Pregnancy in United States immigration detention: the gendered necropolitics of reproductive oppression

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that the detention and inhumane treatment of pregnant migrants by the United States (US) immigration authorities forms part of a continuum of gendered necropolitical violence that frames migrants’ lives before, during, and after crossing the US–Mexico border. In this context, pregnancy – a uniquely gendered and embodied experience – is a rich site of analysis, a place where reproductive oppression is enacted on individual bodies as well as reproduced in rhetoric that criminalizes pregnant migrant women. This article brings together two streams of analysis by feminists of color: first, the analysis by Latin American feminists of the “war against women’s bodies” in the current phase of narcocapitalism and necrocapitalism in Mexico and Central America; and second, the analysis by scholars of gendered immigration enforcement (“crimmigration”) and reproductive oppression in the US. This transfeminist approach brings the US reproductive justice movement into conversation with a Latin American feminist critique of gendered necropolitics in the Americas, pointing the way toward a radical politics of embodied personhood and reproductive autonomy.