A Reproductive Justice History

Reproductive justice is a contemporary framework for activism and for thinking about the experience of reproduction. It is also a political movement that splices reproductive rights with social justice to achieve reproductive justice. The definition of reproductive justice goes beyond the pro-choice/pro-life debate and has three primary principles: (1) the right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; and (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. In addition, reproductive justice demands sexual autonomy and gender freedom for every human being.

At the heart of reproductive justice is this claim: all fertile persons and persons who reproduce and become parents require a safe and dignified context for these most fundamental human experiences. Achieving this goal depends on access to specific, community-based resources including high-quality health care, housing and education, a living wage, a healthy environment, and a safety net for times when these resources fail. Safe and dignified fertility management, childbirth, and parenting are impossible without these resources.

REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The case for reproductive justice makes another basic claim: access to these material resources is justified on the grounds that safe and dignified fertility management, childbirth, and parenting together constitute a fundamental human right. Human rights, a global idea, are what governments owe to the people they govern and include both negative rights and positive rights. Negative rights are a government's obligation to refrain from unduly interfering with people's mental, physical, and spiritual autonomy. Positive rights are a government's obligation to ensure that people can exercise their freedoms and enjoy the benefits of society.

Reproductive justice uses a human rights framework to draw attention to — and resist — laws and public and corporate policies based on racial, gender, and class prejudices. These laws and policies deny people the right to control their bodies, interfere with their reproductive decision making, and, ultimately, prevent many people from being able to live with dignity in safe and healthy communities.

The human rights analysis rests on the claim that interference with the safety and dignity of fertile and reproducing persons is a blow against their humanity — that is, against their rights as human beings. Protecting people against this interference is crucial to ensuring the human rights of all because all of us have the human right to be fertile, the human right to engage in sexual relations, and the human right to reproduce or not, and the human right to be able to care for our children with dignity and safety.

This history of reproduction in the United States pays attention to the ways that women have always been determined to make secret decisions, pursue bold options, share information and resources, depend on the support of sisters, friends, and strangers, and take the risks they needed to take to make the reproductive decisions they could make. Sometimes these efforts were successful, sometimes not. Indeed, the reproductive options that fertile people have are always structured by the resources they have — or do not have.

Understanding the historical, legal, and technological contexts in which women have lived their reproductive lives is key to understanding how women have seized particular spaces for managing their fertility. This means understanding how women have avoided conception and how they have had children and been mothers when they wanted to. This kind of information allows us to understand how women have been responsible mothers when they had children in the midst of the life they had, in the midst of the community they lived in. The crucial point here is that no matter what kinds of regulations the government, the church, the family, or other authorities created, girls and women have always done what they could to shape their own reproductive lives. These assertions have particular meaning for the lived experience of women of color, whose reproductive capacity has constituted both a key engine for white power and wealth historically and a touchstone for those who want to distinguish the "value" of women's reproductive bodies by race. These perspectives make clear that women of color have been targeted in distinctive, brutal ways across U.S. history.

The reproductive justice framework derives its vital depth from drawing attention to the persistence of this history — the ways that the history of white supremacy operating in a capitalist system penetrates and misshapes the present. "The past is never dead," William Faulkner famously said. "It's not even past." In this case, past abuses of women's reproductive bodies live on in contemporary harms and coercions, stimulating reproductive justice activists to define the arena of reproductive dignity and safety in terms of human rights. Keeping in mind the impacts of this history, reproductive justice activists and theorists focus on the lived, embodied reproductive and whole-life experiences within their communities of people who can become pregnant and give birth.

We cannot understand these experiences of fertility and reproduction and maternity separate from our understanding of the community — the social context — in which they occur. When we assess the extent to which a group of fertile and pregnant persons are reproductively healthy and the degree of this group's access to affordable reproductive health services, we can understand the relationship between health, health care, poverty, community empowerment, and the experiences of individuals. We can see the connection between reproductive health and well-being and the right to be a mother or a parent. We can see how the economic and cultural health of the community structures the degree of safety and dignity available to fertile and reproducing persons. These perspectives demonstrate the limits of the marketplace concept of free, unimpeded individual "choice" and turn us toward a human rights analysis.

This first chapter recounts the history of the thirteen original colonies and the United States and the resistance by women of color that gave birth to the reproductive justice framework. This chapter makes the case that knowing this history is crucial for understanding what animates and defines the contours and content of reproductive justice and the activist movement associated with its claims. It is a history that shows how colonizers, enslavers, employers, and the state, among other entities, have used reproductive capacity to pursue goals associated with power, wealth, status, and property, creating difficulties and particular degradations for fertile and reproducing persons because of their sex and gender and their capacity to give birth to new life. It highlights the histories of people of color regarding...