2 - Pregnancy and State Power

Summary

For all the important and even urgent attention to reproductive rights, focused on preserving abortion access in an era of political and judicial backlash, far less advocacy protects the interests of women who wish to remain pregnant. That is, abortion rights are the primary focus of reproductive privacy advocacy movements in the United States and have been for some time. Arguably, abortion has become so fundamentally intertwined linguistically and conceptually with the terminology of “reproductive privacy” and “reproductive rights” that little else fits within the taxonomy. One might even argue that the right to be free from government intervention in pregnancy has been excised from the framework of reproductive rights altogether, as some feminist scholars now refer to pregnancy preference as “birth activism” rather than as a part of the bundle of rights framed within reproductive privacy. Pro-choice, or even to exercise choice, within this narrow conception of reproductive rights serves only to affirm an abortion right. The reductive meaning of having choice is the ability to exercise agency over pregnancy termination. Unfortunately, this approach to reproductive rights suffers significant blind spots; it ignores the spectrum of reproductive health decisions a woman makes and in which she can be subjected to state power.