structures; promotes informed, healthy, respectful, and responsible choices, free from coer­cion; and supports increased access to elective preventive, screening, treatment, and support services.

SRJ Faculty and Researchers

Terry McGovern

Senior Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs

Terry McGovern, JD, ​​is a human rights lawyer, advocate, and academic who is internationally recognized for her work in health and human rights, sexual and reproductive rights and health, gender justice, and environmental justice. McGovern previously served as the Harriet and Robert H. Heilbrunn Professor and chair of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Prior to joining Columbia in 2002, McGovern served as senior program officer in the Gender, Rights, and Equality Unit of the Ford Foundation, where she oversaw global and domestic programming relating to HIV, gender, LGBT, and human rights.

In 1989, McGovern founded the HIV Law Project, where she served as executive director until 1999. While there, she successfully litigated numerous cases against federal, state, and local governments including S.P. v. Sullivan, which forced the Social Security Administration to expand HIV-related disability criteria so that women and low-income individuals can qualify for Medicaid and Social Security benefits; and T.N. v. FDA, which eliminated a 1977 FDA guideline banning women of childbearing potential from early phases of clinical trials.

McGovern’s research focuses on health and human rights, sexual and reproductive rights and health, gender justice and environmental justice, with publications appearing in journals including Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Health and Human Rights, and the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Lynn Roberts

Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Alumni Relations
Assistant Professor of Community Health and Social Sciences

The City University of New York (CUNY) has been Dr. Lynn Roberts’ academic home since 1995. Prior to joining CUNY and the GSPHHP, she oversaw the development, implementation and evaluation of several prevention programs for women and youth in NYC. As an emeritus board member of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, Dr. Roberts has been a national leader in the reproductive justice movement that has been advocating for the sexual and reproductive autonomy of women of color and other marginalized people for over 20 years. She is the co-editor and contributing author of Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice Critique (Feminist Press, 2017). Dr. Roberts’ current activism and scholarship examine the intersections of race, class and gender in adolescent dating relationships, juvenile justice, and reproductive health policies, as well as the impact of models of collaborative inquiry and teaching on civic and political engagement. For decades Dr. Roberts has taught the Community Organizing to Advance Health and Social Justice course in our MPH program, with the highest student evaluation accolades.

Diana Romero

Professor in the Department of Community Health and Social Sciences
Director of the Maternal, Child, Reproductive and Sexual Health specialization 

Dr. Diana Romero has engaged in research and evidence-based advocacy related to reproductive, maternal and child health over the past 20 years. From her early research on factors affecting contraceptive decision-making and continuation among women of different racial/ethnic backgrounds, to the differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pregnant persons in NYS, she has focused on these experiences among marginalized groups by race/ethnicity, socioeconomic and related structural factors. Dr. Romero serves on the NYC DOHMH Advisory Board for the CDC Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) survey, and she has served on the FDA Obstetrics and Gynecological Devices Advisory Panel, as well as on the Board of Directors of several non-profit research and advocacy organizations addressing reproduction, gender and health. She teaches graduate courses in research methods, community health, and reproductive and sexual health policy.

Clarisa Bencomo

Project Director for Gender Justice

Clarisa Bencomo works at the intersection of human rights, governance, and philanthropy, with an interest in how global, national, and hyper local systems and practices can be reimagined to promote greater equity. Before joining CUNY SPH, she was the Associate Director for Global Health Justice and Governance at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and previously taught International Development in Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. From 2010 through 2018 she developed and led governance programming for the Ford Foundation’s MENA Regional Office in Cairo. Her programming at Ford included support for participatory planning and budgeting to address spatial inequality; research and capacity-building to advance accountability for service provision; documentation and advocacy for policies that are inclusive of migrants and refugees; and regional learning networks and platforms around law and society, post-conflict recovery, and equitable urbanism. In addition to her work in philanthropy, she had a long career as a researcher and advocate on human rights and aid effectiveness, including more than a decade as a researcher at Human Rights Watch based in Cairo and New York.

Sabrina Das

Harkness Fellow

Sabrina Das, MB ChB, MRCOG, PGDip (BA), joins the SRJ Hub as a 2024–25 UK Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. Her fellowship project seeks to learn from innovations and harm reduction strategies used by formal, grass roots, and civil society efforts to support abortion access for minoritized people in New York.  Das maintains a clinical practice as a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London, specializing in high-risk pregnancy and complex intrapartum care. She also works for NHS England as a National Maternity Improvement Advisor in the Maternity Safety and Support Programme, the highest level of intervention for maternity units across England. She also works as an abortion surgeon for Marie Stopes International and has worked for Médecins Sans Frontières as a women’s health specialist in conflict zones.

Das is passionate about using quality improvement, coaching, and leadership skills in improving the lives of the largest global group of disenfranchised people (women and girls). Her life mission is to use her clinical and nonclinical expertise to narrow the gap in clinical outcomes and quality of life for women of color, women in poverty, and others who have suffered systemic and historical disadvantage. Das has led projects in Yemen utilizing quality improvement methods to reduce hemorrhage rates, in ethnically diverse West London to coproduce interventions to build trust between formal health care institutions and the local community, and in coastal communities of England to develop equitable pathways of care access. She has published and spoken extensively about quality improvement and how to take policy into practice.

In 2022, Das was listed as one of “50 Leading Lights” by the Kind Leadership Revolution’s Kindness in Leadership Campaign. That year she was also a finalist for the MAMA Academy Healthcare Professional of the Year Award, for providing personalized, culturally competent care to women with breech-presenting babies in pregnancy and labor. In 2021, she was a runner-up for the Health Services Journal Clinical Leader of the Year Award. In her spare time, Das volunteers for her local triathlon club and is an accredited British Triathlon Federation (BTF) Coach. She won the 2019 BTF Award for Children’s Coach of the Year.

Events at the SRJ Hub

Keep an eye on the SRJ Hub calendar for upcoming events.

History of the SRJ Movement

In June 1994, a caucus of twelve Black women were looking to articulate the specific unmet health care needs of Black women. They decided to call themselves the Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice (WADRJ) and took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post entitled, “Black Women and Health Care Reform.” It ultimately garnered signatures from 836 Black women. With this seminal ad and the press conference on Capitol Hill that followed, the Reproductive Justice (RJ) Movement was born.

For nearly three decades, RJ has been recognized globally as a critical framework grounded in Black feminist thought and human rights. It is based on the practice of self-help and community care and is inclusive and applicable to everyone. Reproductive Justice is the human right “not to have children using safe birth control, abortion, or abstinence; the right to have children under the conditions we choose; and the right to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments.” The RJ framework includes the right to bodily autonomy, free from any form of sexual or reproductive oppression. The framework is now more inclusively called Sexual and Reproductive Justice: the “complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, social, and economic well-being of women and girls based on the full achievement and protection of women’s human rights” and all people who can become pregnant.

The goal of SRJ is to advocate for and sustain the human rights of historically marginalized women, families, and communities in the United States and around the world to have the power and resources to maintain autonomy over their sexual and reproductive lives.

SRJ acknowledges the harms of repeated divestment due to structural racism and the resulting inadequate, inequitable access to resources and physical, emotional, spiritual, mental harm. The SRJ framework recognizes that reproductive autonomy is intrinsically linked to the full breadth of social determinants of health and racial equity.

Without equitable access to quality and safe healthcare, housing, education, environments, food, employment, and wages, there cannot be reproductive autonomy.