For most parents, our children’s safety is at the root of every decision we make. But policing, mass incarceration, and the surveillance and criminalization of poor communities and Black and brown people can make us feel powerless in keeping our children safe, no matter what decisions we make about our life or our children’s lives. Movement organizers who are parents feel this most acutely. The experience is isolating. Abolitionist organizer and author Maya Schenwar explained to me earlier this month that during the 2020 uprisings, as she was parenting her toddler, she remembers thinking, “We’re talking so much in movement spaces about care, and yet I feel so isolated from movement work because I have a young child.” Schenwar mentioned it to a friend, who told her, “That is the work. You are doing the work every day, caring for your kid.” This experience got Schenwar thinking about the relationship between organizing and parenting and how the experience of caregiving can go hand in hand with the world-building organizing work of abolitionists. This set her on the path to co-editing a new anthology, titled We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition (Haymarket Books), with abolitionist organizer, educator, and artist Kim Wilson, who produces the Beyond Prisons podcast.

“I knew this was not a book I could simply just write alone,” said Schenwar, an editor-at-large at Truthout. “I’m not an expert, and if we’re honest, none of us are experts on parenting. This is something that most of our contributors write about in the book, that we are trying and failing and trying again, and failing better.”

As the parent of two sons who are currently sentenced to life in prison, as well as an adult daughter who is on the outside, Wilson told me that she’s been thinking about the interconnectedness between abolitionist organizing and parenting for a long time. “You have to reimagine how you parent someone who’s inside, and someone who’s dealing with these brutal systems every single day, and it’s relentless.” Wilson said. “And there were a lot of other [aspects of] movement work that I just could not be involved in, because [parenting children who are incarcerated] was, especially in the early days, all consuming.”

I spoke with Schenwar and Wilson about their new anthology, why it’s crucial to be clear that there’s no reproductive justice without a free Palestine, and what they wish for their children and all children.