Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice

Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Justice

The reproductive right discourse is about reproductive freedom, the choice to determine reproduction, the right to chose to prevent pregnancy, to bear children, to control fertility. To reach those rights, women need appropriate sex education, affordable and reliable birth control, safe, legal and affordable abortion, parental care and care through childbirth, health care for infants and children and alternative insemination.

Meanwhile, reproductive justice discourse is the access to all reproductive rights; to put reproductive rights within a social, economical, institutional, political justice frame work. All women no matter class, gender, sexuality, ability generation, and immigration status should have access to the reproductive rights.  

When talking about birth control, reproductive rights are about safe contraception that doesn’t affect the body, like does the intrauterine device which causes heavy bleeding, pain and cramps, or with some pills like Depo-Prevera and Norplant. And for that women need appropriate funding from the government, international resource, private foundations in the field of reproductive research and more support.

For reproductive justice all women should have access to safe contraception; for example low-income women of color are much more likely than white women to be encouraged to use long-acting contraceptives (Depo-Prevera and Norplant). “Official policy seeks to limit their pregnancies and assumes that these women would be unreliable using other methods, thereby continuing the long connection between birth control and eugenics, or selective breeding, often linked to racism and ableism, supposedly to create healthier and more intelligent people, to save resources, and to lessen human suffering” (Roberts 1997, Ross 1993, smith 2002) (chapter 5 page 212).

Abortion is the most controversial subject in controlling fertility, the fight for safe and legal abortion has been very long and hard; between criminalizing abortion and legalizing it (with the Roe V Wade that gives the right to privacy, which means the woman and only the woman have the right to decide whether to have the abortion or not), the abortion choice is full of difficulties, that’s why women need to make the right political choice, choose pro-choice politicians and make sure that the Roe V Wade is not overturned and avoid the re-criminalization of abortion, more funding for abortion, create a safe environment for the clinics and people who exercise abortion.    

Reproductive justice organizations call for the right to abortion rather than sterilization abuse for poor women especially women of color (Latina, African American and Native American women). By 1982, 24 percent of African American women, 35 percent of Puerto Rican women, and 42 percent of Native American women had been sterilized, compared with 15 percent of white women (Black’s Women’s health Project; also see Davis 1983a; Jaimes and Halsey 1986; Lopez; Nelson 2003; Silliman et al. 2004; Smith 2002) (chapter 5 page 214)

The increasing rate of C-sections scares the reproductive rights organizations, because it changes women’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth and affects their knowledge and confidence about their bodies, women should have the right to choose between having a natural childbirth (which requires appropriate care) or C-section.      

Reproductive right discourse and reproductive Justice are complementary; because you can’t make the choice if you don’t have access to the rights