Believe people, show them mercy. This short philosophy encompasses the concept of “Rahmah,” or mercy, in Islam, and is embraced by Sahar Pirzada, Director of Movement Building at the non-profit organization, HEART. Pirzada has worked on the frontlines of reproductive justice and community care for years with HEART, an organization founded in 2009 by a group of Muslim women in Chicago and the Midwest who witnessed the demand in their community to support Muslims navigating their sexual and reproductive health.
HEART began as a series of workshops aimed at helping Muslim women have conversations around puberty, sex, and healthy relationships. Once organizers like Pirzada saw the immense demand in their communities for these spaces, they decided to create an organization dedicated to breaking the silence around these topics and helping women navigate their health through the “inherently Islamic” principles of bodily autonomy, choice and consent. “We make sure women have whatever they need to feel supported in their choices,” says Pirzada.
HEART’S mission became especially salient after the United States Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (Dobbs) decision in June 2022, which overturned a person’s constitutional right to seek an abortion, previously enshrined in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. The ruling led to major rollbacks on abortion protections across the country, resulting in new threats against reproductive justice workers. In light of these latest attacks on reproductive rights, Pirzada encourages people to provide care and safety for those in need outside the context of the law. “You first have to kill the cop in your heart,” she says.
Pirzada also regards escalating limitations on abortion as contrary to Rahmah. “If you're forcing someone into carrying a pregnancy to term when they don't want to, or you're forcing someone into ending a pregnancy that they want to carry, that's a violation of their sacred body. We see that as reproductive violence,” she says. “At HEART, simply, we view it as haram.”
Organizers like Pirzada argue that what really keeps communities safe is not enforcing colonial-era laws which violate the divine agency of women, but committing to hearing each other’s stories with reverence and respect – that is, by embodying Rahmah. “The biggest barrier for anyone to receive the care they need, whether it’s surviving gendered violence or navigating reproductive traumas, is not being believed. That is what we need to disrupt,” Pirzada says. “If you were to believe that what this person is telling you is true to their experience, you would trust them with the decisions that they need to make about their bodies.”
During her own journey navigating sexual and reproductive trauma, Pirzada often felt that the health professionals she encountered were too blinded by Islamophobia to adequately care for her. “I would tell my doctors I was having pain during sex or explain my issues with sexual dysfunction and they focused, or rather blamed, my culture and my religion instead of listening to me,” she recalls.
“My entry point into reproductive justice work at HEART comes from having lived experience around navigating sexual and reproductive traumas and health issues and feeling like I wasn’t equipped to deal with this,” Pirzada recalls. While working at HEART, Pirzada decided to terminate her pregnancy. “I knew from an Islamic perspective, there was nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. “--I publicly support abortion and consider myself to be a feminist!” Yet, when it came to her pregnancy termination, for a long time she could not name it as an abortion. Though she had the committed support of her spouse and immediate family, when she turned to her wider Muslim community to talk about her experiences with reproductive trauma, she couldn’t find anyone willing to have these conversations. The silence was troubling and painful.
Pirzada isn’t alone in her experience of feeling ostracized and ashamed.
For some Muslim women, finding family support, let alone community support, simply isn’t an option. Aisha, a Muslim woman living on the east coast who had an abortion through which her boyfriend supported her, says that the experience was impossibly lonely because she could not tell her family (Aisha is a pseudonym, to protect her anonymity). “When I found out, it was a shock. I was in the bathroom shaking on the ground with the pregnancy test in my hand, calling my boyfriend’s name,” she says. “You think of your parents, your family. I am Muslim, I shouldn’t even be in this position. My parents didn’t even know I had a boyfriend, let alone a live-in one.”
Aisha confesses that to this day she has not confided in any family members about her abortion. “No one in my family knows because it is so stigmatized and it would be hard to open that chapter with them without having some sense of disappointment or shame,” she said. Her partner’s family, who are not Muslim, were very supportive. “It’s crazy to see that unconditional love. You think that you have that at home but there’s a part of you that fears that you don’t.”
Meanwhile, Nida Allam, a former North Carolina congressional candidate and a current Durham County Commissioner, recounts a very different experience of familial and community support when she had an abortion after experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. Allam says she was lucky to have the support of her friends and family in making this very difficult decision, despite the fact that it wasn’t much of a decision for her – if she did not terminate her ectopic pregnancy she would have died. That said, though ectopic pregnancies are not viable and would take the life of the mother, post Dobbs, there have been recorded cases of women being denied abortions under these circumstances and having to travel to other states to receive life saving care.
“What I went through was a privilege. A huge one. I couldn’t have made that decision without the people closest to me and the protection, albeit imperfect, offered by Roe. But now my daughter won't have that same privilege, and it’s devastating for our whole family,” said Allam, referring to the Dobbs decision.
Women, and specifically Muslim women, have been used as pawns to justify foreign intervention and authoritarianism since colonization first started, and well into America’s never ending wars in the Middle East. Yet, for all the war slogans championing colonizers as here to “save Muslim women,” presumably from Islam, little consideration has been given to what Islam actually has to say about the reproductive rights of Muslim women. Nor is much consideration given to what Muslim women think of abortion. The truth is, a majority of Muslim women support a women’s right to choose.
According to a 2022 poll from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, 60 percent of Muslim women believe abortion should be legal, with 26 percent agreeing it should be legal in all cases and 34 percent agreeing that it should be legal in most cases. Meanwhile, Islam has frequently served as a safe haven for Muslim women looking for comfort while making the difficult decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy.
In a comprehensive analysis of Islam’s stance on reproductive justice, published in 2022, Imam Omar Suleiman of the Yaqeen Institute says that “Islam recognizes that obliging everyone to bear children while disregarding their respective circumstances is impractical.” He further argues that differing Islamic madhabs, or Schools of Islamic Law, allow a range of permissibility regarding abortion, with some popular madhabs, such as the Hanafi School of Law practiced by the Abbāsid caliphs and Ottomans sultans – who exerted power over much of modern day Central and South Asia, Turkey, and Egypt – believing abortion to be permissible in some instances up to ensoulment, which occurs at 120 days. He says Islam allows abortion in cases where the mother’s life is at risk, regardless of the stage of gestation.
While different madhabs have varying beliefs on abortion, what’s clear is that the liberty Islam can provide in terms of abortion is often more than the total abortion bans or the 6-week bans being passed throughout the country. Some people, like Islamic and Constitutional Law professor, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, have even argued that these bans tread on Muslims' First Amendment rights.
The truth is, a majority of Muslim women support a woman's right to choose.
Of course, much of what Islamic leaders and communities have to say on abortion does not come from religious scripture. Professor Zahra Ayubi, a scholar of women and gender in Islamic ethics at Dartmouth University, argues that this tension in Muslim communities around abortion is a historical artifact of colonization rather than religious dictate. Regardless of what the Qur’an says or doesn’t say, Muslims are not immune to the cultural forces of patriarchy, and, at the moment, this means that a fairly conservative attitude towards abortion persists in some Muslim communities. Ayubi stresses that Muslims making choices about their health and future should make a clear distinction between what is Muslim practice shaped by cultural norms, and what is Islamic law as dictated by the Qur’an. Ayubi also argues that the forced-introduction of European medicine over colonized lands is what initially robbed women, many of whom were well-versed in midwifery and knowledgeable about their bodies', of control over their health since these European powers facilitated a male-dominated practice of medicine.
In “Reproduction: Abortion and Islam, published in The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures” in 2006, political scientist Donna Lee Bowen likewise states that there is a connection between the criminalization of abortion and colonization. She argues that there is even evidence linking the dominance of more conservative Maliki madhabs in North Africa to French colonization in the region. At the time that the French were conquering North Africa, they had already outlawed abortion in France. According to Bowen, they formed political alliances to uplift similarly conservative madhabs in the region; these madhabs still have lingering influence over North Africa.
Cultural stigmas and political roadblocks are not the only barriers that Muslim women in the U.S. face as they navigate their reproductive health. Black Muslim women in the U.S. are faced with heightened forms of state-sanctioned police violence, surveillance, and anti-Blackness, in addition to the racism, sexism, and Islamophobia that many other Muslim women face. Sabreen Mohammed, a Manager of Health Education and Research at HEART, says that many intersecting forces are at play for Black Muslim womens’ reproductive health.
“As a Black, visibly-Muslim woman, I don’t only face Islamophobia, or only anti-Blackness. They are compounded and permeate both within the Muslim community and in society at large,” she says. This layered experience of structural racism and intra-community racism (perpetrated by non-black Muslims) that Mohammed discusses is a big reason why the criminalization of abortion leaves Black women especially vulnerable.
The intersection of anti-Black racism and regressive health policies is why reproductive justice activist and doula Assata de La Cruz, who identifies as Muslim, was drawn to the work. “For me it always goes back to Black maternal health care and how we have been dying in alarming numbers,” says De la Cruz, Director of Community Outreach at the non-profit Soulforce, an organization dedicated to ending violence against LGBTQI communities.
Assata described how she, herself, had expressed concerns about the impact her endometriosis could have on a future pregnancy and had been ignored by her doctors. This ultimately led to dangerous complications in the birth of her daughter, “My kid almost died, and it took something like that happening for the doctors to finally listen.” De la Cruz says. “I thought I had a unique story until I started talking to other Black women.”
The medical racism De La Cruz describes, in addition to increasingly restrictive laws around abortion, compounds into a nightmare for Black women seeking any kind of reproductive care.
De La Cruz says that the Dobbs decision also worsens the precarious state of Black maternal health in this country. As a doula, she noticed that women are now more reluctant to reach out to their doctors regarding complications with their pregnancies because the level of trust with doctors has been further compromised by this ruling.
“I’ve had more of my doula clients than ever before [since Dobbs] having medical emergencies that didn’t have to be emergencies. A lot of that is because of confusion with doctors, who don’t know what they can and can’t do,” she says. De la Cruz elaborated that there were situations in which prescribing a medication would have easily addressed a certain complication for a pregnant patient, but if any of its side effects included even the smallest risk of terminating the pregnancy, doctors would hesitate to prescribe it. “Doctors are afraid of losing their license or getting in trouble and that takes precedence over them caring for their patients,” she says.
With the constitutional right to abortion now being restricted and regulated by individual states, Muslim women in states such as Texas, Oklahoma, and Indiana (among many others) may find it difficult, or even impossible, to obtain an abortion due to a combination of restrictive laws, economic constraints, and culturally conservative households.
Muslim women already face disproportionate disparities in healthcare and reproductive health outcomes compared to other groups, especially visibly Muslim women who wear hijab. The Dobbs decision further widens these disparities as access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare, including abortion services, becomes limited in states like North Carolina, Florida and Kansas.
“We already didn’t have a Planned Parenthood in Durham prior to Dobbs, women had to go to Raleigh or Chapel Hill to get reproductive care. Now, North Carolina is set to pass even more restrictive abortion laws that will endanger women who had pregnancies like mine. So women will have even fewer options than before,” said Allam.
“Even before Dobbs came down, access was already so limited in North Carolina. For a long time we had the 20-week abortion ban and 72 hour waiting periods. But after the decision passed, the state legislature got emboldened. But we aren’t letting up either, we are still here fighting for women in North Carolina,” says Lela Ali, Policy and Program Director at Muslim Women For, a collective focused on creating positive social change for Muslim communities and specifically, for Muslim women.
After the Dobbs decision, the fight to fully restore reproductive rights in the country will be a long one. It is made harder with the lack of reliable data on abortions in the Muslims community, and in marginalized populations overall. Privacy issues make it hard to collect data, especially with reproductive rights activists more frequently getting doxxed.
Sharmin Hossain, Campaign Director of Liberate Abortion, a coalition of organizations and activists fighting for abortion rights, recommends that people use Signal whenever possible while discussing healthcare decisions and while organizing. “Doxxing is real and Muslim communities are already heavily surveilled. Even in New York, where Muslim women are protected by liberal abortion laws, our communities, particularly on college campuses, were among the most heavily surveilled post-9/11. This created a culture where women seeking care were less likely to trust authority figures about their options,” Hossain says. “Use Signal… learn about your reproductive rights…and use a password app for added privacy,” she recommends.
De la Cruz mentions that women, especially Black Muslim women, are increasingly relying on themselves and the internet for medical information out of a heightened fear of medical institutions post Dobbs. “Women are being pushed back to this time where they have to be at home and figure things out on their own, or have secret networks, which is what I’m a big part of, where women help other women by giving them the actual information that they need.”
She also went on to caution those working in the reproductive space not to solely target their messaging and solidarity work around a surveillance narrative. She noted that Black women, including Black Muslim women “have been surveilled by the government since long before 9/11. Think of all the eugenics experiments. All of that has happened specifically to Black women. That’s why it’s really hard for me to get behind Muslim justice organizations that say that surveillance or privacy concerns are the reason we should be caring about this,” De la Cruz warns.
Despite the many hurdles to reproductive access, Muslim organizers and educators have been working on supporting women and people with uteruses through health challenges and empowering them to make the decision that’s best for them. They are ready to mobilize in the face of worsening conditions for women's reproductive rights. Where before, there wasn’t any space for these conversations, Muslim organizers have fought to create it.
De La Cruz recognizes this. She credits organizers working in the reproductive justice space, ones who are inclusive of queer and Black muslims such as Pirzada at HEART, for being instrumental in her navigating a post-Dobbs world as a queer, Black Muslim woman. “Everything in the Dobbs decision, to me, is rooted in white supremacy. And the way that white supremacy wins is by making us feel isolated. The greatest thing you can do to act against that is actively seeking out your people. Once you find them, it really empowers you to be able to tell your stories.”
Mohammed also recommends seeking trusted individuals and organizers to share community with. “Seek out supportive and safe spaces. Identify trusted members in your community who you can confide in. Stay vigilant. And look out for each other, especially Black women.”
“It’s important to talk about these issues but also to make sure your voice isn’t adding more harm to the conversation. Really bringing back an approach that centers [Rahmah], while rejecting harm, policing, and anything that inhibits bodily autonomy, which is a sacred right,” says Pirzada.
“God is Merciful, God is Just, God knows your intentions, and God knows that each individual human being has moral agency. And so, we are going to support them regardless of what the law says. Because lives are more important than laws."
