From Rights to Justice: The Reproductive Justice Movement, Past and Present

Catalog description

This course examines the emergence of the Reproductive Justice framework through a transnational lens that expands upon the Western liberal feminist discourse of reproductive rights and its focus on women's right to avoid compulsory motherhood. In the 1990s, women of color and indigenous women in the United States began criticizing a solely rights-based approach to reproductive politics on the basis that it fails to acknowledge the history of denying reproductive autonomy to people who are underserved, marginalized, and discriminated against. Coined in 1994, Reproductive Justice is a radical framework that fuses the struggle for reproductive rights with the fight for social justice. By contextualizing 'choice' in relation to race, class, sexuality and ability, Reproductive Justice demands not only the right to avoid motherhood, but also the rights to have children and to raise children in safe and healthy environments. In this class students will learn why feminists of color criticized the liberal feminist approach to reproductive politics; gain understanding of how 1980s international feminist solidarity between feminists in the Global North and South informed the formation of the Reproductive Justice framework; examine the uptake of the framework by anti-colonial movements in the United States and the Global South; and analyze a variety of historical and contemporary reproductive issues through a Reproductive Justice lens, including abortion, eugenics, population control, mass incarceration and maternal health.