Reproductive rights

Abstract

Reproductive rights are about the legal right to contraception, abortion, fertility treatment, reproductive health, and access to information about one's reproductive body. Reproductive rights secure people's freedom to decide about their body's capacities to (not) reproduce. Departing from a feminist understanding of the reproductive body as the most intimate site for/of political struggle, reproductive geographies have emerged as a relatively new field within human geography. Reproduction used to be a traditional topic of a quantitative population geography. More recent geographic work on reproduction, however, is inspired by feminist, Black, postcolonial, and critical theories to address the uneven geographies of access to spaces of reproductive health and justice. Research in the field of reproductive geography increasingly employs an intersectional perspective investigating how questions of reproductive rights intersect with environmental, racial, sexual, and gender justice. While research on intimate geopolitics looks at how reproductive freedom and autonomy are embedded in wider geopolitical, geoeconomic, and biopolitical power relations, reproductive geographies study the spaces, mobilities, and practices of fertility, pregnancy, and birth.