Reproductive Justice

What are the three tenets of Reproductive Justice (SisterSong/Ross & Solinger)?

(1) The right not to have a child; (2) the right to have a child; (3) the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments — plus bodily and sexual autonomy. (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

When and by whom was the term "Reproductive Justice" coined?

Coined in 1994 by Black women activists responding to inadequacies of the pro-choice framework; SisterSong (founded 1997) was the first formal RJ organisation. Rooted in the 1983 National Conference on Black Women's Health Issues.

What is "stratified reproduction"? (Colen, 1995)

"By stratified reproduction I mean that physical and social reproductive tasks are accomplished differentially according to inequalities that are based on hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, gender, place in a global economy, and migration status and that are structured by social, economic, and political forces." (Colen, 1995, cited in lecture)

What is "social reproduction"? (Di Chiro, cited in Hoover, 2018)

"The intersecting complex of political-economic, sociocultural, and material-environmental processes required to maintain everyday life and to sustain human cultures and communities on a daily basis and intergenerationally." (Di Chiro, cited in Hoover, 2018)

What is Environmental Reproductive Justice? (Hoover, 2018)

"The concept of environmental reproductive justice involves expanding reproductive justice to include a deeper focus on the environment, and to include the reproduction of language and culture as concerns, in addition to the reproduction of human beings." (Hoover, 2018, p. 8)

What are the key limitations of the "choice" framework?

It promotes an individualistic, market-oriented notion of freedom; overlooks social, economic and political conditions shaping access; focuses on "negative rights" (non-interference) rather than "positive rights" (ensuring people can exercise freedoms); most harms women relying on public funding. (Lecture)

What is the distinction between negative and positive rights?

Negative rights = government's obligation to refrain from interfering with autonomy. Positive rights = government's obligation to ensure people can exercise freedoms and enjoy society's benefits. Human rights include both. (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

How does Ross & Solinger define RJ as a framework about power?

"Reproductive justice is essentially a framework about power. It allows us to analyze the intersectional forces arrayed to deny us our human rights, and it also enables us to determine how to work together across barriers to accrue the power we need to achieve and protect our human rights… We must work together in solid alliances that put our own lives in the center of the lens through which we theorize, strategize, and organize." (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

What does bell hooks argue about white supremacy and reproductive control?

"The very concept of white supremacy relies on the perpetuation of a white race, and it is in the interest of continued racist domination of the planet that the bodies of all women are controlled." (bell hooks, cited in lecture)

How does Ross & Solinger define reproductive oppression?

"Reproductive oppression is the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, [labor,] and reproduction. The regulation of women and individuals thus becomes a powerful strategic pathway to controlling entire communities. It involves systems of oppression that are based on race, ability, class, gender, sexuality, age, and immigration status." (Forward Together, cited in Ross & Solinger, 2017)

How do Ross & Solinger link reproductive oppression to genocide?

"Reproductive oppression constitutes genocide because it can be characterized as 'imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'." (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

Give two historical examples of racially differentiated reproductive control. (Ross & Solinger)

(1) Sale of enslaved African American children away from their families; (2) removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools — both "horrifying examples of how some women — and only some — have historically faced official, legal obstacles to the right to be mothers of children they bear." (Ross & Solinger, ch. 1)

What did 19th-century US abortion/contraception laws reveal about race and reproduction?

"The nineteenth-century laws against contraception and abortion expressed the importance of the white mother's role in making the white nation and the government's interest in protecting her fertility." (Ross & Solinger, ch. 1)

Give two concrete examples of coercive sterilisation in the US.

(1) Relf sisters (1970): Mary Alice (14) and Minnie Lee (12) sterilised without consent; (2) Indian Health Service accused of sterilising 25% of Native women; Latinas pressured to sign English consent forms during labour. (Lecture)

Why is RJ specifically a racial justice project, not a universal women's movement? (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

"As Black women, we shared a unique standpoint that expressed how the reproductive privileges of some women depended on the reproductive disciplining of other women in ways that did not challenge racism or other vehicles of inequality." (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

How does Hoover describe the shared move of EJ and RJ away from individual rights?

"Like EJ, RJ seeks to move away from a discourse on individual rights to a more expansive set of concerns for the conditions under which rights can be exercised, which include ecologies, prison systems, food systems, criminalization of drug use, and more." (Hoover, 2018)

What does race predict about environmental harm?

Race is the strongest predictor of where toxic waste sites are located; tribal communities live in close proximity to approximately 600 Superfund sites, with environmental mitigation significantly behind non-tribal communities. (Hoover et al., 2012; Lecture)

What is the Akwesasne case study? (Hoover, 2018)

A Mohawk community downstream from General Motors, Alcoa and Reynolds plants on the NY/Canada border. PCBs leached into rivers; Mohawk women's breast milk showed significantly higher PCB levels than neighbouring white women's; linked to miscarriages, endocrine disruption, and cultural loss through fish advisories.

How did PCB contamination threaten collective reproduction at Akwesasne? (Hoover, 2018)

"The PCBs that leached from the GM plant threatened not only their desire to have a large family — 'we wanted five daughters and five sons' — but was also seen as a broader attack on their tribal nation — 'our genetics are limited and under attack', as the wife described." (Hoover, 2018)

How did contamination threaten cultural practices at Akwesasne? (Hoover, 2018)

"Cultural and social practices linked to catching, trading, and consuming fish were limited by the threat of exposure to the contamination that these community members linked to their reproductive troubles and other health issues." (Hoover, 2018)

How did fish advisories produce linguistic and cultural loss at Akwesasne? (Hoover, 2018)

"No one will eat it or buy it… So suddenly, the fisherman cuts his nets down, and they fall on the ground, and there's no fishing… over the years, people forget, in their own culture, what you call the knot that you tie in a net to make a net. And so, a whole section of your language and culture is lost because no one is tying those nets any more." (Hoover, 2018, interviewee)

What is epistemicide? (Azam, 2026)

"The functional disabling or destruction of an entire knowledge system, not through direct suppression or prohibition but through the erosion of the ecological and material conditions that allow that system to operate… It occurs when environmental transformation renders knowledge practices unusable, inoperative, or incapable of transmission." (Azam, 2026)

What is "slow violence" and why is it relevant to ERJ? (Whyte, 2018)

Kyle Whyte characterises environmental harm as "slow violence" — gradual, cumulative and invisible destruction, as opposed to immediate acts. Environmental toxicity erodes reproductive capacity and cultural survival incrementally, often unrecognised by legal systems requiring discrete, observable events.

What is body-territory (cuerpo-territorio)?

A concept from Latin American Indigenous women's movements: the body cannot exist without inter-subjective ties connecting it to collectively imagined social and territorial geographies. The fate of the body is inseparable from the fate of the land it inhabits; defending territory means defending human and non-human members alike. (Lecture)

What does ERJ add to the concept of "safe and healthy environments" in RJ's third tenet?

ERJ expands this to include not only physical safety but the ecological, epistemic and linguistic conditions for cultural survival — including the ability to pass on language, knowledge and practices intergenerationally. Environmental contamination or climate-induced displacement can violate this tenet without any direct bodily harm. (Hoover, 2018; Liddell et al., 2024)

How does Hoover et al. (2012) expand the definition of RJ's third tenet directly?

"We want to expand the definition of reproductive justice to include the capacity to raise children in culturally appropriate ways. For many indigenous communities, to reproduce culturally informed citizens requires a clean environment." (Hoover et al., 2012, cited in Hoover, 2018)

How does Hoover define intersectionality and its role in EJ?

Intersectionality is "a theoretical framework for understanding how multiple social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression… at the macro social structural level." EJ is intersectional because of its emphasis on the interdependence of human health, ecological integrity, and social justice. (Hoover, 2018)

How does Ross & Solinger describe the need for intersectional analysis in RJ?

"Reproductive justice calls for an integrated analysis, a holistic vision, and comprehensive strategies that push against structural conditions that control our communities by regulating our bodies, our sexuality, our labor, and our reproduction. Solutions based on an intersectional analysis require a holistic approach, not a linear approach that distorts our realities." (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

What does Laura Briggs mean by "all politics are reproductive politics"?

Briggs argues that key political battles — welfare reform, immigration, incarceration, foreclosure — are fundamentally about who reproduces, under what conditions, and with what state support. Reproduction is not a niche women's issue but the terrain on which broader struggles over race, class and citizenship are fought, making it constitutive of political life. (Briggs, 2017)

What were the key legal landmarks establishing the privacy framework for US reproductive rights?

Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): established right to privacy for married couples re. contraception. Roe v. Wade (1973): criminalising abortion violated women's right to make private reproductive decisions without government interference; divided pregnancy into three trimesters. Both anchored rights in negative liberty, not positive entitlement.

What is the Hyde Amendment and why is it significant for RJ?

The Hyde Amendment (post-Roe) prohibits federal Medicaid funding for abortion. It demonstrates that legality without access reproduces inequality — the right exists on paper but is inaccessible to women dependent on public funding, exposing the limits of the negative-rights/privacy framework.

How does Ross & Solinger demonstrate that legality without access reproduces inequality?

"Women with money or private health insurance may choose to have an abortion within the guidelines of various state restrictions. But women who cannot afford to pay for their health care (such as those on Medicaid)… are prohibited from using their health care insurance anywhere to pay for an abortion." (Ross & Solinger, 2017)

How does Stephens (1995) show physical and cultural reproduction cannot be separated? (Sami/Chernobyl)

After Chernobyl contaminated reindeer meat, state programs directing Sami to buy outside food were experienced as "a literal severing of the bonds among people, deer, places, and ancestors." Stephens argues that "Scandinavian state officials and radiation experts have tended to assume a clear separation between physical and cultural reproduction" — a separation ERJ rejects. (Stephens, 1995)

What are "grieving geographies"? (Rodríguez-Aguilera, 2021)

"Spaces of complex collective loss due to multiple interconnected forms of violence" where "the deaths of humans and other-than-humans collide." In Zapotalito, Mexico, the slow death of the Chacahua-Pastoría lagoons threatens fishing, medicinal knowledge and communal life disproportionately borne by Black and Indigenous women, who "reproduce life, and structurally sustain the community weaving." (Rodríguez-Aguilera, 2021)

What does Katsi Cook mean by "woman is the first environment"? (Cook, 2007)

"In pregnancy, our bodies sustain life. Our unborn see through our eyes and hear through our ears. Everything the mother feels, the baby feels, too… Because our nursing infants are at the top of the food chain, they inherit a body burden of industrial contaminants from our blood by way of our milk; thus are we part of the landfill, colonized." (Cook, 2007)

How does Liddell et al. (2024) demonstrate linguicide through climate-induced displacement?

Indigenous women in a Gulf Coast tribe describe intergenerational language loss tied to environmental change: "[My grandmother] speaking [language name removed]… that's another thing that's getting lost." One participant: "It must've died with me. I don't remember anybody teaching me… the remedies or certain elements." Liddell argues "impeding cultural reproduction is in line with the settler colonial project." (Liddell et al., 2024)

What are the main distinctions between RJ and the reproductive rights framework?

RJ moves beyond: (1) the pro-choice/pro-life binary; (2) the negative rights/privacy frame (Roe); (3) single-issue agendas. It insists on an intersectional, human-rights-based framework encompassing the right to have children (not only not to), access to resources, economic and racial justice, freedom from violence, and — via ERJ — environmental and cultural conditions of reproduction.

Why must reproduction always be understood as political? (Stephens, 1995)

"Physical reproduction is always, everywhere, a politically and culturally constituted practice." (Stephens, 1995) — meaning no reproductive decision or outcome exists outside structures of power, culture and governance; the idea of purely private, biological reproduction is itself a political fiction.

What does Taylor (2014) reveal about uranium mining and reproductive harm in Navajo territory?

Between 1964 and 1974, "the rate of birth defects among Navajo newborns in the Shiprock area was two to eight times higher than the national average," alongside significant increases in stillbirths and cancer deaths directly linked to uranium tailings contamination. Kerr-McGee left 71 acres of radioactive waste 60 feet from the San Juan River — the only significant water source in the area — contaminating downstream communities. (Taylor, 2014)

How does Taylor (2014) theorise the relationship between colonialism and environmental harm in Indigenous territories?

Taylor argues that Native American reservations are "seen and treated as internal colonies" — supplying natural resources, cheap labour and land while serving as sites for toxic industrial facilities and nuclear waste repositories. Reservations have been described as an "environmental sacrifice zone, a dump for the rest of the nation's toxic waste," with over 317 threatened by hazardous waste and more than 100 proposals made to dump toxics on Indian lands. (Taylor, 2014, citing Wright, 2005)