The Intersecting Politics of Abortion, Pregnancy, & Family Policing
USA: ABORTION LAW AND FAMILY POLICING
2025
Dorothy ROBERTS, The Intersecting Politics of Abortion, Pregnancy, & Family Policing (keynote at the conference Breaking Silos in Reproductive Justice: Building Solidarity to End Family Policing), Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, 2025/2, pp. 157–170.
The author of this keynote explains that abortion, pregnancy criminalization and family policy are entangled (p. 159).
She criticizes the fact that “the legal right not to be prevented from having an abortion never included the right to the resources you need to get one”, because it “obscured the experiences of Black, Latina, Indigenous, and other marginalized women, as well as other people capable of bearing children whose childbearing was socially devalued”. Moreover, she criticizes “the idea that reproductive rights only entail the right not to be banned from having an abortion” because it does not take into account violations of the right to have children “against people [...] who are deemed unworthy of having children at all” and it does not take into account “the experiences of families that have been torn apart by the so-called Child Protection Services”. She therefore qualifies the approach of the Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court as already “completely inadequate” (pp. 159 and 161).
She stresses that all systems of oppressions and all forms of reproductive oppression are interlocking and supported by hierarchies (pp. 160-161). The author points out that “reproductive labor and forced family separation were entwined during the slavery era”; “enslaved women’s reproduction was under the legal control of enslavers”, and their children were under the control of their enslavers, so that enslaved families could be separated at the will of their enslavers. Therefore, “compelled pregnancy and family separation were deeply and inextricably entangled in the slavery system”. She therefore explains that the 13th and 14th amendments of the Constitution of the USA enforcing the abolition of slavery protected reproductive freedom (p. 161). She points out that even after the slavery was abolished, white supremacists continued the ideology that black woman do not take care of their children, and that in the next century, this ideology still existed in the form of the idea that black women only have babies to get a welfare check (p. 162). She explains that the foster care population exploded after black women started to get welfare, that Native children were separated from their families in order to destroy Indigenous tribes or assimilate their people and that forced sterilizations of black women in the USA, of Mexican women in California and of women in Porto Rico took place (p. 163). She points out that sterility programs still take place in Californian prison programs and in ICE detention camps (p. 163). She also explains that some anti-abortion advocates mix the idea that black women are dangerous because they commit abortion and the idea that they shouldn't have children at all. She also points out that the right wing presents the fetus as more vulnerable than the pregnant women in order to control their reproductive lives.
Furthermore, she denounces a strategy to punish people for their conduct during their pregnancy if they put a fetus at risk (pp. 164-165). In this context, she explains that there is a unified strategy of the Fetal Personhood Movement criminalizing pregnancy and abortion. She points out that since the Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, more than 200 criminalizations have been related to pregnancy (p. 165). She denounces the argument quoted in the Dobbs decision that children of people compelled to give birth can be adopted because it completely ignores the experience of women not prepared to give birth and the fact that their babies are more likely to be taken from them on grounds of neglect in the frame of a system of surveillance and coercion than because they would give them to adoption after their birth (p. 166). She criticizes the idea that parents, instead of structural inequalities, are the cause of harms to children. She predicts that “criminalizing fetal abuse is going to expand — already has expanded — the grounds for family separation because fetal neglect is now evidence of parental unfitness” (p. 167). She stresses that reproductive justice encompasses the right to parent your children in a safe community as well as the right to not have a child (p. 168). The orator denounces systems based on investigation and punishments of parents and invites to “reimagine the very meaning of care and safety” (p. 169).
In conclusion, she argues that as the “forms of reproductive injustice are inextricably entangled”, the “movements to end them have to also be inextricably entangled” (p. 170).