What Language Justice means for Reproductive Healthcare Access

In the United States, many immigrant women and underserved families face enormous barriers to healthcare access. For some, health insurance is financially out of reach. For others, language barriers create fear, confusion, or mistrust within medical systems. And, in reproductive healthcare settings, those barriers can become even more urgent and dangerous. Maternal mortality rates for black women are three times higher than for white women, meaning that equitable information access for marginalized communities is quite literally a matter of life and death.

Organizations like the Luz de Atabey Midwifery Project (LAMP) – a nonprofit supporting women, mothers, immigrants, and historically underserved communities navigating reproductive healthcare in the US – are responding directly to those realities by creating culturally grounded, community-centered care and education. But that work can only reach communities if the information itself is understandable, accessible, and translated with care.

That is where language justice becomes essential.

In April 2025, I coordinated an important, and very large scale, project with Luz de Atabey – coordinating the translation of 20 reproductive health and pregnancy-related documents across Haitian Creole, French, Portuguese, Lingala, Spanish, Wolof, and later Kinyarwanda. 

But this was not a simple “translate everything into every language” workflow. Each document had different language needs depending on the communities Luz de Atabey was serving. Some documents were translated into three languages, and others into five or six. We had to carefully track which communities needed access to which resources, while coordinating translators across multiple time zones and language teams.

The materials covered topics that are often difficult to discuss openly, especially in communities where medical systems already feel inaccessible or unsafe:

• vaginal wellness

• bacterial vaginosis

• consent in medical settings

• lactation and infant health

• prenatal intake

• nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

• constipation and pregnancy-related illness

• heartburn during pregnancy

• reproductive rights

This project also reminded me that translation is not just linguistic work — it is relational work. Coordinating large scale projects into several languages means building trust between organizations, linguists, and the communities ultimately receiving the information.

Because much of this work was done on a pro bono basis, it required extraordinary collaboration and commitment from language teams who understood the importance of making these resources accessible. It also required flexibility, organization, and constant communication across multiple moving parts.

As the project coordinator across all languages, my role became not only operational, but connective. I was responsible for ensuring that partner requests were clear, workflows stayed organized, timelines remained realistic, and language teams had the support they needed to produce trauma-informed, plain-language translations capable of truly reaching communities.

This experience showed me how important centralized multilingual coordination can be, especially for organizations working in healthcare, immigration, reproductive justice, and community advocacy. Most importantly, this project demonstrated what becomes possible when organizations working toward justice collaborate with one another.

Language access is not an “extra service.” It is part of healthcare access. It is part of reproductive justice. It is part of dignity.

1 Maternal Mortality data released by the CDC, from the National Vital Statistics System, (NVSS 2023)