Chapter 2 focuses on the regulation of selective abortion following prenatal screening and testing. It argues that disability-selective abortion bans may appear to be compatible with disability rights but that such bans are ultimately misguided because they fail to recognise the socio-economic context in which reproductive decisions are made by prospective parents. The chapter concludes that disability-inclusive abortion laws would not legally entrench differential time limits for pregnancy termination based on foetal impairment: if disabled foetuses can be aborted until birth, then the same should apply to non-disabled foetuses.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the Black maternal mortality crisis and intersectionality. It begins with the story of Kira Johnson, an accomplished Black businesswoman, mother, and wife living in Los Angeles, California. Kira died due to medical neglect after giving birth to her second son, Langston, in 2016 and her death illustrates the Black maternal mortality crisis in the US, the highest among rich countries in the world. This chapter reviews the concept and popular myths on gendered racism, how sexism and racism intersect and combine in the experience of Black women, girls, and femmes. It introduces intersectionality, a valuable tool to understand and dismantle gendered racism driving this Black maternal health crisis, and other intersecting systems of power. Intersectionality is discussed as a field of study, an analytical approach, and as critical action. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on the Page Act of 1875 and the Atlanta spa shootings of 2021. It ends with a discussion of Kira Johnson and reproductive justice.

This introduction lays out a core argument of the book: that social movements mobilize law and legal institutions to unsettle expert consensus and alter the distribution of material resources. This chapter describes how feminist activists concerned about women and AIDS sought to reset public health practice on surveillance, diagnosis, risk, and treatment to effectuate feminist goals, including access to public health resources and welfare benefits.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, several corporations signaled their support for reproductive rights by announcing expanded abortion care coverage and/or travel stipends for employees who are forced to travel out of state to receive care, including abortion care. While such moves may be celebrated and recognized as a commitment to pro-choice politics, these decisions require scrutiny and suspicion. This article details why.

Part I of this paper will discuss the corporate response to Dobbs. It will discuss the type of benefits that corporations offered, and the class of employees these benefits were offered to (for instance, “independent contractors” were mostly excluded from availing of these benefits). Part II will discuss the movement for reproductive rights, some of the harms it reinforced, and the criticisms it received from the Reproductive Justice movement. Against this backdrop, Part III will discuss the possible intentions behind corporations conferring these benefits, including those related to staff retention, microeconomic logics, and DEI efforts. It will review them against large corporations’ histories of (not) providing reproductive supports, including a living wage, paid leave, sick leave, and childcare. It will also analyze some of the evidence in the public sphere that shows the roles some of these large corporations have played in supporting antiabortion agendas and politicians. Part IV will discuss the long-term harms that this new crop of workplace policies and benefits might create. Mainly, it will discuss how the provision of abortion care without other reproductive supports reemphasizes a reproductive rights approach despite its criticisms, which were highlighted by the Reproductive Justice movement. For instance, this section will discuss the expanding role corporations are assuming in providing healthcare, and how that may lead to the exclusion of certain historically marginalized classes of workers and people. It will also discuss the impact of these policies on the deprioritization of certain types of care, which have been overlooked for decades, including gender-affirming care and fertility treatments. Part V will suggest a few steps corporations can take to mitigate the harm created by Dobbs.

A focus on the nutrition of women before and during pregnancy was important in establishing the field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). Maternal nutrition provided a means by which poor living conditions could be embodied and affect the development of the unborn baby. Historical evidence linking women’s nutrition to the size of the baby at birth was limited, but a plethora of research with laboratory animals ensued, with maternal diets manipulated to determine consequences for the offspring. This was necessary for the scientific acceptance of the theory. However, a narrow view of nutrition and its role in the first 1,000 days has held prominence, with pregnant women provided nutritional advice, behavioural interventions, and marketed products. This obscures the broad scope and implications of the DOHaD theory for health inequalities. We take a feminist science and technology studies (STS) approach to show how hegemonic nutrition and biopolitics pervade DOHaD research and pregnancy care in ways that render invisible the gendered dimensions of precarity, mothering, and food. We argue that both the scientific method and socio-political influences have constrained responses to DOHaD as an issue of social and reproductive justice.

This chapter examines key works of contemporary literature to argue that Black American literature has borne witness to how medical advancement has, and continues, to be made over and through Black bodies. Whereas dominant historical narratives erase the (often coerced) contributions of Black people, and Black folks, by and large, have failed to reap the social, financial, and embodied benefits of the technological progress enabled by their abused and sacrificed flesh, Black literature forces us to confront the impoverished ethics of medical practice. Authors such as Kwoya Fagin Maples, Bettina Judd, and Toni Morrison feature characters whose bodies document the long history of racist medical indifference and violence against Black bodies, despite this history’s archival misrepresentation and erasure. These writers craft a counter-history of Black life that refuses to gaslight those whose bodies continue to founder within racist medical systems in the wake of slavery.

The COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized abortion care. What seemed impossible a few years ago – entirely virtual abortion – is now a reality. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has historically required patients to collect abortion medication, a two-drug regimen that terminates a pregnancy in the first ten weeks, in-person at a health care facility. In July 2020, a federal district court suspended that requirement during the pandemic, allowing providers to mail abortion medication directly to patients. In December 2021, President Biden removed the in-person requirement permanently. Over the last two years, virtual clinics have begun offering “no-touch” abortions, eliminating many of the costs associated with travel to an abortion clinic. The FDA’s most recent decision has cleared the way for the supervised mail delivery and pharmacy dispensation of abortion medication. The expansion of virtual clinics, however, faces significant obstacles and limitations – most acutely, the fact that nineteen states prohibit telabortion explicitly or indirectly. This chapter maps the emergence of virtual abortion care and analyzes its significance for early abortion access, particularly in the post-Roe world. It then considers the limits of telabortion, concluding that, over the long term, the portability of abortion medication will test how closely state officials (or anyone else) can police access to early abortion care, even if abortion is banned in a particular state.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

Laws and policies created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic ameliorated some long-standing barriers to reproductive justice. By granting access to paid family leave and telemedicine reproductive services, federal and state governments gave individuals greater responsibility for and autonomy over their reproductive and family lives, removing barriers to reproductive well-being. However, this devolution of personal responsibility back to individuals has occurred predominantly for people who already have means. Thus, COVID-19-stimulated policy changes have not only been ineffectual for marginalized individuals (for whom policy changes are most needed), but have in practice further entrenched harms to them: requiring them alone to continue to work when they or their family members are sick, and to overcome numerous barriers to seek reproductive care in person. This bifurcation is deliberate. American policy has long ascribed a kind of “personal responsibility” to Black and Brown people (who were disproportionately designated “essential” during this pandemic) that requires responsibility without providing a means to effect it, and punishes when prescriptive benchmarks are not met. It pretextually responsiblizes marginalized people, especially Black women and other women of color, for their health outcomes, instead of creating the conditions for reproductive and health justice. This chapter argues for laws and policies that enable a kind of responsibility that is consistent with reproductive justice. This responsibility sees people as worthy of making decisions about their and their family’s health, removes barriers to them doing so, and provides the underlying support to make such personal reproductive health decisions possible.

The fields of critical animal studies and feminist new materialisms have important implications for anthropology. In attending to ethics in human-animal relations, these fields not only decenter but also destabilize the very category of the Human. In conversation with critical animal studies and feminist anthropology, multispecies ethnography thinks with nonhumans and honors their specificities as both individuals and species. Multispecies ethnography encourages analysis of humans’ entanglement with other species as well as thinking about seemingly inanimate matter such as rocks as animate entities. Recognizing the animacy of objects offers interesting and important insights for ethnography. In this chapter, the author provides an overview of the cross-pollination of the multispecies and new materialist turns to explore how feminist and queer studies of the non/human are important for anthropology. Multispecies and feminist new materialist interrogations of sexuality are discussed, focusing on their innovative and important ethical contributions to human understandings of sexuality. The author argues that anthropology is uniquely positioned to intervene further in this conversation and posits that queering multispecies ethnography, rather than simply using nonhuman animals to reify or resist human formations of sexuality, can offer an opening to interrogate sexuality as a multispecies entanglement.