No going back: The struggle for a post-Roe reproductive justice

ABSTRACT

We inhabit a world fundamentally transformed in the decades since Roe v. Wade. This includes seismic shifts wrought by the rise of homeland security culture, wherein intense digital surveillance and privacy violations are figured as both pedestrian and inevitable. It is no coincidence that the evisceration of constitutionally-protected abortion care under the right to “privacy” specifically unfolds in this moment. There is no going back. Moving forward entails understanding the Dobbs decision in the broader context of homeland security culture and a centering of reproductive justice as critical to US democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-Roe
• reproductive justice
• surveillance
• privacy
• homeland security

Notes

1 Joan E. Greve, “Contraception, Gay Marriage: Clarence Thomas Signals New Targets for Supreme Court,” The Guardian, June 24, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/clarence-thomas-roe-gay-marriage-contraception-lgbtq.

2 Jael Silliman et al., Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004); Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017).

3 Khiara M. Bridges, “Race, Pregnancy, and the Opioid Epidemic: White Privilege and the Criminalization of Opioid Use During Pregnancy,” Harvard Law Review 133, no. 3 (January 10, 2020): 770–851; Eleanor J. Bader, “Lynn Paltrow on the Prosecution of Pregnancy,” Lilith Magazine, March 3, 2021, https://lilith.org/2021/03/lynn-paltrow-on-the-prosecution-of-pregnancy/.

4 Quoted in Bader, “Lynn Paltrow on the Prosecution of Pregnancy.”

5 Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity: U.S. Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019); Lynn Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin, “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States (1973-2005): Implications for Women’s Legal Status and Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 38, no. 2 (2013): 299–343, https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-1966324.

6 Faiza Patel and Alia Shahzad, “With Roe v. Wade at Risk, Digital Surveillance Threatens Reproductive Freedom,” Just Security, May 17, 2022, https://www.justsecurity.org/81547/with-roe-v-wade-at-risk-digital-surveillance-threatens-reproductive-freedom/; Barbara Ortutay, “Why Some Fear That Big Tech Data Could Become a Tool for Abortion Surveillance,” PBS NewsHour, June 28, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-some-fear-that-big-tech-data-could-become-a-tool-for-abortion-surveillance; Cat Zakrzewski, Pranshu Verma, and Claire Parker, “Texts, Web Searches about Abortion Have Been Used to Prosecute Women,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/03/abortion-data-privacy-prosecution/; Caroline Kitchener and Devin Barrett, “Antiabortion Lawmakers Want to Block Patients from Crossing State Lines,” The Washington Post, June 30, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-state-lines/.

7 Teddy Wilson, “‘Prosecution in Search of a Theory’: Court Documents Raise Questions About Case Against Latice Fisher,” Rewire News Group, February 21, 2018, https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2018/02/21/prosecution-search-theory-court-documents-raise-questions-case-latice-fisher/; Teddy Wilson, “Mississippi Woman Criminally Charged for Pregnancy Outcome After Home Birth,” Rewire, February 6, 2018, https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2018/02/06/mississippi-woman-criminally-charged-pregnancy-outcome-home-birth/; Glenza, “Purvi Patel Case: Legal Experts Warn on Reproductive Rights in Indiana,” The Guardian, April 2, 2015,, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/02/purvi-patel-case-alter-reproductive-rights-indiana; Emily Bazelon, “Purvi Patel Could Be Just the Beginning,” The New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/magazine/purvi-patel-could-be-just-the-beginning.html.

8 Zakrzewski, Verma, and Parker, “Police Used Texts, Web Searches for Abortion to Prosecute Women.”

9 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity; Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, “The Policing of Pregnancy and Homeland Security Are Intimately Enmeshed,” The Washington Post, August 4, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/08/04/policing-pregnancy-homeland-security-are-intimately-enmeshed/.

10 Center for Reproductive Rights, “U.S. Supreme Court Fails to Block Texas’s Unconstitutional Abortion Ban and Vigilante Scheme,” Center for Reproductive Rights, December 10, 2021, https://reproductiverights.org/case/texas-abortion-ban-us-supreme-court/ruling/; Rewire News Group Staff, “Supreme Court Fast-Tracks Arguments for Texas SB 8,” Rewire News Group, October 25, 2021, https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2021/10/25/supreme-court-fast-tracks-arguments-for-texas-sb-8/.

11 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity.

12 Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1997).

13 Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice; Silliman et al., Undivided Rights.

14 Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice.

15 As a point of departure, see work by scholars in this forum, as well as upcoming forums on reproductive justice in Women’s Studies in Communication and Women & Language.

16 Nina Totenberg, “The U.S. Supreme Court Term in Review,” National Public Radio, July 5, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109883082/the-u-s-supreme-court-term-in-review.

17 Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity; Katherine Stewart, “Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next,” The New York Times, July 5, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/05/opinion/dobbs-christian-nationalism.html; Seth G. Jones, Catrina Doxsee, and Nicholas Harrington, “The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States,” Center for Strategic & International Studies, June 17, 2020, https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-united-states.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz is F. Wendell Miller Associate Professor Communication Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She would like to thank Karrin Anderson for the invitation to join this forum and Sharon Yam for offering feedback on this essay.