When Jenice Fountain, executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund, talks about how she got into reproductive justice work, she doesn’t start with policy: She starts with her survival. “I was navigating leaving a marriage, working 50 hours a week, being almost homeless [with my oldest child], and having trouble feeding myself,” she tells Her Campus. “I definitely didn’t have reproductive justice language when I entered the work — I just had enough dissatisfaction.”
In 2017, Fountain started working locally in Birmingham, Alabama, organizing financial support for Black women navigating housing instability and medical crises. At first, she looked for an existing organization to join. “I started by [asking], ‘Is anybody else already doing this work?’ so I could just join,” she says. But the answer she got surprised her. “People [told me], ‘No one’s going to fund anything if you just say it’s only for Black women.’”
So, she built it herself. Fountain began by crowdsourcing funds on Facebook, often raising hundreds of thousands of dollars through social media campaigns to provide financial assistance to Black women. And during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, she organized meal deliveries for families who couldn’t access school food distribution.
The visibility of that work eventually caught the attention of the Yellowhammer Fund, an Alabama-based abortion fund that helps people access reproductive care by covering procedures, travel, and lodging in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Deep South. “They were like, ‘Do you want to get paid for that work to help us move into a fuller spectrum of reproductive justice?’” she says. “And I was like, ‘Hell yeah. I do it for free while I’m broke.’”
In 2020, Fountain joined the Yellowhammer and began building what she calls “family justice” work, which means creating resources for when “the state tries to separate your family,” she says. Her work also included helping people cover bills, and, in her words, “making sure that people’s pregnancies weren’t catalysts for them being in poverty or a worsening circumstance.”
They [told me], ‘Don’t say anything, don’t advise, don’t fund.’ And I [said], ‘That’s not going to work.’
Then, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade and Alabama’s abortion ban took effect in 2022, the Yellowhammer Fund leadership asked her to step into the role of executive director. Initially, she was hesitant. However, her beliefs on the abortion funding landscape — and how it sometimes failed the very communities it claimed to serve — propelled her to accept. “I critique abortion funds so much that I may as well try to be the change that I would like to see,” she says.
That change was tested almost immediately. Soon after, Alabama’s attorney general publicly suggested that organizations assisting residents in traveling out of state for abortion care could face criminal charges. Yellowhammer paused direct abortion funding while assessing legal risk.“They [told me], ’Don’t say anything, don’t advise, don’t fund,’” Fountain says. “And I [said], ‘That’s not going to work.’”
Under Fountain, the Yellowhammer Fund joined a lawsuit challenging the state’s attempt to block travel assistance. After more than a year in court, they won. “We funded the first abortion 15 minutes after we found out we won,” she says. “And at that point, we knew. We really won.” Since then, Fountain says the fund has not turned away a single abortion request.
Persistence now looks like logistics. It’s helping Alabamians travel hundreds of miles, often to Illinois, covering procedure costs, hotels, flights, gas, and food. “Sometimes, people don’t even want to be on the phone,” she says. “So we text. We just hold your hand through the whole thing.”
Working in Alabama has sharpened her view of the broader reproductive justice movement. She pushes back on the idea that lawmakers simply do not understand the consequences of abortion bans. “Those folks know,” she says. “They’re not stupid.”
For Fountain, reproductive justice has never been just about legality. “People stopped at legality,” she says. “They thought that was enough. It’s never been enough.”
Fountain entered this work, she says, as “a person who needed a thing.” That experience has never left her. In Alabama, where abortion remains almost completely banned, she leads from what she lived through. “Standing in community this long, we’ve been in so many areas for at least four years now, every month, without fail,” she says. “Seeing how much more vulnerability there is, seeing that our organizer knows people’s names, knows their grandkids, knows what size diapers the babies wear, just being a community has been a win for us.”