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The States of Inequality: Methods for Mapping Legal Pluralism in Reproductive Autonomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2022

Amber B. Vayo
Amber B. Vayo*
Affiliation:
Doctoral candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States avayo@umass.edu
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Abstract

The field of public health law has been honing important transdisciplinary methods such as legal epidemiology and legal mapping. These methods can and should be integrated into socio-legal studies because they provide us with a way to capture the legal elements of interlocking power structures, offer ways to meaningfully compare and predict what access to rights will look like across jurisdictions, and capture a new way to study legal pluralism across and within jurisdictions. To illustrate the benefit of such methods for studying legal pluralism, this article offers the State Reproductive Autonomy Index, which compares all fifty states on seventy-five variables. Modeled on legal epidemiology’s survey of multiple types of law, including laws that can be classified as infrastructural (laying the institutional or policy parameters), interventionist (specifically targeted to produce a result), and incidental (distally related, not intentionally), this method integrates the work of reproductive justice scholars with the work on legal pluralism to illustrate the vast inequalities in access to reproductive autonomy across the United States. The State Reproductive Autonomy Index also shows why reproductive justice, rather than reproductive rights discourse, is a more accurate frame for understanding laws relating to reproduction and bodily autonomy.

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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , February 2024 , pp. 209 - 246
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© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The author is grateful for the support of her dissertation committee, especially Dr. Rebecca Hamlin and Dr. Paul M. Collins, Jr. Funding for this project came from the Political Science Department’s summer research and writing grants and a University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate School’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.

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