Traditionally, any discussion of reproductive rights and reproductive justice is reduced to the often contentious and narrow debate regarding abortion rights. Reproductive justice, for many, encompasses much more than the singular act of giving birth. In this Charla de Merienda, our panelists go beyond the theoretical to explore the very real implications of reproductive justice.

To talk about reproductive justice from a women and gender center perspective, both in Kansas and across the country can be (and has been) met with immense excitement and curiosity, justifiable hesitancy, or downright anger. As a space for all students in our communities, identity based centers often serve folks with different understandings, experiences, and politic that make the conversations we hope to have, and specifically this dialogue around reproductive justice, somewhat fraught. With that said, we utilize the definition and framework for understanding reproductive justice offered to us by SisterSong, a women of color reproductive justice collective, which defines reproductive justice “as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities (see more here). It is with this definition that we work to provide the support, access, and information needed for our students and community members to be informed, involved, and empowered as they advocate for themselves and others. 

As identity-based resource centers seek to intentionally serve people centering their salient identity (race, gender, sexuality, etc), many are thinking more expansively and intersectionally about the work done and services provided. The history of women’s centers remind us of the ways white women and their issues have always been central to the work of our spaces and today we are pushed to think about those most marginalized in our communities that being women of color, transgender and non-binary folk. As we think about reproductive justice broadly, we know that, practitioners must consider the needs of those students to make our spaces, services, and advocacy more accessible and inclusive. Centering the people experiencing compound oppression would result in work that would effectively meet the needs of all - essentially a trickle up effect. As we take the conversation around reproductive justice and apply it to our context- the Americas, the United States, the State of Kansas, the City of Lawrence, the University of Kansas- we can allow ourselves to expand the conversation around abortion rights to encompass climate change, health care, immigration, gun control, transportation services, public education, equal pay, and specifically in our space, educational access and childcare support for student parents. 

As a space of practice, the women’s and gender equity center is a sensible place to go for support as a parenting student. What we know is that there are added responsibilities for students who are also caregivers, especially students who are birth parents. Currently, there is no federal law offering paid family leave though states across the country and institutions like the University of Kansas have enacted their own policies to support employees and some students. In addition to the limited accessibility to parental leave for both employees and students (non-existent for undergraduates), the choice to have children or not have children remains complicated when one cannot ensure childcare support, healthcare, or general bodily safety. The cost for a KU student to send their child to Hilltop for a year, roughly comes out to $6,087 that is if you and your child meet all of the criteria, or else one would need to find support outside of the institution. Many students who come from more communal cultures often have parents or grandparents caring for their children, meaning they are often not only needing economic resources for themselves but also their extended family. Knowing the data around the wage gap for women of color and the history of disenfranchisement for people of color, one can deduce that this reality is far more complicated at the intersections of identity (see more here).

Dr. Loretta Ross, one of the women who coined the term reproductive justice, recently said “A key criterion for reproductive justice is realizing that no individual can make reproductive decisions outside of the context in which they’re embedded,” and with that, what will move us towards a future that is just and fair is an understanding of the various contexts and experiences of those on this planet with us.

The following is a summary of a piece Pere DeRoy penned for another site. You can read her full piece below.

The high mortality rates of pregnant women during the term of their pregnancies or during childbirth have become a normal occurrence in Guyana. Culturally, there is a dread and worry that comes with the (perhaps) not-so-happy news of the advent of a new family member. For over 25 years, maternal mortality rates have been fluctuating between 171-230 deaths a year, with no forward progress. Pushing against the traditional individual blame approach existent in the healthcare sector, Pere is criticizing how healthcare in Guyana working just the systems that perpetuate poverty and inequality. This violence against women in Guyana is present in different manifestations, but this is a sector of the community that should not contribute to this issue.

The findings from our manifest and latent content analysis lend support to the theoretical expectations posited in the feminist surveillance studies and social control framework, illustrating how these practices construct both women and abortion providers and shapes the types of policies that are designed for them (Schneider and Ingram 1993, 2005). The analysis demonstrates that state-level anti-abortion legislation is about more than restricting access to abortion services—these policies position the state to carefully manage women’s reproductive experiences through surveillance and social control.

 In the case of legislative provisions constructed to protect women and their unborn, by virtue of their identity as mothers, women are positioned as an at-risk group. Within these bills, the sex of an individual (female) is conflated with the role of an individual (parent) in a way that naturalizes the category of woman/mother by erasing these distinctions and constructing them as interchangeable in policy design. This maternalism makes motherhood an inevitability, while also constructing pregnancy as a time of great vulnerability for women, even when the pregnancy is unwanted. Women are socially constructed as a dependent group, unaware that their fetus is an unborn child, ignorant about the hazards of abortion, and ill equipped to navigate the coercive nature of the abortion industry. This beckons the state to intervene to protect them from mistakenly deciding to terminate a pregnancy rather than embrace their natural maternity.

Anti-abortion legislation contributes to normalizing medical care that only represents a certain form of livability, reinforcing a specific way that all women are supposed to respond to a pregnancy. Women seeking abortions are treated in policy and in practice as deviant—breaking with their true maternal nature—and the state’s surveillance of them reinforces and constructs pregnancy termination as deviant (Conrad 2009).

State paternalism also becomes normalized, even expected, in the face of this socially constructed woman—she is dependent upon the knowledge that can only be imparted to her through the protective, paternal authority of the state, regardless of its accuracy. The authority and expertise of medical professionals is reframed through this legislation, which constructs abortion providers as unethical and part of an industry that requires increased regulation. Abortion providers embody a group that violates the norms of motherhood. They offer medical services that terminate pregnancy and disrupt motherhood, therefore they are the consummate threat to women’s well-being. Although abortion providers are physicians, they are constructed and stigmatized as a group that operates outside the boundaries of conventional medicine, posing a threat to women that must be countered by social control provisions aimed at reining them in and punishing them if they do not comply. Through surveillance and social control provisions the state supplants abortion providers’ medical expertise with mandates that require them to become the tools through which contested information on abortion is disseminated to women, even when the inaccuracy of the information transgresses their personal or professional ethics and training.

Surveillance and social control become the method by which the state can ostensibly protect women against the harms of abortion, though this protection invites another set of invasive practices through a woman’s interactions with the medical sector. If she has an abortion, she is often given scientifically misleading or inaccurate information, required to sign multiple documents at certain times, and subjected to intrusive medical procedures regardless of her wishes. Her decision has to be validated by those with medical expertise (and legislative expertise, in the case of those passing these bills). If she chooses to forgo an abortion and continue to carry the pregnancy to term, she now faces the surveillance of prenatal care in doctors’ office and well-meaning strangers while navigating public space. State surveillance and social control practices do not disappear if a woman chooses to have an abortion or not; it simply morphs into a new form of scrutiny.

When examined collectively, this legislation suggests that abortion will continue to be subjected to surveillance and social control practices that regulate abortion through a trajectory of well-established legislation, while simultaneously expanding the reproductive surveillance regimen. By constructing women as unknowledgeable and dependent alongside predatory, coercive medical providers, this particular genre of legislation will continue to invite the state to seek additional protective measures.

The content analysis revealed how the reciprocal relationship between the construction of abortion-seeking women and abortion providers, has facilitated the normalization of surveillance and social control. Reproductive surveillance and social control are blanketed across all pregnant women, without acknowledgement of the differences amongst and between them. As Butler (2004) writes, “What is most important is to cease legislating for all lives what is livable only for some, and similarly, to refrain from proscribing for all lives what is only unlivable for some” (8). Once new standards of surveillance and social control are established, a policy precedent becomes established that “feeds forward” into enacting more invasive policies (Schneider and Ingram 2005). With the passage of each new provision that concretizes socially constructed narratives, the justification for future policies becomes less important. The rapid succession of anti-abortion policies exemplifies the feed forward process of degenerative politics.

Expanding state surveillance vis-à-vis protecting women has continued to feed forward. Toward this end, hundreds of women protective bills continue to be introduced and new ones have begun to crop up. In 2017 the Texas Senate passed, and the House considered, a bill that takes the next step toward widening the state’s authority to intervene in women’s abortion decisions. This bill empowers physicians to protect women from the adverse consequences of abortion by shielding physicians from lawsuits if they purposefully withhold information from a woman that may lead her to terminate her pregnancy (Guttmacher Institute 2017). As state legislatures continue to propose and enact anti-abortion policies, it is critical to contextualize and interrogate the larger landscape of surveillance and social control practices within which these laws exist. State and federal-level policy is increasingly engaging in the surveillance and social control of bodies and identities, restricting how transgender students use bathrooms at school; how non-citizens travel within US borders; and how potential criminals and terrorists are identified through “See Something, Say Something” programs. While these policies may seem disconnected in their focus, they are all foregrounded in social constructions of target populations that marginalize those who are not considered normative members of society. If policy legitimates the surveillance of one group, then the same frames can be applied across other populations and with new levels of invasiveness.