In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with Brittany Leach, the author of a recent APSR article entitled, “At the Borders of the Body Politic: Fetal Citizens, Pregnant Migrants, and Reproductive Injustices in Immigration Detention.”

APSR: What are the aims of your paper, and where did the idea for it come from?

Brittany Leach: The aims of the paper are to trace the power dynamics that produced reproductive injustices against immigrant women in order to allow feminists to disrupt those dynamics. Specifically, I explore the ways in which the far right doesn’t agree about the citizenship status of fetuses: you have this pro-life idea of fetal citizenship sitting alongside the anti-immigrant idea of “anchor babies.” They find ways to paper over it, but I think that that allows the opportunity for resistance at the intersection of those two discourses.

I knew that I wanted to write about the body in relation to the body politic or the nation, and so I was on the lookout for cases involving reproductive justice and immigration. When the hearings were happening for Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, there was a lot of coverage of Garza v Hargan. I went and read the case and, to my surprise, I discovered that Kavanaugh’s opinion was actually the more reasonable of the two opinions against Jane Doe’s rights. I ended up thinking of Henderson and Kavanaugh’s opinions as being in conflict as much as they are in agreement, and that’s what the theoretical argument of the piece comes out of.

APSR: What did you find most difficult in researching or writing about this topic?

Brittany Leach: The most difficult thing is the injustices that immigrant women are facing in immigrant detention centers. They are just so horrific and are not receiving the kind of public and scholarly attention that they ought to be. It seems like one of those causes that people pay attention to the moment it’s in the news and then, when it drops off, people aren’t talking about it and aren’t paying attention to it as much. But I think it’s actually at the core of what reproductive justice means: to defend the rights of these immigrant women. I think feminists should try to prioritize reproductive rights of immigrant women.

So, going back and forth between reading about the horrible things that are happening to women, whether that’s being denied medical care or being subjected to forced sterilization or being shackled around the belly causing a miscarriage or family separation. The fact that all these things are happening and they’re not necessarily on people’s minds all the time – that was really hard for me.

Another component of this is the data – and I’m not a quantitative person – but the sheer fact that the data isn’t available for quantitative researchers to analyze and to show the disparities in miscarriage rates is really frustrating. It’s not that we don’t have data on it, but rather that it’s not available to the public or to researchers, which makes it really hard to document the significance of the problem quantitatively. I think this is an opportunity for qualitative and theoretical research to open up new lines of inquiry and to draw attention to these issues, which I think very much deserve it.

APSR: What was the major thing that surprised, confounded, or excited you as you were conducting your research or writing the article?

Brittany Leach: There were two big moments. The first was when I discovered the Henderson decision and saw some of the language in that decision – about how Jane Doe isn’t a person under the Constitution and isn’t entitled to any of the rights of citizenship under the Constitution. Thinking about that, in comparison to a lot of the historical cases, like Dred Scott – that was something I didn’t expect to find.

The second one was in thinking about the role of neoliberalism in producing these injustices. I was initially thinking about it in a simplistic way of “neoliberalism or neoliberal capitalism causes these injustices.” But one of my committee members encouraged me fairly early on to explore some of the complexities of neoliberalism as a discourse and the ways in which there are conflicting economic incentives and conflicting economic discourses at play in these injustices. That’s one of the things that I tried to explore in the paper.

APSR: How do you see your research speaking to the current dynamics of this issue, especially under a new presidential administration? Do you think anything has changed, rhetoric- or policy-wise?

Brittany Leach: I predicted in my dissertation defense in May 2020 that a lot of these policies would not change significantly, if there was a different administration. I wanted to be wrong, but, unfortunately, I wasn’t. I would just say that people should keep this on their radar, keep fighting on this issue. There have been some changes – improving the living conditions of children who are separated from their parents, the rhetoric coming from the president is not as violently anti-immigrant, and, of course, the president supports abortion rights within the scope of constitutional law. I would just want to draw attention to the fact that the change hasn’t been as significant as we might hope and, while some of the injustices may be less likely, particularly the denial of abortion rights, the underlying systemic injustices that I talked about using Jasbir Puar’s conception of debilitation have not changed. There’s not been any significant push to expand reproductive healthcare, release pregnant women, or reverse some of these key policies. That’s really disappointing.

APSR: Is there anything else that you want readers to know about your article or how you think about this line of work moving forward?

Brittany Leach: I’m working on a book project, and this is a chapter in that book project. The argument of the book as a whole is that we should try to think about reproductive and bodily autonomy in ways that embrace community and that don’t view community as a threat to liberty. I think that a lot of times reproductive rights are defended in an individualistic way, and that’s not wrong. Individual pregnant people should have the right to terminate or carry to term as they see fit. But it does leave unaddressed a lot of the background and qualities that shape those decisions, as well as the complicated emotions that people have about them. Thinking about what forms of community, in addition to what kinds of laws are necessary to support pregnant people’s self-determination and the self-determination of people after a pregnancy – whether that’s through birth or miscarriage or abortion – those are all issues I think are important to reproductive autonomy as well.

One other thing that I would add is that this has been a crazy journey, for me. When I submitted this piece, I was thinking there’s no way that I can get published in the APSR -I just finished my dissertation. I think a lot of people suffer from a bit of imposter syndrome and don’t think that their work is good enough or they think this isn’t the kind of work that a top journal would be interested in. I just want to echo what the editorial team has said and encourage people to submit because the data shows that a big part of why women authors and diverse methodological perspectives don’t get published as often in top journals is because they’re not submitted as often. I was really surprised and delighted that my article got accepted, and I think that people who aren’t sure if their work is good enough should give it a try, because you might be surprised and delighted by the outcome.

– Brittany R. Leach, University of Virginia

– Leach’s article is free access until the end of April 2022