Reproductive Justice Movement Research Articles

Reproductive Justice: A Framework for Improving Maternal Mental Health

The United States has the highest rate of maternal deaths compared to any high-income country, with the highest rate for Black women. Mental health conditions such as Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMAD) are the most common complication during the perinatal period and the leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the U.S. Nurses following a Reproductive Justice framework can improve perinatal mental health outcomes. The purpose of this article is to review the current maternal mental health crisis through the lens of the Reproductive Justice movement. By utilizing the three Reproductive Justice principles as a framework, this article will identify action steps that nurses can take today to help create a culture of health for mothers and babies.

“These are our children and we got to set them free”: A public health approach to reading reproductive justice in black literature

This paper explores reproductive justice themes in different works of Black literature and juxtaposes that literature with modern scholarship to consider a reproductive justice agenda for public health researchers. Incorporating multiple disciplines including public health, critical geography, and anthropology, this paper goes on to suggest that public health researchers would benefit from engagement with works from beyond academia. Specifically looking into Black fiction, nonfiction, and autobiographical writing, this paper traces reproductive justice themes and suggests that attention to these themes will bolster academic public health scholarship aligned with the reproductive justice movement

Immaterial intimacy: The neoliberal entanglement of digital technologies in social movement volunteer work

Outside of visible moments of mass mobilization, ongoing latent work, such as direct service and mutual aid, is a long-standing tradition in social movements. Yet, like all labor, personal digital devices have changed the norms and practices of direct service social movement work. In this article, as situated in the technology–media–movement complex (TMMC), I analyze qualitative interview data ( N = 26) with volunteers from a yearlong ethnographic project at an abortion fund hotline in the reproductive justice movement in the US South. To name hotline volunteers’ digital care labor, I offer the term immaterial intimacy to describe its ubiquitous, ephemeral, and intimate nature. I argue immaterial intimate labor enabled the organization to provide a responsive service, but relied on individualized digital volunteer work, existing within gendered and neoliberal norms. I discuss and question the use of personal digital technologies for direct service volunteer work in contemporary social movements.

Everyday Practices, Unaffordable Rights, Radical Liberation: Reproductive Justice Direct Service Activism

In post- Roe America, access to reproductive care is rapidly dwindling, with the criminalization of abortion on the rise. Yet, in these frustrating and perilous times, organizations, activists, and volunteers facilitate access to care every day via digital direct service activism. This article is a meditation on the transformational nature of direct service praxis in the contemporary reproductive justice movement. To document my own ongoing transformation, I include autoethnographic reflections on my experiences as a direct service volunteer from August 2021 to December 2022. Practices such as distributing abortion funding and peer counseling on an anonymous talkline have transformed my understanding and experience of liberation work. I want to draw attention to these quiet actions and exchanges that often go unnoticed in our loud, neoliberal capitalist context. These communions of care and connection help forge the future now, in small, radical, and tangible ways.

Empowering the next generation: integrating adolescents into the Reproductive Justice movement

This article explores the ethical implications of mandatory parental consent requirements for adolescents seeking sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS). Using a Reproductive Justice framework, which identifies systemic barriers to...

Fineman Speaks to Dobbs

It is an honor to comment on the scholarship of the preeminent legal theorist Martha Fineman. Throughout her pioneering career, she has challenged liberal feminist ideals grounded in anti-discrimination principles. She shows how sex neutrality and formal equality in law and policy fail to realize justice for women and children. In the last few decades, she has broadened her analysis to a critique of autonomy as a foundational ideal in law. In its place, she offers an account of the state’s obligation to respond to universal human vulnerability. As an entirety, I have found Fineman’s scholarship important to my own work because it offers a formidable normative argument for affirmative entitlements for caregivers and caretaking. Her specific analyses have ranged across diverse socio-legal arenas from divorce law and child custody, to the structure of the workplace, to public assistance and welfare policies.
 In this Essay, I explore the import of Fineman’s ideas for a pressing feminist issue upon which neither of us have focused in our scholarship: abortion. Given her longstanding focus on the social debt owed to mothers (including men who perform the labor of mothering), it is interesting that Fineman has not specifically spoken to the importance of women’s freedom from motherhood. In this Essay, however, I argue her ideas offer a critique of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and a theoretical foundation for abortion access. I hope this nascent exploration offers new insight into both the range and power of Fineman’s scholarship and productive paths forward for the reproductive justice movement.

Centering disability visibility in reproductive health care: Dismantling barriers to achieve reproductive equity.

Access to comprehensive and culturally competent reproductive health care is essential for individuals and communities to realize and achieve health and well-being, as one prefers. The disability community represents a diverse group of individuals with a wide spectrum of functional, physical, sensory, and/or neurodivergent abilities. Existing barriers to reproductive health care are a consequence of environmental and attitudinal barriers, not from the disabilities themselves. People with disabilities are also not frequently centered or included in discussions surrounding reproductive rights. This article reviews the intersection of the Disability Justice Movement and the history of discrimination in the United States against people with disabilities with a particular focus on reproductive oppression. We discuss the mechanisms of inequity and barriers to health care, including financial barriers, inaccessible medical facilities, provider discrimination and competency, and guardianship; as well as the importance of open access to contraception, menstrual health, and abortion for people with disabilities. Finally, we explore the intersection of the Disability Justice Movement and the Reproductive Justice Movement to better promote reproductive autonomy.

Human Rights In Childbearing 2. Reproductive Justice

In this article, I give an overview of the reproductive justice movement, defining and clarifying its meaning and differentiating it from the issue of reproductive rights. The main principles will be explored and consideration given to this framework within the UK context.

Reforming Medicaid Coverage Toward Reproductive Justice.

As the United States' largest public health insurance program, Medicaid has since 1965 played a crucial role in the struggle for equitable health care access. It has the potential to be a powerful instrument of reproductive justice, yet discriminatory policies that deny coverage for vital sexual, reproductive, or other health services, or exclude entire populations of people with low incomes from coverage altogether, constrain peoples' health and reproductive futures. Resulting discrimination in Medicaid law and policy thwart the program's ability to promote intergenerational health equity and reproductive justice for underserved communities.This Article provides an account of why reproductive justice is a necessary framework for examining, reimagining, and reforming Medicaid coverage law and policy. Part I gives a brief history and overview of reproductive justice, which serves as "an open source code that people have used to pursue fresh critical thinking regarding power and powerlessness." Part II argues that we should utilize that open source code in Medicaid coverage reform. Using some of the reproductive justice movement's critiques as a starting point, it explores how reproductive oppression has shaped Medicaid coverage law, policy, and mainstream reproductive and health care reform movements' proposals, and to what effect. It argues that examining Medicaid law, policy, and proposed reforms through this lens and in collaboration with the reproductive justice movement can enable health advocates and policymakers to more fully understand, disrupt, and dismantle reproductive injustices that drive health inequities. Ultimately, it can empower reformers to build a more equitable public health insurance safety net that brings us closer to reproductive justice for all.

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

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.

From Abortion Rights to Reproductive Justice: A Call to Action

As aggressive cultural and legislative attacks on abortion rights and access continue, we call upon social workers to pursue the liberatory aims of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement. We argue that the RJ framework, rooted in feminist theory, aligns with social work's social justice ethos and goals, appropriately guiding advocacy and intervention. After outlining the central aims and tenets of the RJ movement, we consider policies that impair RJ and those that could promote RJ, focusing on enhancing body sovereignty, childbearing, and parenting. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how social workers can pursue RJ professionally and personally.

Review of Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice by Zakiya Luna (New York University Press)

Zakiya Luna’s rich study combines comprehensive discourse analysis of political rhetoric and archival documents with her own ethnographic experiences within the reproductive justice movement. This book is an entry point into this often-marginalized arena, presenting a unique perspective informed by years of participant observation and thorough research which has produced additional projects, attesting to Luna’s expertise in this field of study. As a woman of color, Luna’s work is symbolically significant, and her intersectional lens renders this study broadly applicable to scholars of law, sociology, and gender studies, to policymakers and activists, and, indeed, to all women, who the reproductive justice movement indirectly or directly impacts. In tracing the way that reproductive justice has been framed as a “human right,” Luna addresses the potential for the human rights discourse to deliver on its intrinsic promise to secure freedom and equity for all.

Which lives matter in reproductive biomedicine?

The most recent Black Lives Matter moment provides an important opportunity for consideration of the interlocking social and political systems that contribute to ongoing racism and racial inequality. What does this mean in the context of reproductive biomedicine? Which lives do reproductive biomedicine devalue and how? In this commentary, I address why reproductive biomedicine is an important site for reflection on race, and how the Reproductive Justice Movement calls on us to shift our thinking. I argue for the need to recognize the deep connections between reproductive biomedicine and eugenics, and then offer some examples of racialization in reproductive biomedicine through assisted reproductive technology. Finally, I consider what steps practitioners might take to be part of the change for which this Black Lives Matter moment calls.

DISMANTLING THE PHALLIC ECONOMY WITH A HERMENEUTICS OF REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE

AbstractA reproductive justice reading of Numbers 5:11–31 centers on “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” as the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective stated so lucidly twenty years ago. Accordingly, a reproductive justice interpretation stresses the ethical imperative of reading Numbers 5:11–31 within the context of the reproductive justice movement. The interpretation centers on the most marginalized character—the woman—by recasting the woman’s experience as sexual violence and not as adultery; it addresses the intersecting oppression as it is represented by the husband whose ally is the priest; it analyzes the depicted power system in Numbers 5:11–31; and it reimagines the dusty water drink as an herbal abortifacient.

Reproductive justice: Non-interference or non-domination?

The reproductive justice movement started by black women's rights activists made its way into the academic literature as an intersectional approach to women's reproductive autonomy. While there are many scholars who now employ the term 'reproductive justice' in their research, few have taken up the task of explaining what 'justice' entails in reproductive justice. In this paper I take up part of this work and attempt to clarify the relevant kind of freedom an adequate theory of reproductive justice would postulate. To do so, I compare two approaches to reproductive freedom: an approach based on freedom as non-interference and an approach based on freedom as non-domination. I then argue that the non-domination approach better fits the ideals of the reproductive justice movement as set forth by its founders and should be treated as one of the necessary conditions in any non-ideal account of reproductive justice. Towards the end, I single out epistemic non-domination as crucial in shaping the narrative around reproductive justice.

Disability and Reproductive Justice

Since at least the 1960s, public debate over abortion rights has frequently turned to issues of disability. Those who argue for liberalization of abortion laws have often been successful by raising the specter of fetal disability — whether caused by Thalidomide, or rubella, or otherwise. Those who agitate for restricting or banning abortion, by contrast, have often argued that pro-choice advocates devalue the lives of people with disabilities. In the spring of 2019, disability and abortion rights collided at the Supreme Court. Indiana had adopted a law “barring the knowing provision of sex-, race-, or disability-selective abortions by abortion providers.” The Seventh Circuit invalidated that law. In Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana & Kentucky, the Supreme Court denied certiorari (though it summarily reversed the Seventh Circuit’s invalidation of a separate Indiana law regulating the disposal of fetal remains). Justice Thomas concurred in the denial of certiorari, but he filed a lengthy separate opinion arguing that the ban on selective abortions was constitutional. He argued that “this law and other laws like it promote a State’s compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.” Just a few months earlier, disability and reproductive rights issues had intersected in a very different way in the debate over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Disability rights advocates drew attention to an opinion then-Judge Kavanaugh had written in a case in which individuals with developmental disabilities challenged a District of Columbia policy that denied them the right to make decisions about their medical care. The case was Doe ex rel. Tarlow v. District of Columbia. The D.C. Circuit reversed a district court decision enjoining that policy. Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion did not say anything specifically about reproductive rights. He treated the case entirely as one about the (lack of a) right of incompetent persons to consent to medical treatment. But the case itself was very much a reproductive rights case. Two of the three plaintiffs had been forced to have abortions without their consent; they sued precisely to challenge the policy that had taken away their power to choose. Although Kavanaugh had a reputation as a strong “pro-life” judge, here he voted to uphold government decisions to require individuals with intellectual disabilities to have abortions. Debate over disability and reproductive rights has typically focused on the issues raised by Justice Thomas’s opinion in Box — whether fetal disability is an acceptable reason for terminating a pregnancy, and what the law should do about it. Those are important questions. But any full assessment of the intersection between disability and reproductive rights must also address the issues raised by then-Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in Doe. Disabled people are frequently denied their own rights to conceive, bear, and parent children, whether through forced sterilization or abortion, the denial of assisted reproduction, or the denial of parental rights once their children are born. Some of these practices — notably forced sterilization — are emblematic of the Eugenics Era. But they are not at all confined to the past. Indeed, the practices that prevent people with disabilities from having and raising children — practices like the law Kavanaugh upheld in Doe — are in many ways the disability analogues of the race-based eugenic practices that Justice Thomas himself decried in his Box opinion. This essay offers a fuller consideration of the intersection of disability and reproductive rights. It does so by considering the legal and societal treatment of fetuses and children with disabilities alongside the legal and societal treatment of parents with disabilities. And it does so by bringing to bear insights drawn from two distinct social movements: the disability rights movement, and the reproductive justice movement. The piece argues that, taken together, the disability rights and reproductive justice perspectives offer substantial purchase on the questions raised by Justice Thomas in his Box concurrence. Those perspectives suggest that the questions are serious indeed but that Thomas gave the wrong answer to them. They also suggest that any effort to address the intersection of disability and reproductive rights needs to address the questions raised by then-Judge Kavanaugh’s Doe opinion — and that Kavanaugh, too, gave the wrong answer.

Was Justice Ginsburg Roe-ght?: Reimagining U.S. Abortion Discourse in the Wake of Argentina’s Marea Verde

The most recent attack on Roe v. Wade (1973) will be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as this October. In its Petitioner’s brief, Mississippi has explicitly requested the Court to overrule Roe. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in 2020 shifted the balance of the Court in favor of the conservatives and many fear that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will be the vehicle through which self-styled pro-life activists will prevail in overturning Roe. Many do not realize that the late Justice Ginsburg was a critic of Roe--not because it provided access to abortion--but because she considered the Court’s decision in that case to be fundamentally flawed. Justice Ginsburg maintained that the Court’s sweeping decision in Roe had squelched the then-evolving public debate about abortion. As a result, far from resolving an important socio-legal issue of the time, Roe ignited a still-unresolved culture war in which a pregnant person’s access to safe and legal abortion hangs in the balance. Implicit in Justice Ginsburg’s critique of Roe was her imagining of an alternate reality, one that may currently be taking shape in Argentina. In December 2020, the Argentine Congress passed national legislation providing for safe, legal, and cost-free abortion. The law was the result of decades of feminist activism that ultimately shifted cultural perspectives about abortion. In Argentina, abortion is no longer taboo and society understands abortion access to be a human right. My Article engages the thought experiment proposed by Justice Ginsburg through a comparative exploration of abortion law and policy in the United States and Argentina. It concludes that anti-abortion actors in Argentina may pursue litigation to enjoin the national law, but those belated efforts at judicial reform will fail in large part because of the culture shift that has been achieved by the reproductive justice movement. My Article observes that Argentina’s activists learned important lessons from Roe, and proposes, if Roe is overruled, that U.S. activists will have much to learn from Argentina. The Appendices (posted) contain English translations of Argentina’s Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Law and 1,000-Day Plan, unavailable elsewhere.

Saving Delaney … by white privilege: a memoir of lesbian motherhood and anti-Black ableism

Saving Delaney is one of a number of “special needs” parent memoirs published in the United States since 2000 and is the only memoir about raising a disabled child in the United States written by lesbian parents. Like many representations of disability, “special needs” parent memoirs use a problematic narrative in which the presumed negative effects of disability are individually overcome before life lived happily ever after. Also like popular and positive representations of disability, the children subjects of “special needs” parent memoirs are almost entirely white. In this paper, I contextualize Saving Delaney within histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) family-making in the United States, drawing particular attention to the overrepresentation of children with disabilities among gay and lesbian adoptive parent households. Then, drawing attention to the overwhelming whiteness of both positive portrayals of children with disabilities in “special needs” parent memoirs and LGBT families in scholarship, data, and media, I argue that white privilege facilitates visibility and protection against disability stigmas. I demonstrate that LGBT family-making and caring for children with disabilities cohere as issues of comprehensive reproductive justice and that narratives like Delaney’s fail to advance the reproductive justice movement due to reiterative entrenchment in the material and discursive privileges of whiteness.

Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth

For decades, sociologists and anthropologists have been at the forefront of theorizing and empirically documenting how racism negatively affects the health and well-being of socially marginalized racial groups in the United States (e.g., Bridges 2011; Gravlee and Sweet 2008; Williams and Sternthal 2010). By contrast, most public health researchers’ explanations for racial health disparities have largely on treated race as a risk factor, rather than attending to how racism operates as a powerful and enduring social determinant of worse health and health outcomes among African-Americans. Important exceptions exist, however, particularly in the area of maternal and child health. Arline Geronimus (1992) developed the ‘weathering hypothesis’ to describe how chronic stress resulting from a lifetime of discrimination contributes to higher rates of adverse birth outcomes among Black women. Around the same time, a collaborative of women of color founded the reproductive justice movement to draw attention to...

Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances

This article provides a brief overview of the state of discourse, politics and provision of abortion in the Anglophone West, including developments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It then surveys three promising directions for feminist abortion scholarship. The first is work inspired by the Reproductive Justice Movement, that points to the intersectional axes of inequality that shape abortion discourse and position us in relation to reproductive choice and access issues. The second is work that examines the particularity of the constitution of the aborting body, reflecting the particularity of the pregnant body. This is a specific body, with a specific history; abortion discourse draws from and makes a significant contribution to the meaning and lived experience of this body. The third area of scholarship we highlight is that which seeks to amplify the meaning of abortion as a social good. Much abortion scholarship is attuned to a critique of negative aspects of abortion—from its representation in popular culture to restrictive law and access issues. This is critical work but/and the performative nature of abortion scholarship, like all discourse, means that it can amplify the association of negativity with abortion. The article concludes by introducing the articles contained in the special section of Women's Studies International Forum, ‘Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances’.