As we began to conceive of this special section in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in June 2022, we confronted a key question: how to think about the ongoing attacks on bodies and reproductive freedom within a broader set of relations, histories, and styles of political mobilization taking place internationally? When we look at the international reactivation of ultraconservative and fascist forces as well as the persistence of colonial and racist grammars, with an eye to the politics of bodies and reproduction, several features of these processes come to the fore. These include the intensification of hypermasculine logics of war and criminalization, religious fundamentalists’ attacks on what they call “ideologies of gender,” the precarization of the material conditions for social reproduction, and the intensification of policing and imprisonment under classist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist, colonial, and imperial regimes. The most recent legal decisions to recriminalize abortion in Poland (2021) and the United States (2022) are part of this landscape. The ongoing destruction of Palestinian life is another. Meanwhile, renewed and heterogeneous feminist mobilizations have emerged in response, refusing several interrelated forms of expropriation, abuse, and control of gendered bodies, and placing the conditions for social reproduction and the desire for collective autonomy at the very center of feminist organizing. It is on this map that we can locate some of the most recent victories in struggles for reproductive justice. These range from struggles for a constitutional right to abortion—codified in Argentina (2020), Colombia (2022), and Mexico (2023)—to organizing against forced sterilization in many places, North and South. Imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women are demanding reparations from the state of California for its most recent eugenic practices of forced sterilization, mostly of Black and Latinx women prisoners.1 These demands belong on the same map. So, too, do the struggles led by Indigenous women, mostly from the Ayacucho region in Peru, and groups of feminists from Lima to demand reparations for the systematic practice of forced sterilization during Alberto Fujimori's regime,2 and the ongoing mobilization of Indigenous women in Quebec against the same practice, conducted in hospitals there for almost three decades beginning in 1980.3
A common thread appears in several recent reinventions of conceptual frameworks, horizons of meaning, and practices in feminisms. It involves a departure from the liberal narratives of choice that had framed the understanding of reproductive rights and that had become, as Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger note, a “mask” that hid different material conditions of (im)possibility depending on race, class, sexuality, and ability.4 Decades ago, reproductive justice emerged in the United States as a political and conceptual framework rooted in Black feminist activism. It pointed to the multiple dimensions at stake when discussing reproduction within a broader context of social justice. It is an expansive vision that, according to Ross, one of the founders of SisterSong, involves the right to bodily autonomy, to have or not have children in safe conditions, to parent within sustainable communities, and to give birth without facing obstetric violence.5 This framework accounts for the necessary connection between reproductive freedom and social reproduction, a connection that has been at the center of the most recent feminist mobilizations for the decriminalization and legalization of abortion. In Poland, a series of demonstrations held in response to the right's first attempt to place a total ban on abortion focused on the material conditions of social reproduction in neoliberal times. Recalling the Women's Strike of October 3, 2016, which was so important in opening an imaginary and field of possibilities internationally, Ewa Majewska explains how the departure from liberal feminism involved regaining a sense that such mobilizations could be part of the texture of everyday life. The Women's Strike mobilized people in ways that destabilized the typical positions and dichotomies, refusing to replicate the logic of macho heroism. The strike was not guided by activism specific to parties or professional organizing. Instead, it entailed rebelling against neoliberal and fascist attacks on bodies and lives deemed “sacrificable” by the authoritarian forces of sovereignty and exception.6
Days later, on October 19, 2016, the call for a Women's Strike in Argentina was also a scream that said “ENOUGH” to feminicide, gender violence, and abuse. Both events led to the International Women's Strike on March 8, 2017, where multiple forms of systemic violence and injustice (abusive power, feminicides, transphobia, labor conditions, immigration restrictions, and gender mandates, among others) brought participants together to mark out a different path for renewed forms of feminist mobilization. This strike pointed to conceptual openings in response to a range of attacks on the material possibilities of reproduction. As Silvia Federici has shown us, these attacks intensify along with the expansion of capitalist accumulation.7 During the years since the strike, we have seen political engagement and involvement grow out of connections with the here and now of everyday social reproduction, where the possibilities and desires of bodies in the community lie. In the departure from liberal and conservative strategies of individualization and moralization, we have witnessed a turn to a form of politics anchored in the everyday and in the possibility of configuring other kinds of political intervention and participation.
Verónica Gago analyzes how the feminist strike made it possible to visualize and connect the multiple forms of gendered devaluation and expropriation that take place in everyday life, and how it expanded our understanding of the economy to include “everything from the sexual division of labor to modes of oppressing desire.”8 For years, the processes that the movement enabled have been crucial to struggles for the decriminalization and legalization of abortion, and to the questioning of assumptions that public health and medical systems have historically left unquestioned in terms of gender, sexualities, and collective autonomy. Lucila Szwarc's contribution to this section focuses on how the departure from a liberal understanding of the body as property or a terrain of choice has involved, among many other things, considering the meaning of a feminist concept of health. As they started problematizing and challenging the authority of medical power that was so entrenched, Szwarc notes, organizers looked at the interconnected histories of mobilizations by lesbian, gay, trans, and intersex groups that had also experienced forms of exclusion and pathologization when dealing with the medical system. By connecting experiences that had historically been marginalized—clandestine practices and moral punishments for deviating from heteropatriarchal sexual norms and gender mandates—they learned to ask what happens when engagements with the medical system do not relate to illness. This also problematizes the limited understanding of autonomy for women and pregnant bodies, an understanding that also informs many laws that grant the right to abortion but still treat the decision to abort as one mediated by medical authority. (Szwarc refers to France and Uruguay, and a similar observation with regard to Roe in the United States can be found in the work of Ross and Solinger.)9 At stake is the question of the role of medical authority and its subjection to state politics, permeated by moral, sexual, and economic norms.10 In this sense, here again we see a narrative that frames women's bodies’ rights and pregnant bodies’ rights as “choices,” when in fact the stress falls on a medical system rooted in patriarchal forms of authority and authorization. Analyzing practices of “medical racism,” Dána-Ain Davis talks about reproductive injustice to conceptualize the complex ways in which the medical system enacts and continues practices of racial hierarchization. Looking at the rates of Black women's premature birth and complications, Davis sheds light on a continuity of a problem at stake during slavery and on how the medical system uses its authority to individualize and moralize Black women for birth outcomes, erasing the systemic nature in which medical practices “recalibrate racism.”11 Another complication has to do with how we connect such a long history of moralization, control, and authority in the medical system to the ongoing intensification of surveillance and policing that is taking place in the present, when hospitals and doctors are recruited to take part in police controls. State surveillance and criminalization have long been part of the politics of control over reproduction and sexuality. Recently, they have regained their centrality in the new antiabortion projects. The Texas antiabortion law SB8, for example, authorizes citizens to act as “vigilantes,” spreading and intensifying forms of surveillance and fear that had characterized regimes of systemic racism and exception.12
How can a feminist understanding of health, guided by a robust sense of autonomy, help us appreciate collective practices that dismantle paternalistic, hierarchical, moralizing forms of medical power while placing autonomy and a feminist conception of bodies as interdependent at the center of our organizing? Both Szwarc and Majewska, in their contributions to this section, emphasize how frameworks for action in Poland and Argentina relate to the expansion of networks of solidarity, accompaniment, and grassroots educative processes. These make plural and collective a subject that the legal system has historically framed as individual, opening dimensions that are closed when reproduction is understood in a liberal sense.13 The collective subject that resists and weaves networks of solidarity for affirming livable lives in heterogeneity has been a recurring feature of different feminist movements. This is made explicit in the lyrics to a song created by Colectivo LASTESIS for a collaborative video for the Day for the Decriminalization and Legalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean: “Together, we accompany one another / together, we reflect one another / together, we abort / We abort the unwanted pregnancy, sexism, / misogyny, strategies of control / the oppressor, the deadbeat dad, unjust laws, prejudices, and guilt. / No more fear. / We abort, the child-mothers. / We abort the silence. / We abort forced motherhood. / We abort, because we are not alone.”14 Centering a collective subject and deindividualizing regimes of violence that the system seeks to separate, these processes create another horizon where forms of violent control over bodies are questioned.
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Efforts to control bodies, their sexual and reproductive capacities, and their role in the population and labor force have always been part of political landscapes. Forced sterilization, policing, and family separation targeting Black, Indigenous, and Immigrant children have a long history and express logics of colonialism and white supremacy that are being expanded and made more explicit as a political project.15 In the present, this project is also reinforced by the expansion of logics of war and exception to various realms. A warlike takeover of the field of rights has been a key part of the advance of the religious ultraconservative right. The most important ultraright group in the United States, the Alliance in Defense of Freedom, was called by one of its founders “a legal army,” a phrase that condenses the way in which the imaginary of war informs multiple legislative projects against reproductive rights and LGBTQIA+ people. Key in advancing the overturn of Roe, the alliance has also led the charge in proposing legislation against gay and trans lives (including “conversion” and “correction” policies in schools).16 According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, they were supporters of several failed European legislative proposals aimed at the forced sterilization of transgender citizens who filled out paperwork indicating their preferred gender.17
The advance of far-right, ultraconservative, and fundamentalist religious politics has expanded logics of war and militarization that are not “new” or “recent,”18 thus raising questions related to many enduring forms of power. Bringing this long history to light is important. It is also important to acknowledge how the coexistence of multiple forms of control over bodies and reproduction has marked various regimes. Their history is neither linear nor progressive. Therefore, we need forms of political analysis and mobilization that do not act as if these phenomena are “new” but allow us to understand a present in which different regimes of power are intensified and brought together under one umbrella. Together they shore up colonial, capitalist, white supremacist, and state politics. Penelope Deutscher's contribution develops this point, analyzing the techniques of power involved in recent legal and political decisions on reproductive rights. Looking closely at different discursive formations, Deutscher unpacks political projects that may “sound” contradictory when considered separately but that need to be approached as overlapping. This approach can help us to map multiple double binds and impossible positions. That is, we need to account for the coexistence of abortion bans and the intensification of the precarious conditions in which children are raised, for efforts to “protect” and “defend” the fetus while continuing to perform forced sterilization, for efforts to “protect” lives while denying people proper medical care, and for the criminalization of miscarriage and the persistence of conditions that make life almost impossible outside of cycles of imprisonment for many people. Deutscher addresses these problems in an essay that argues against individualizing and moralizing approaches to “choice” that fail to account for material conditions, privileging instead an abstract idea of the “competent parent.” Revocability, exception, and disqualification, Deutscher shows, are all names for hegemonic legal positions that coexist in the present.
According to the logic of “states of exception,” in a dynamic that is key to the ongoing encounter between fascism and fundamentalist conservative Christianity, groups are treated as “enemies.” This logic has become mainstream and explicit in the white supremacist heteropatriarchal “defense” of the “nation,” often recast as a defense of the “family.” Military and police violence at the beginnings of neoliberalism also relied on appeals to the heteronormative “family” as the supposed savior of the nation, where every body had to be in the “right” (fixed) place. Here, one particular history is instructive. In Chile, where the dictatorship functioned as a laboratory of neoliberalism,19 one of Pinochet's last decisions in office was to place a total ban on abortion, a decision that stood in place for twenty-five years until September 2017. Then, another law approved abortion under three restricting circumstances: when a woman's life was at risk, when there were fetal anomalies incompatible with life, and when the pregnancy resulted from rape.20
Deutscher and Majewska both prompt us to connect the legislation against abortion at the center of current far-right and religious politics to a long politico-philosophical history of fascist ideologies of “exception.” A state of exception aims to concentrate all the power (parliamentary and judiciary) in the figure of the sovereign, who is exempted from the rules it imposes, and who opposes a group of “enemies.” Majewska analyzes the connection between the state of exception and the attacks on abortion as one point within a broader constellation of movements that insist on the necessity of an international reaffirmation of heteronormative “family” values that have historically been associated with the “nation.” Migrant people, women, pregnant people, LGBTQIA+ people, and people with disabilities are all treated as objects, victims of a “sacrificial” logic of exclusion and renunciation that seeks to “save” the heteronormative patriarchal white family. As Judith Butler notes in their analysis of Clarence Thomas's discourse, the decision on abortion rights involves an attack on many groups placed under one banner.21 This observation is important. It opens up new possibilities for political organizing with multiple groups. We might translate the connections drawn legally into coalitional and creative politics, into forms of transversal connection among groups and fields of struggle (in the legal realm, political economy, the environment, and so on). If the far right is taking the legal realm as the site of a war against subjectivities that do not conform to the white supremacist, heteropatriarchal logic of “family” and “nation,” we can respond with practical forms of imagination. We can activate a space for experimentation and connect multiple dimensions (legal, budgetary, and political) without reproducing the injustices that have persisted in the realm of rights. What kind of legal imagination can we deploy that would involve these different dimensions? As the long tradition of reproductive justice has taught us, the multidimensionality of reproduction is crucial. It involves not only the decision to have or not to have children but also the capacity to raise children and form heterogeneous families. In this sense, the struggle to end the bans on abortion goes in hand with a struggle to end cuts to health care, welfare, education, and so on, and with struggles to abolish criminalization and imprisonment as “solutions” to the problems created by the system itself.
Layal Ftouni's essay considers another dimension of reproductive injustice. She reflects on the violence of Israeli settler colonialism as it aims to control reproduction, and she seeks to understand how it becomes a field of struggle and resistance in the lives of male political prisoners who counter the Israeli regime's logic of extermination and denial of futurity for the Palestinian people. Ftouni zooms in on Palestinian male political prisoners’ efforts to smuggle their sperm out of Israeli colonial prisons and theorizes this practice as an “affirmation of life” within the context of multiple reproductive injustices and denials (including the denial of identification to those born from sperm smuggling). She inquires into the meanings and scope of what this resistance as life-affirmation involves, and more precisely into what the “right to life” might mean under conditions of systemic, colonial violence where “rights” are related to a legal realm that has served to sustain radical violence against the Palestinian people with absolute impunity. Here the affirmation of collective autonomy takes place in ways that are not limited to the question of rights and that place a different emphasis on relationality and a situated understanding of the reproduction of everyday life. Drawing on Butler's reflections on the “future anterior,” Ftouni develops a sense of “life's future anterior” that foregrounds the role of affects, desires, and practices of “imagining freedom” in the midst of multiple forms of violence and death.22 In this context, Ftouni frames sperm smuggling as a “creative practice” of resistance, where the life that is birthed also needs to be seen in its “symbolic significance” that involves the “futurity” for the Palestinian people, lives “‘that will have been lived’ in dignity and freedom,” as she beautifully writes. This contribution also takes us to a site seemingly distant from feminist preoccupations to the incarcerated men who struggle, without any resort to rights or to law, to have families and to affirm the capacity to live and to thrive. To place this text next to the three others in this collection is to reimagine feminism so that it becomes attuned to the struggles of male political prisoners. It is also to trouble pro-life rhetoric, this time from the perspective of anticolonial, life-affirming practices.
Here again, however, the renewed forms of feminist mobilization are very important as spaces where different logics of social relation and desires for life in collective autonomy are being experimented with. Hence the relevance of paradoxical and nondisjunctive forms of thought and political action in efforts to understand social reproduction. Key to understanding these struggles is the claim that the feminist revolution starts from bodies and from concrete conflicts in many territories. In the interview with Colectivo LASTESIS, which took place in the context of their visit to New York in March 2023, they explain what it means for them to reconnect critical theory and bodies through performance—that is, by moving critical ideas and texts through bodies and the political histories that bodies carry and that performance can interrupt and reconfigure. Relationality is a key term in the critical interventions published here, which ask how we can confront attacks on reproductive justice in the context of, on the one hand, the expansion of far-right politics and the intensification of neoliberal measures that wage war on social reproduction, and, on the other hand, the renewed forms of feminist mobilization that closely link the political to the everyday, where an imagination of other forms of autonomy in interdependence resides. In this sense, radically different understandings of life, bodies, and desire are at stake, and a question, at once epistemological and political, that we face is how to connect groups that do not necessarily share the “same” positions, and how these connections can come not only from the mere commonality of “being against.” As visionary Black lesbian poet Pat Parker put it in a beautiful poem, it is a problem when a revolutionary desire “is to talk the enemy to death.”23 In this sense, we need to indicate what we don't want but to do so motivated by the force of our desire for what we do want to envision and enact—the lives that we hope to live in radical heterogeneity but under equally livable conditions. As new and not so new popular feminist movements are making explicit, these bodies, our bodies, are never isolated and self-sufficient but rather interconnected and interdependent.
Notes
For more on the legislation on reparations, see California Coalition for Women Prisoners, “Reparations.” For a detailed history of the problem and how the organizing started, see the documentary directed by Erika Cohn, The Belly of the Beast.
By means of the alliances among different groups of women from different rural and urban places, organizers denounced and called for a judicial investigation (always put off by the government) to denounce the forced sterilization of mostly Indigenous women, and men at lower rates, as part of the Family Planning Policy between 1995 and 2000. See Ballón, Memoria.
In August 2023, a judge authorized a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Atikamekw women. See Stevenson, “Quebec Judge.”
Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 47.
Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice, 9.
Along with Federici, Caliban and the Witch, her Re-enchanting the World surveys the landscape of the recent history of attacks on women's bodies produced by capitalist globalization.
Ross and Solinger look at how Roe v. Wade “gave women individual reproductive ‘choice’ (not ‘rights’ or ‘justice’) while tying their decisions to a physician's permission and other limitations” (Reproductive Justice, 47).
This is explored in LASTESIS's work on abortion, where they point to the entanglement of all the invisible, patriarchal, paternalist, and heterosexist rules implicit in conversations with doctors about a pregnancy. See LASTESIS, “Together We Abort.”
For an analysis of these mechanisms in ongoing antiabortion legislation within the broader context of the intensification of the carceral system, see Thomas et al., Abortion Decriminalization. For a brilliant analysis of surveillance, policing, and imprisonment in the racist welfare system, see Roberts, Shattered Bonds, and her most recent intervention, calling for an abolition of the current welfare system, Torn Apart.
Natalia Santarelli and Claudia Anzorena write about the history and relevance of the network of “Socorristas” in “Los socorrismos.”
LASTESIS, “Together We Abort,” 35–36.
The struggles of Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican women who were sterilized without consent or even awareness has been at the center of many recent struggles in many parts of the world. Roberts conceptualizes this complex field as a “denial of motherhood” that continues a long history. She places colonization and enslavement at the center of a politics that continues today in different regimes. See Roberts, Killing the Black Body. See also Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics; Busquier, “Las ‘mujeres del Tercer Mundo’”; López, Matters of Choice.
In 2021 alone, one hundred antitrans legal proposals were put forward in the United States.
The genocidal powers at stake in the most recent dictatorships in the Southern Cone and known as “wars” in Guatemala and El Salvador all centered on state practices in which the police and military raped, killed, tortured, and disappeared people, separated families, and kidnapped children, with all this taking place in the name of family values and/or to protect the “nation.” This history is indexed in the green handkerchief that became the sign of abortion struggles in Argentina and then spread everywhere, linking these struggles to a long history of mobilizations of mothers and grandmothers looking for loved ones disappeared and killed by police and military state violence. In the United States, these histories are linked to the killings of Black people by the police and the whole system of disappearance enacted by the prison industrial complex. In this sense, the expansion of mobilizations for reproductive freedom within a framework of social justice allows us to understand the politics of control and the disciplining of bodies within a longer history of human rights violations, kidnappings, and the killing of political prisoners. This is a history of women challenging that order, demanding the return of their children alive.
Accounts of the neoliberal experiment in the Chilean dictatorial context can be found in Valdés, Pinochet's Economists, and Harvey, “Neoliberalism and the Restoration of Class Power.”
In their most recent work on the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup on September 11, 1973, LASTESIS connects systemic political and sexual violence during the civic-military dictatorship to the ongoing persistence of control by means of punishment and fear. For a detailed analysis, see Maira, Casas, and Vivaldi, “Abortion in Chile.”
Parker, Complete Works, 78; emphasis added.
