Dying for life: reproductive governance redux … redux … redux

In her 2019 article “Reproductive Governance, Redux,” Lynn M. Morgan opened with a list of startling headlines: the Chinese government’s policy to encourage citizens (through tax incentives) to have more babies some 40 years after imposing its one-child policy; the Argentine senate’s rejection of a bill that would have legalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy; the United States (US) government’s denial of passport applications filed by children born near the Mexican border, despite the fact that those children hold state-issued birth certificates; and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, accused by three women of committing sexual assault, to the US Supreme Court. As Morgan (2019, 113) asserted, “[r]eproduction undoubtedly sits at the center of politics and governance.” Four years later, this list can be extended yet further: the current four highest office holders in the UK government (the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, and the Home Secretary) have failed to publicly support safe abortions; the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US is now severely restricting women’s right to safe abortions (Coen-Sanchez et al. 2022); the Brazilian congress is currently discussing a bill called the Statute of the Unborn Child (Estatuto do Nascituro) that aims to grant citizenship rights to fetuses from inception, which would in practice criminalize the three forms of abortion currently allowed (Santos 2022); the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party in Germany wants to outlaw abortion and promote traditional roles for women (Brown 2018); in Hungary, Viktor Orbán has promised that women with four or more children will not pay income tax (Walker 2019) and, notoriously, has banned the study of gender in Hungarian universities (Oppenheim 2018); the Vox Party in Spain considers “gender ideology” to be a threat and has refused to sign an all-party declaration condemning violence against women (Cabezas 2022); and Pope Francis refers to “gender ideology” as the “ideological colonization of the family” (Pullella 2015). The list could clearly go on and on and on.

Of course, there are resistances and sometimes reversals – not least in Argentina, which in 2020 became the largest Latin American country to legalize abortion after its senate approved the historic legal change by 38 votes to 29 (with one abstention) (Phillips, Booth, and Goñi 2020). Furthermore, as Rishita Nandagiri (2022) argues, women concerned for their reproductive rights in the Global North can learn from the approaches taken by women in the Global South, who have had to find ways to get around legal bans.

However, it cannot be said too loudly, too clearly, or too often: reproduction and gender/sexuality undoubtedly sit right at the center of politics and governance – never an afterthought or side issue. That foundational palindromic feminist concept – the personal is political – beats at the violent heart of these varied forms of reproductive and gender/sexual governance. As the articles in this issue clearly demonstrate, the many violences associated with reproductive governance are relentlessly presented as, or masquerade as, “something else”: a concern with criminal or immoral behaviors, for example, sometimes resulting in a moral panic; the imposition of allegedly necessary controls, most often on women’s and other Othered bodies; or the placement of those bodies outside the realms of dignity and humanity, which so often materializes through racialized discourses, as with migrants, for example. These rationalizations are typically accompanied by superficial semblances of political, legal, or “natural” logics, which, when critically analyzed (as the articles in this issue do so well), are shown to comprise multiple layers of uncaring, necropolitical attitudes, especially toward feminized, trans, gender non-binary, and racialized bodies. Moreover, there are deep and insidious connections with “anti-gender” politics, policies, and practice – those regularly embedded in stories and narratives around “traditional family values” that are currently visibly sweeping the globe.

Redux … redux … redux – a leading back, a return to the old. Feminist, critical, postcolonial, queer, and trans scholars and activists have all surely known that “progress” is not linear. The “straight line” theory of “rights and freedoms” has always been hollow for so many – actually, for all, if in radically different ways – which gives some sense to the violence currently radiating from conservatives and the alt-right in 2023. Yet, we might take some heart from an alternative use of the idea of redux; a Fortuna redux is more about safe “re-turning,” even if the journey is long and perilous. We present the articles in this issue, all of which offer rich analyses around reproductive and gender/sexual governance, in that spirit.

We open with our 2021 Enloe Award winner Madeleine Belfrage, whose article works to conceptualize self-induced abortion as a part of reproductive governance mechanisms in Mexico. She offers a supremely careful theoretical and political analysis by “following the pills” misoprostol and mifepristone to assert how they are being territorialized, deterritorialized, and reterritorialized through assemblages of pharmaceuticalized medicine. By focusing on different actors, practices, and discourses within these assemblages – including sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) non-governmental organizations and social marketing organizations, global health agencies, private philanthropic donors, transnational pharmaceutical companies, local pharmacy outlets, feminist activists, and the abortion pills themselves – Belfrage offers a nuanced approach to the ways in which power is shifting through abortifacient pills, not only in the hands of women, but also within processes of neoliberal governance that are ongoing, partial, and contested. Self-consciously engaging with “dangertalk,” she shows that “the revolutionary potential of pills requires the deliberate adoption of the politics and practices of collective care and reproductive justice to disrupt systems of power that currently reinforce reproductive governance.”

In her analysis of Canada’s evolving global reproductive policy commitments in the context of global maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) policy since 2010, Candace Johnson notes an important paradox: despite the ascendancy of MNCH policy, there has been a decline in interest in the “maternal subject.” She queries what the implications of this paradox are for gender justice, particularly concerning its impacts for countries, communities, and individuals in the Global South. Proceeding from an empirically grounded normative political theory, Johnson argues that the policy shift from MNCH (adopted during the conservative government of Stephen Harper) to SRHR (adopted during the liberal government of Justin Trudeau) was a top-down discursive approach that ignored the effects of local contexts and practices. As such, while this change was potentially feminist in its orientation, implicitly acknowledging the limits of the essentialist, pronatalist approach of the MNCH policies, its implementation followed a neoliberal, developmentalist approach committed to a human capital model of empowerment, which transformed the maternal subject into a wise capital investment by focusing mainly on pregnant adolescents.

Genevieve Fuji Johnson and Kerry Porth offer a methodologically meticulous analysis of oppressive regimes of criminalization of sex worker rights organizations in Canada and the US. They place major importance on the need for research to push for and provide resources for social change. They “theorize solidarity” by drawing on the emancipatory work of Indigenous, Black, and Latine scholars and the methodological principles of grounded normative theory. Starting from the statements of sex worker advocates, activists, and organizations about the daily harms of their trade, Johnson and Porth work backward to the prior conditions that give rise to such harms – namely, ontological and epistemic injustice. While the former stereotypically represents people who sell sex as cisgendered, victimized, and objectified women who need rescuing, but remain undeserving of fundamental rights, the latter makes their testimony unreliable, leaving their entire social experience unintelligible to themselves and others. Johnson and Porth’s solidaristic theorizing is a contribution to undoing such processes and to assisting sex workers in the decriminalization of their trade.

Maree Pardy and Kalissa Alexeyeff’s article precisely denounces these colonial and racialized injustices that sustain the everyday harms of sex workers by offering an in-depth analysis of Oxfam’s response to the 2018 “sex scandal” involving the “exploitation and abuse” of Haitian sex workers by development and humanitarian workers. The largely mediatized “scandal” relied on stereotypical representations of sex workers as cis-female, subaltern, object-victims. Leaving this narrative unchallenged, Oxfam engaged in a frantic attempt to restore its damaged reputation, denying the sex workers any agency by portraying them as helpless victims. For Pardy and Alexeyeff, such a response reflects the development and humanitarian sector’s “ongoing implication in its colonial and heteronormative origins, structured through the nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and sex work.”

Finally, engaging with the violence inflicted upon the poor, racialized bodies of migrant women throughout the process of migrating to the US, Amanda Hefferman offers a transfeminist approach that illuminates the gendered necropolitics at work on the US–Mexico border. Claiming that gender is at the heart of necropolitical regimes in the Americas, Hefferman’s nuanced study points to multiple layers of reproductive oppression in the migration experiences of women in the US–Mexico borderlands, recommending the development of “a radical politics of embodied personhood and reproductive autonomy.”

What emerges from these articles is a careful and clear warning that reproductive governance has many faces and works through multiple assemblages of actors, discourses, locations, and materialities. Together, the authors paint a detailed map to guide us as we struggle to navigate the complicated logics of gender/sexual and reproductive governance in all parts of the world.