The Problem

The issues of reproductive health and rights in the United States are both confusing and contested. Some definitions of reproductive health focus only on reducing unintended pregnancies while others, according to the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, include the diseases, disorders, and conditions that affect the functioning of the male and female reproductive systems during all stages of life. In addition, there is a deeply polarizing discussion over abortion that is the result of a decades-long campaign by political conservatives. In this debate, the cultural and political understanding of reproductive health has been reduced to a moral and religious fight over abortion and the status of the fetus. This has resulted in reduced access to abortion and contraceptive services as well as limited sexuality education.

Because of this political contestation, reproductive health has become a gendered issue that is almost exclusively focused on limiting the bodily autonomy and self-determination of women and girls. Reproductive rights, reduced to a debate on the morality of abortion and when human life begins, has become a proxy contest about the role of women in political, social, and economic life, bolstered by underlying nationalist, economic, and racial anxieties.

Anti-abortion advocacy, fueled by conservative and Evangelical Christian activism, is radically committed to overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in 1973. This promise to end legal access to abortion has driven a tidal wave of anti-abortion legislation at the state level and helped to vote Donald Trump and Mike Pence into the White House with the assurance of nominating anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court. Since 1973 these activists have passed 1,296 laws restricting access to abortion, including 278 in the last five years. Currently, 29 states are actively hostile to abortion access, and only 14 states are supportive. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in 2019, 40 million women of reproductive age (58 percent) live in states that are hostile to abortion access.

In contrast to the pro-life movement with its singular focus on abortion, the reproductive rights movement has been a relatively fractured movement with three distinct approaches: reproductive health, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice.