In 2019, Hacks star Poppy Liu joined the board of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, an organization that advocates for maternal health and reproductive justice and centers women of color. She came to the reproductive justice movement after sharing her abortion story in a short film and collaborating with Healthy and Free Tennessee, which introduced her to SisterSong. Liu was one of the only members of the board who didn’t come from a nonprofit background, instead working in the entertainment industry in addition to her work as a full-spectrum abortion doula. She’d soon come to see SisterSong as her "political home," Liu told Jezebel. But this week, Liu says she was heartbroken to resign from the board with two other members—activist Coya Artichoker and one former board member who’s remained anonymous. In a resignation letter they co-signed, which Liu shared on her Instagram on Tuesday, the resigning members said they could no longer sit on the organization’s board “due to SisterSong's silence on Palestine for the past 140+ days.” On Thursday evening, SisterSong shared a statement acknowledging "what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza is a reproductive justice crisis" and calling "for an immediate ceasefire to the violence in Gaza." The statement comes short of naming Israel, identifying the United States' role in Israel's war on Gaza, or, as Liu states in her letter, naming apartheid conditions that Palestinians face or calling the Israeli attacks a genocide. "It is a very real question: who are we afraid of here? What sort of genocidal alliances have we made behind the scenes?" “In the case of Palestine more than any issue in the world, silence equates to complicity," Liu and Artichoker's Tuesday letter says. The letter begins by detailing why the ongoing crisis in Gaza is a reproductive justice issue, which they assert that organizations like SisterSong have an obligation to act on in a timely manner. “As we write this message, the miscarriage rate in Gaza has risen by 300%, over 50,000 pregnant people are in need of urgent care, mothers are undergoing c-sections without anesthesia, hospitals have become literal graveyards, and on average 2 Palestinian mothers are killed every hour.” The letter also cites how “over 13,000 children have been killed in the last 140 days,” “infants in the NICU have been left to decompose in hospitals that have been bombed by Israeli air raids,” and “those that are alive do not have access to food, water or medical care.” Further, “every single one of these atrocities is enabled by the US government.” “SisterSong calls itself a ‘movement voice [that is] called on by the United Nations, White House, legislators, media, and leaders of large mainstream organizations.’ There is a world in which SisterSong rises to this moment by leveraging its power to amplify the Free Palestine movement and demanding a ceasefire in the name of Reproductive Justice straight into the ears of the policymakers we have access to,” the letter, which Liu told Jezebel she wrote and rewrote “maybe 10 times,” continues. “Instead we have been given a myriad of reasons for why SisterSong cannot speak up and a succession of vague promises and timelines resulting in months of continued silence.” (As mentioned above, SisterSong did finally call for a ceasefire Thursday night.) “It is a very real question: who are we afraid of here? What sort of genocidal alliances have we made behind the scenes?” the letter concludes. “We wonder what type of allies we are dependent on, who hold their right to commit genocide above our right to condemn genocide.” Since their resignation, Liu and…
