What Social Workers Believe about the Intersection of Reproductive and Environmental Justice

Background and Purpose: Linking environmental justice with reproductive justice offers novel strategies for transforming pertinent global health injustices and sustainability challenges, while simultaneously enhancing human rights and autonomy for vulnerable groups (Di Chiro, 2008). Beyond recognizing environmental and reproductive justice concepts, an awareness of the issues’ intersectionality is important for the work in which social workers engage. Not only does this fit into a more holistic, ecological or person-in-environment perspective that includes the natural environment (Weick, 1981), but it also generates synergy between multiple stakeholders and their resources to ameliorate problems amidst concerns of limited funding and social service budget cuts. This study aimed to increase social work’s ability to intervene in these areas. The objectives were to: 1) assess social work students’ and practitioners’ awareness of and capacity to affect reproductive and environmental justice, and 2) explore perceptions of the issues’ intersectionality.

Methods: This mixed-methods study used an exploratory, sequential design (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2011). In the qualitative strand, researchers conducted interviews with 14 students from seven social work schools. Sampling was purposive, and students were geographically, racially, and ethnically diverse, and represented private and public, large and small, and practice and research-oriented programs. Interview transcripts were analyzed using an iterative coding process that reduced content to themes and codes (Saldaña, 2013). The qualitative findings informed the study’s second strand design, an anonymous quantitative survey administered to social work practitioners across the United States and Canada through convenience and snowball sampling.

Results: The qualitative data suggested reproductive and environmental justice are often not formally included in social work education, though content for either is at times presented when students perceive the instructor to be particularly passionate about the topic. Often students expressed a narrow definition of reproductive justice specific to abortion, and demonstrated difficulty in connecting environmental injustices to people. If engaged in a deeper conversation, students were able to apply social work values and ethics to each substantive area, but struggled to connect the issues’ intersectionality.

Responding to the quantitative survey instrument (n = 72), practitioners reported that both environmental (92%) and reproductive justice (94%) should play a significant role in social work practice. In regard to environmental justice, 90% of practitioners reported that their clients face injustices, while 79% believed that their clients face reproductive injustices. Barriers to addressing environmental and reproductive injustices experienced by clients included lack of support from own agency and feeling unprepared. Approximately 90% reported common concerns between the two issues, and 75% thought environmental justice could advance reproductive justice and vice versa. Most demographic variables including practice focus and level, region, and age had insignificant effects on outcome variables of attitudes and experiences with environmental and reproductive justice.

Conclusions and Implications: Social work clients are experiencing both environmental and reproductive justice issues; yet, practitioners report feeling unable to address these problems. These results suggest a need for the social work field to become more inclusive of such topics, and support practitioners through training and education related to environmental and reproductive justice.