Ntarupt’s Veronica Whitehead Pens Oped For Visible Magazine

The constant drumbeat of news of the global pandemic of COVID-19 may render a false sense that mass shootings and violence are somehow stalled and that the 1.5 billion people around the globe who are sheltering in place are safe.

They are not.

Earlier this month, 18 people were shot and killed at a club in Cleveland. According to The Trace, a site that daily tracks mass shootings, “seven were shot at a house party in Chicago; a 13-year-old boy was killed five other teens were shot during an altercation at a shopping center outside of Baltimore; six were shot, including a 5-year-old, at a barbershop in Washington, D.C.; four were shot, one fatally, at a club in Milwaukee; four were shot at a house party in Albuquerque, New Mexico and four were shot on a freeway in the Chicago suburb of South Holland, Illinois.”

School shootings have stopped; most likely only because in all 50 states, schools are closed either varying by district, for a specified time, through the end of the school year, or indefinitely.

But the trauma of the ongoing violence around the country and the school shootings of the recent past is ongoing for many, felt for generations by those directly and indirectly impacted.

During COVID-19, the assertion that home is an automatic safe refuge is false. These perpetual acts of violence—still happening during the pandemic — take away the fundamental right to raise children in a safe and sustainable community.

The human right to raise children safely, along with personal bodily autonomy, and the right to both have and not have children is reproductive justice, as defined by Sister Song.

As a sexual and reproductive health educator in Texas, I see every day the intersection of the need for reproductive justice and the country’s violent history against brown and Black bodies. I hear from my students that parenthood is not marked by educational attainment but instead moving somewhere safer with more opportunities.