A term originally coined in the United States by organizations that promote the rights of Native women and women of color, reproductive justice is a concept that links reproductive rights with social justice. The reproductive justice movement arose in the late 1980s as an attempt by these organizations to expand the rhetoric of reproductive rights that focused primarily on choice within the abortion debate and was seen to restrict the dialogue to those groups of women they felt could make such a choice in the first place. In addition to advocating as do traditional reproductive rights platforms for the access of women to birth control, reproductive justice provides a framework that focuses additional attention on the social, political, and economic inequalities among different communities that contribute to infringements of reproductive justice.
The paradigms that combine the empowerment of women with reproduction have since been categorized into three frameworks: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice. The reproductive health framework addresses inequalities in health services by advocating for the provision of services to historically under-served communities. The reproductive rights framework emphasizes the protection of an individual woman's legal right to reproductive health services, focusing on increasing access to contraception and keeping abortion legal. Finally, the reproductive justice framework utilizes an intersectional analysis of women's experiences and focuses on changing the structural inequalities that affect women's reproductive health and their ability to control their reproductive lives. As such, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, recently renamed Forward Together, defines the concept as follows:
“Reproductive Justice is the complete physical, mental, spiritual, political, economic, and social well-being of women and girls, and will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social, and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality, and reproduction for ourselves, our families, and our communities in all areas of our lives.”
The concept of reproductive justice has expanded since its origination from a focus on issues in the United States to include movements that affect women around the world.
Read more about Reproductive Justice: Origins in The United States, Reproductive Justice For US Prisons, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words reproductive and/or justice:
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.”
—Imelda Marcos (b. 1929)