Reproductive Justice: An Introduction

Below is an excerpt from chapter 7 of my book: The Feminist Handbook:

“The concept, reproductive justice was created by women of color, based on their lived experiences, and frustration with White feminists’ singular focus on abortion as the primary issue in terms of reproductive rights. Access to safe, legal abortion, can’t be isolated from other needs such as education, good paying jobs, housing and safe neighborhoods. The framework shifts the focus away from the concept of “choice” in reproduction, to consider context. Sexual and reproductive justice are integrated within a human rights framework to ensure that rights are accessible to everyone. The framework of reproductive justice is intersectional and created to make sure that the differences between social groups don’t become barriers. (Ross & Solinger, 2017). 

Reproductive justice goes beyond working towards accessibility, by addressing systemic reproductive oppression. Activists working within the reproductive justice movement work to connect your rights to access of services with a consideration of the ways that inequality may affect your access to services (Ahmed & Gamble, 2017). 

Reproductive and Sexual Justice Values 

The framework of Reproductive and Sexual Justice includes the following values (Ross & Solinger, 2017): 

• Your right to have children 

• Your right to not have children 

• Your right to parent children in safe and healthy environments 

• Your right to sexual autonomy and gender freedom”

The Intersection of Reproductive Justice (RJ) & Critical Adoption Studies

When you bring RJ into adoption conversations, the center of gravity shifts:

  • from “Was adoption a good outcome?”

  • to “What conditions made separation likely, and what would it take for families to stay safely together?”

Being an adoptee means that we live in the “both/and” space. Meaning, we can love our adoptive family, and acknowledge that some adoptees needed to be separated from an abusive parent or unsafe environment, and by using an RJ and critical adoption studies lens, we have the framework to ask questions like: Were people sufficiently supported to have real options?

What RJ helps you see in adoption discourse

RJ is especially useful because adoption is often discussed as a private, individual story. RJ insists on examining the conditions surrounding pregnancy, parenting, and family stability.

RJ brings attention to:

  • Material resources: housing, healthcare, childcare, income, disability supports, and community safety (the difference between “choice” and constraint).

  • Coercion and pressure: how stigma, lack of support, institutional power, or crisis can shape “voluntary” decisions.

  • State power over families: how systems decide which families are supported, surveilled, separated, or declared “unfit.”

This overlaps with CAS in a big way: both lenses ask how adoption is shaped by poverty, racism, economic inequality, and political violence, rather than treating adoption demand/supply as natural (Briggs, 2012).  

Reproductive Justice & Critical Adoption Studies Intersection Points

  • RJ asks: what makes parenting possible? What happens when people lack food, housing, medical care, disability supports, or legal safety?

  • RJ intersects with critiques of child welfare as punitive surveillance—especially for marginalized communities. Dorothy Roberts argues the U.S. child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that disproportionately targets Black families (Roberts, 2022).

  • Policing, prisons, and family separation can’t be cleanly separated from reproductive freedom when caregivers risk losing children due to criminalization or state scrutiny.

  • RJ holds the long history of reproductive control (including coercion and institutional decision-making) and asks how disability oppression shapes who gets supported to parent.

  • Legal vulnerability, detention, deportation, and cross-border policies affect whether families can remain intact—and how children are moved.

Common misconceptions about Reproductive Justice

  • “RJ is only about abortion.” RJ includes the right to parent safely and with support.

  • “RJ means adoption is always wrong.” The RJ and critical adoption studies frameworks help us move away from binary arguments about whether or not adoption is good or bad. These arguments generally leave people stuck. Instead, these frameworks ask us to think deeply and reflect on questions that lead us to examine power, coercion, and support systems.

  • “Talking about power structures minimizes adoptee relationships.” Naming structural pressures can coexist with adoptive family relationships.

References

Ahmed, O. & Gamble, C.M. (2017). Reproductive justice: What it means and why it matters (now more than ever). Public Health Post. Retrieved from https://www.publichealthpost.org/viewpoints/reproductive-justice/ 

Briggs, L. (2012). Somebody's children: The politics of transracial and transnational adoption. Duke University Press.

Ross, L.J. & Solinger, R. (2017). Reproductive justice: An introduction. University of California Press, Oakland, CA. 
 

Next Step:

REproductive justice & family Separation Reading List