- History of Reproductive Justice in the United States

Catalog description

This course explores the history of what has come to be known as reproductive justice—the efforts of women and other people who can become pregnant to control their own reproductive lives, to choose whether and when to have children, and to ensure that they can bear and raise children in safe and healthy ways. We will survey this history from the colonial era to the present, with a particular eye toward how hierarchies of power based on race, gender, and other categories of identity have shaped women’s experiences. We will examine how women’s reproductive autonomy was circumscribed in the past by enslavement, eugenic ideologies, forced sterilization programs, and other practices, as well as how it has been affected more recently by factors like anti-choice campaigns and Supreme Court decisions. We will also learn, however, about women’s knowledge of the functioning of their own bodies, about how they have maintained some degree of autonomy over their bodies even under oppressive circumstances, and about how people have collectively struggled to ensure that everyone can determine the course of their own reproductive lives.