By Forward Times Editorial
Forward Times
https://www.forwardtimes.com/
Journey HTX Conference and Retreat Center is a wellness and resource haven for youth who have aged out of the foster care system. On its sprawling seven acres lie outdoor green spaces for yoga, indoor event halls, meditation gardens, and even a community kitchen. The chapel on site might not seem like the obvious setting for a discussion on reproductive health — yet it became the backdrop for actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s candid reflections on her experience and the power of Black women’s voices in the fight for reproductive freedom.
Behind the event was Own Every Piece, a growing movement working to ensure women and girls have access to information and resources for their reproductive wellness needs. The campaign aims to normalize the conversation around birth control, empower women to make their own choices, and build a collection of stories that amplify women’s experiences to help many others along the way. Program Specialist Brianna Lewis opened by encouraging audience members to share their stories. “By a show of hands,” she asked, “who here has ever had a story or experience that changed the way you see yourself or your body?”
Nobody spoke at first. But one woman stood. “My name is Karen,” she said, “and my husband and I had the opportunity of trying to conceive children for about 20 years.” Once she did conceive, doctors misdiagnosed her with a pituitary tumor. When it turned out there was no tumor, she visited Walter Reed Military Medical Center, also called Bethesda Naval, to pick up prenatal vitamins.
“I’m a lieutenant commander, formerly with the U.S. Public Health Service,” Karen said. “So, going to Bethesda Naval to pick up the prenatal vitamins, they told me that my alpha-beta protein numbers were very high.” At six weeks, doctors told her there was no baby — that the black screen on the monitor showed possible cancer cells but no amniotic sac. Two or three doctors came in, she remembered, before deciding on an “emergency D&C.”
A dilation and curettage (D&C) is a common medical procedure in which doctors dilate the cervix and surgically remove uterine tissue by scraping, often with tools called curettes. It’s done to diagnose or treat conditions like fibroids, or to remove tissue after a miscarriage or abortion.
By the time the last doctor came in, “I had soaked myself in blood,” she recalled. “My husband was out of the state, doing a residency meeting. And there was nobody for me to talk to. Lo and behold, the last doctor came in and said, ‘Lieutenant Commander, just rest. Let me see what’s going on.’”
In that moment, everything shifted. What doctors had mistaken for a loss turned out to be a life still beating.
“I saw the sac. I saw the heartbeat… She is now 21 years of age,” Karen said. “Howard senior. Economics. Double major. 3.94 GPA. Ms. Carson Nicole Smith. Remember that name.”
This frightening, powerful story demonstrates the obstacles that Black women face in seeking reproductive healthcare. “Just like Ms. Karen, I know many of us have stories that have ended in positive and negative ways,” Lewis told the audience. “We’ve been in situations where we felt like we didn’t have bodily autonomy and could not advocate for ourselves and speak up for ourselves. And so that’s what makes events like this so special and important.”
After a performance by Nia’s Daughters Movement Collective — who danced to the sounds of poet Crystal Tennille Irby’s “Call Me Mama” — it was time for the woman of the hour.
An industry veteran, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor garnered attention for her roles on television in the series When They See Us (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2021), and in films like Men of Honor (2000), Undercover Brother (2002), Ray (2004), and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). But she’s perhaps best known for her performance as matriarch Oracene Price in King Richard (2021), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She’s also attracted attention for her bold advocacy. Raised in Mississippi, Ellis-Taylor recalled how her drives home were lined with Confederate flags and other reminders of the state’s fraught past. Even on her way to Houston, she said, the scenes felt familiar — passing through Louisiana and into Texas, where billboards shouted messages about the president, patriotism, and “stolen” elections. The echoes of her Mississippi upbringing stirred something in her, inspiring a bold and provocative act: in 2014, Ellis-Taylor purchased a billboard along Highway 55 in Jackson, Miss., that read WE SHALL OVERCOME, spelled out with Confederate flags.
“It made everybody mad,” she remembered. “Black folks was cussing me out. White folks were calling me mental… I mean, I just got called everything.” Though the reaction was strong, it didn’t bother her. “That’s what I wanted,” she explained. “I wanted to wake the sleeping giant.”
That urge surfaced again in 2023, after Roe v. Wade was overturned. After participating in a panel, Ellis-Taylor wondered why women had so much shame around abortion. And seeing Black women pictured on anti-choice billboards spurred her to send a message. So, she purchased another billboard — this one in Georgia and Florida — that read: “My name is Aunjanue Ellis, and I had an abortion.”
“I didn’t get a lot of reactions,” she recalled. “I wanted to make people mad at it. But no one kinda noticed.” Searching for the lesson or takeaway she could glean from the decision, she ultimately realized that her billboard in Tallahassee (“in Ron DeSantis’ backyard”) meant “that was one less space that they could use to shame Black women.”
Sometimes the battle for liberation is one we fight without needed support. Ellis-Taylor revealed how, when she put up those billboards in Florida, she’d asked Planned Parenthood to help her amplify the message. They didn’t. But they later called, needing her for something. Looking around a room filled with Black women, Ellis-Taylor explained why that bothered her.
“White women own the discussion about abortion,” she said. “It is different. It is culturally different, sociologically different, it’s economically different. Our reasons for doing it are different. Our obstacles to doing it are different.” She called on her fellow Black women to own the conversation around abortion and bodily autonomy: “We gon’ have to make it look like us.”
Before opening the floor for questions, Dr. Kimberly Baker, executive director of Own Every Piece, asked Ellis-Taylor what she hopes the next generation of Black women will feel and know that perhaps her generation could not. Ellis-Taylor said she prays they’ll have bravery, reflecting on the silence she said was imposed on her during childhood, in the pews of her Mississippi church.
“A lot of what happens in the pews goes beyond the pews and becomes culture,” she said. “And so what is concerning me now is that this Christian nationalism ish is going to bleed into culture.” In some ways, she conceded, it already has. But Ellis-Taylor, who hyphenated her name to honor her late mother, has demonstrated the courage to interrogate those nationalist ideas and to have hard conversations about uncomfortable topics like race and reproductive health.
Later, during the audience Q&A, Ellis-Taylor was asked about queerness (she came out as bisexual in 2022). In response, she opened up about her Southern Baptist upbringing — a life, she said, “of rules.” Much of what she wanted to do was forbidden: music, dancing, even playing cards.
On a school bus one day, she found herself looking at a young woman named Caroline and realizing, there’s not a boy on the planet that makes me feel what this woman makes me feel. But growing up in the Bible Belt meant those feelings couldn’t be acted on, so she pushed them away. “I fought that for a long, long time,” she admitted, joking that she “missed out on some good times… with very, very good-looking women.”
Eventually, she said, “I can’t live like this.” Though she had a man in her life and thought that part of her identity was behind her, she realized otherwise: “No, it’s not over. This is who I am.” Her coming-out process, she added, “is not clean. It’s messy. And I own that… But it’s who I am.”
Soon after, an audience member said she couldn’t recall seeing any film that centered Black liberation or women’s liberation around topics like abortion or rape, or general bodily autonomy. Ellis-Taylor answered that she is one of those filmmakers. She said she’s been working on a film about a Black woman who was sterilized against her will.
Ellis-Taylor emphasized the need for compelling narratives as opposed to documentaries. “And the other thing is — this is the hard part: we cannot look outside of ourselves to do that. That means us investing in ourselves.” She’s done just that: at a small HBCU outside of Jackson, Mississippi, she held what she called a “convocation” — a weekend of Black female filmmakers, musicians, and authors, creating and discussing their work.
“I’m paying for that solely by myself,” she said. “Nobody gave me nothing.” She used her money to bring women from all over the country to talk to students and engage with them in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise. “We have to do that,” Ellis-Taylor said, urging the crowd to realize the power of movies and fund relevant narratives: “We’ve got to do it ourselves.”
