Human trafficking is often misunderstood. It is not always dramatic kidnappings or people being physically restrained. More often, trafficking involves force, fraud or coercion that compels someone into labor or commercial sex.
It happens in private homes, restaurants, caregiving, agriculture, construction, hotels and informal economies. It does not require crossing borders, and it often goes unseen.
Across California, trafficking disproportionately impacts people already navigating systemic barriers: immigrants and undocumented workers, people of color, young people, foreign students, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, and those experiencing poverty or housing instability. Traffickers exploit vulnerability — economic, legal, and social, wherever it exists.
January was National Human Trafficking Prevention Month. This year, counties and cities throughout California issued proclamations recognizing the month and reaffirming commitments to awareness, survivor support and prevention. These actions reflect growing ongoing statewide leadership and coordination around a crisis that demands sustained attention and investment.
But effective prevention requires more than awareness. It requires addressing one of the most overlooked tools of exploitation: reproductive control.
Human trafficking is fundamentally about power and control over another person’s life. For many survivors, that control includes reproductive coercion, sexual violence, forced pregnancy, denial of contraception or obstruction of abortion care. When survivors are denied the ability to make decisions about their own bodies, their ability to escape exploitation, heal and rebuild their lives is severely limited.
At the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national abortion fund that helps pregnant people access abortion and emergency contraceptive care when cost, distance, or circumstance would otherwise make care impossible. Among the patients we support are survivors of human trafficking, domestic violence, incest and sexual assault in California and states across the U.S.
WRRAP works statewide with clinics, hospitals and vetted telehealth providers to ensure survivors can access care safely and confidentially. Many face barriers that legality alone cannot solve, lack of insurance, fear related to immigration status, inability to travel, language access challenges or safety concerns that make in-person clinic visits risky or impossible. For these individuals, reproductive healthcare is not abstract policy; it is immediate, life-altering support.
Programs like WRRAP’s abortion pill by mail funding are especially critical for survivors who cannot safely leave their homes or be seen at a clinic. Access to timely reproductive care can interrupt cycles of control, reduce trauma and restore autonomy at a pivotal moment.
California has taken meaningful steps to strengthen survivor protections within its healthcare system and beyond. In 2025, Senate Bill 963 took effect, requiring hospitals with emergency departments to adopt confidential self-identification policies so patients can disclose if they are experiencing human trafficking or domestic violence and be connected to support services. This approach recognizes healthcare settings as critical points of intervention and reflects California’s broader commitment to survivor-centered, trauma-informed care.
But policy must be matched by implementation and access. Survivors cannot benefit from identification or referrals if reproductive healthcare itself remains out of reach. Prevention strategies must explicitly include abortion and emergency contraception as essential survivor services, not secondary considerations. Public health planning, funding decisions and cross-agency coordination should treat reproductive autonomy as foundational to safety and recovery.
True prevention is intersectional. It recognizes that survivors’ needs do not exist in silos and that bodily autonomy is inseparable from freedom.
California has an opportunity to continue to lead by ensuring that survivor support includes the power to make decisions about one’s own body and future. Ending trafficking means restoring control. And that restoration must include reproductive justice.
Sylvia Ghazarian is executive director of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a nonprofit abortion fund that provides urgently needed financial assistance on a national level to those seeking abortion or emergency contraception. She is an active member on the California Future of Abortion Council and past chair of the Commission on the Status of Women.
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