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This chapter introduces the movement for reproductive justice, which uses intersectionality and human rights frameworks on behalf of women of color’s right to access health care. The chapter critiques the varied forms of reproductive oppression against which these activists engage in grassroots organizing, cultural politics, and policy advocacy. The chapter discusses the research questions as well as methodology that draws from ethnographic research, including participant observation, focus groups, and interviews with activists and participants working with thirteen reproductive justice organizations. The chapter provides an overview of the book.

The women presented here were all between the ages of thirty and thirty-nine at the time of the interview and come from a wide variety of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds. Taken together these life narratives reveal a changing landscape of feminist activism. Far more of these activists were trained in women’s studies programs, which, by the late 1990s and early 2000s had become more prevalent in educational settings. Several discuss the complexities of reproductive justice frameworks that are starting to supplant a focus on reproductive rights. Street harassment is a major topic of activism. They reflect on the impact of 9/11 and the economic crash of 2008 on their lives, on the impact of social media on older feminist organizations, and on the fractiousness of the online feminist community. Several of these women live in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and their interlocking stories reveal both the connections and the fractures within that vibrant feminist community. As this generation of activists seeks to make change, one theme that emerges in several of their stories is their sense that we need to change hearts and minds, and behaviors, not just laws.This conviction was forged at least in part through the horrors of police violence unfolding during the time of these interviews, and the Black Lives Matter movement that was taking shape in response.

This chapter introduces and defines several of the book’s key terms, including biological reproduction, colonialism, settler colonialism, and reproductive justice. Articulating the book’s overarching arguments, the chapter contends that colonial politics have been and remain reproductive politics. It further argues that Native women have navigated pregnancy and birthing in myriad ways that disrupt any tidy dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern” birthing in the twentieth century. The introduction begins with an overview of the founding of the Women of All Red Nations (WARN) in 1978 and suggests that the roots of this 1970s activism are not only in Native struggles for sovereignty and self-determination in post-World War II decades but in Native women’s reproductive-related activism throughout the century.

This concluding chapter details the creation of a reproductive justice movement among women of color. Critical of the dominant abortion rights discourse about reproductive “choice,” they used human rights as their frame for building a movement that focused on transforming the broad social and economic context that they believed was fundamental to achieving reproductive justice for all women. Distancing themselves from a medical model of health care activism, women of color feminists like Loretta Ross, Dázon Dixon Diallo, and Luz Rodriguez argued that fundamental needs—ending poverty, gaining access to jobs and quality housing, and acquiring education—all needed to be met in order to guarantee reproductive justice. Since poor women and women of color had the most trouble satisfying these most basic needs, they suffered compromised reproductive health and control over their reproductive choices.

Chapter 5 investigates the opportunistic ways that mainstream reproductive health NGOs draw on the language of reproductive justice to frame population advocacy as socially progressive. At the same time, they obscure the intersectional politics that structure the reproductive justice movement’s history and current work. The chapter analyzes the experiences of population advocates of color as they navigate the thorniness and complexity of reproductive justice (RJ) language and frameworks in an advocacy movement that has historically threatened RJ goals. I chart the changing role of racial politics in population-environment advocacy over time, tracing the ways race has moved from being a zone of heated controversy to providing an opening for new representational strategies such as reproductive and “population justice”—despite deep ambivalence toward justice frameworks and activists.

This epilogue provides a brief overview of Native women’s reproductive experiences in the twenty-first century, the most pressing issues Native pregnant people currently face, and the wide-ranging reproductive justice agendas that Native individuals and organizations are advancing. In recent years, the Indian Health Service has closed some reservation hospitals and reduced obstetric services in others. In response, Native women are advocating for the return and expansion of reservation women’s health and obstetrics services, as well as the reform of institutions that have not met patients’ needs. Native women are also questioning or outright challenging Western models of medicalized birthing, continuing a longer struggle for the decolonization of pregnancy and childbirth. Native reproductive justice agendas are expansive and incorporate demands such as the right to control one’s own fertility, the elimination of racial health disparities, and the protection of tribal lands from environmental degradation, among many other priorities.

In Chapter 7, the development of the Reproductive Justice Framework and its international application is analysed, alongside consideration of the terminology of reproductive justice and how its use is impacted by different societal contexts. A consideration of the choice framework is offered. The case study of RESURJ, an international organisation of young feminists working in the Global South, provides insight into how movements can work at grassroots and international levels, promoting the values of reproductive justice in order to improve the lives of those most affected by oppressive laws and policies. The chapter further considers how reproductive justice can shine a light on countries with multiple reproductive oppressions. The chapter concludes by considering a recent development in the theoretical framework of Reparative Reproductive Justice.

Taking recent immigration policies related to pregnancy and motherhood as its point of departure, the conclusion considers the implications of homeland maternity and examines potential modes of resistance to it. Resistance might include strategies of co-optation, subversion, and other modes of rhetorical invention and reinvention. In an age of homeland maternity, this would imply, for example, challenges to the cult of intensive mothering, resistance to the surveillance and control of pregnancy and childbirth, novel forms of community organizing and alliance, and more capacious imaginings of motherhood, family, and kin. This final chapter highlights and develops emerging channels of challenge and transformation, to edge us toward the promise of reproductive justice, beginning with the very words we speak.

This chapter sets the history of abortion law this in the context of feminist critique, exploring the significance of access to abortion for women’s lives and the gendered structure of society. It contains a discussion of feminist writing on pregnancy and motherhood and what these mean for female subjectivity: from Simone de Beauvoir’s description of pregnancy as a ‘servitude’, to Shulamith Firestone’s call for reproductive technologies that can separate the process of reproduction from women’s bodies. This chapter also explores the reproductive justice movement, which has emphasised the ways in which the needs of poor, minority ethnic and migrant women may differ from those of white middle-class women. The chapter argues that access to abortion can have radical implications for women’s lives, freeing women from compulsory motherhood. Yet celebratory accounts of abortion in Britain must be tempered. Abortion law has always relied heavily on the capacity of the medical profession to control women’s reproductive choices.

This chapter places abortion debates in Britain in the context of both anti-abortion strategy worldwide and the global struggle for reproductive justice, touching on issues of race, ethnicity, migration and nation. There has recently been a twofold shift in the terrain of British pro-choice argument. One the one hand, the British pro-choice coalition has shifted from a politics of protection – which emphasises women’s vulnerability and thereby supports a paternalistic, medicalised regime of abortion regulation – to a politics of liberation, which emphasises women’s authority over their own reproductive decisions. On the other hand, there is a growing need to acknowledge intersectional or reproductive justice claims in abortion politics. The chapter closes by asking whether the pro-choice movement is being pulled in two different directions, and how it can steer between them.

This chapter offers a feminist reading of two Irish cases that raise important ethical and legal concerns:  the unnecessary peripartum hysterectomies at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital Drogheda and the tragic death of Savita Halappanavar in October 2012. Key to this feminist analysis is a desire to understand the mechanisms by which the voices and concerns of the women at the centre of these cases were ignored, marginalised and trivialised. The chapter addresses the cultural dis-ease with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy and the excess of epistemic and moral authority vested in doctors and religious leaders and the correlated lack of authority invested in women patients and midwives.

This chapter reflects on the state of women’s health care and the policy that undergirds the contemporary vibrancy of the pre-pregnancy care framework. It explains why pre-pregnancy care was initially met with opposing interpretations about its vision and potential efficacy. Analyzing interview data in conjunction with historical materials, this chapter shows that pre-pregnancy care was, in part, created to advance reproductive justice by bridging the long-divided realms of maternal care and reproductive care. By traversing the boundaries of entrenched reproductive silos, the pre-pregnancy care model expanded health care during women’s reproductive years—an outcome that seemingly served progressive goals. However, the idea of couching women’s health in terms of their maternity status followed a long tradition of maternalism in American policymaking, further entangling motherhood and womanhood.

This chapter examines the limitations of feminist discussions about disability and reproduction. Feminism and disability rights often hold different places in reproductive justice discussions. Feminism often oversimplifies the idea of reproductive choice, focusing on individual women and endorsing cultural stereotypes of disability. As a counterpoint to the scholarly literature of these issues, Alison Piepmeier interviewed twenty-nine parents of children with Down syndrome, asking them about their pregnancy, prenatal testing, and their families. The responses of these parents illustrate how families need more support than just individual rights to raise a child with a disability. Although reproductive decisions may rest on an individual woman, she must also consider community support and health services in her decision to raise a child, particularly one with a disability.

This book explores the social politics of legal infant abandonment in advocacy and media discourses surrounding safe haven laws, which allow a parent to relinquish a newborn legally and anonymously at a specified institutional location such as a hospital or fire station. More specifically, it considers the social constructions of motherhood perpetuated by safe haven advocates as well as the social injustices that compel infant abandonment. Using a feminist framework, the book offers insights into the contested nature of what defines good and bad motherhood and examines the issues that surround unsafe infant abandonment from a reproductive justice perspective, with particular emphasis on abortion and adoption politics. This introduction discusses critical perspectives on why we do not need safe haven laws, the cultural components of wanted and unwanted motherhood, and assumptions about maternal love, infant abandonment, adoption, and infanticide. It also provides an overview of the chapters in this book.

The six women and one trans man in this chapter were between the ages of 20 and 30 years old. Like the other activists in this book, they search for ways to balance their passion and commitment to making a difference in the world with the need to earn a living, maintain their health, and craft lives that include time for friends and families. Several have been activists since they were teenagers. They discuss how the events of September 11, 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008 shaped their lives and their ideas about activism. They reveal how “intersectionality” inherently defines the way most of them think about feminism and see interconnections between issues --- whether reproductive justice, sexual assault, police brutality, Black Lives Matter, transgender experiences, housing and economic development. Several discuss the role of philanthropy in the feminist movement. These young activists’ ingenuity and their ability to tap into local and international networks, and to bring theory to practice, reflects a wealth of experience and knowledge that promises feminism remains a vital, evolving, and exciting movement.

Chapter 5 revisits many of the themes of the book and investigates their broader import and applicability, exploring the ways in which notions of privacy and the public sphere are wielded in reproductive regulations. Arguing that women’s bodies are sometimes presented as public spaces and are at other times privatized, it shows that these representations are connected to common understandings of autonomy. Another topic explored herein is how autonomy as critique and transformation could be used to promote reproductive justice projects. Chapter 5 also provides an overview of how each of the policy areas the book investigates would benefit from an approach anchored in the tradition of autonomy as critique and transformation. This overview is combined with a consideration of the limitations and potential of legal change and, in conclusion, an examination of the links between cyborg theory and transformative autonomy. The chapter argues that cyborg theory draws needed attention to the critical and transformative possibilities of non-reproductive technologies that play a crucial role in the management of reproduction.

This chapter explores theories about how laws and organizations influence each other. First, the chapter explores the purpose of tort laws and the goals of the tort reform movement and uses them to define provider-friendly and patient-friendly tort regimes. An analysis of the effects of tort laws on obstetric malpractice lawsuits illustrates that, contrary to expectations, the rate of lawsuits is higher in states where tort reforms have reduced healthcare providers’ liability risk. The chapter then uses reproductive justice theory to examine reproductive health laws that govern contraception, abortion, midwifery, prenatal substance use, and fetal rights. These laws define fetus-centered and woman-centered reproductive rights regimes.

This chapter explores the ways in which reproductive capabilities of women with intellectual disabilities are understood and represented while remaining mindful of the discourses of control lodged at a multiplicity of women’s bodies. In addition, the coalitional potential between reproductive justice and disability rights is discussed.