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Fight over ‘bodily autonomy’ about who is seen as ‘human enough,’ professor said
The U.S. has a 400-year history of “reproductive oppression” targeting black women, Arizona State University Professor Jenny Brian said during a Zoom event hosted by the school Thursday.
She criticized the U.S. for what she described as efforts to “criminalize reproductive outcomes,” as they disproportionately affect black women.
Brian framed American history, from chattel slavery in the 1600s, through eugenics to modern abortion restrictions, as a continuous system of reproductive control targeting black women.
“And so what we’ve seen is that the struggle for bodily autonomy is not a series of isolated events, but a 400-year-old conversation about who is considered human enough to own their own body and to plan their reproductive futures,” she said.
One of her PowerPoint slides stated, “Control of Black women’s bodies is, uncomfortably, a foundation of American medicine.”
She argued that black women’s reproduction was exploited for economic gain and later targeted through medical experimentation, eugenics, and forced sterilization.
She also said that current disparities, such as high black maternal mortality and post-Roe abortion restrictions, continue to disproportionately affect black communities.
“When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, it created a fairly fractured map of healthcare in America. So if you look at a map of where abortion is now banned or severely restricted, it almost perfectly overlaps with the map of where the majority of black Americans live in the South,” the professor said.
“So for a black person in rural Mississippi or Alabama, the choice to access care now requires hundreds of miles of travel, time off work, child care, luxuries that systemic poverty often make impossible,” she said.
Brian said these “policies or practices that diminish people’s choices” contribute to what some abortion advocates call “reproductive genocide.”
She told attendees the origins of the fight for “reproductive justice” began with its coining in 1994 by a group of 12 black women in Chicago called Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice.
Frustrated with the narrow “pro-life vs. pro-choice” debate, they argued that “choice” is meaningless without the social, economic, and political conditions that make real choice possible.
Brian defined “reproductive justice” as “the right to not have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent those children in safe and sustainable practices.”
“So, reproductive justice says that you can’t have, you can’t make free and informed decisions without economic justice, environmental justice, or criminal justice reform,” she said.
She added that things like “clean water,” “paid family leave,” and “voting rights” are all “reproductive rights.”
Addressing climate change also falls within that framework, Brian said, adding that viewing policy issues through this lens reshapes how people think about them.
The event, titled “What is Reproductive Justice?,” was hosted by Barrett, the Honors College, at ASU.
Brian is a faculty chair, teaching professor, and honors faculty fellow, according to the school’s website. Her areas of expertise include bioethics, “feminist and queer theory,” and “feminist ethics.”
The event was part of a series of talks honoring Black History Month. Other lectures included “Do Black Americans Still Have the Right to Vote?” and “Monstrous Races and Racist Monsters: On the Racialization of Mythological Creatures.”
