Expanding the Movement for Empowerment and Reproductive Justice (EMERJ) is a national movement building initiative of ACRJ. EMERJ builds strategic alliances and increase the power, leadership, and capacity of grassroots organizations and communities working for reproductive justice.

EMERJ's primary strategy is to convene reproductive justice and social justice organizations to engage in strategic thinking and to build synergy and alignment around taking collective action. One of our priorities is to build relationships with organizations that have not yet seen their connection to reproductive justice to bring them into the movement. EMERJ believes that as the Reproductive Justice Movement grows, we need more leadership to fill a variety of complementary roles, strategies and approaches to build a strong infrastructure that can support change at the individual, community, and societal levels.

Reproductive Justice exists when all people have the social, political, and economic power and resources to make healthy decisions about our gender, bodies, and sexuality for ourselves, our families, and our communities. For a complete analysis of reproductive justice, read ACRJ's groundbreaking framework, A New Vision.

The core problem we are trying to address is reproductive oppression, which is the controlling and regulation of our gender, bodies, and sexuality, and is a result of multiple systems of oppression based on race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, ability, age, geography, and faith/spirituality.

The reproductive justice framework centers organizing by communities most impacted by reproductive oppression as the most effective method for creating systemic change. Building power and leadership within marginalized communities addresses the systemic underpinning of reproductive oppression and transforms power inequities to bring concrete change on individual, community, institutional, and societal levels.