Beyond Intimate Partners: Meanings of Reproductive Coercion in the Lives of Criminalized Women

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5. Reproductive Politics: Anxieties, Risks, and Decision-Making

Abstract

This article presents the findings and conceptual contributions of a research project examining reproductive coercion and coercive violence as distinct forms of gendered violence against women criminalized by the criminal legal system. Drawing upon the reproductive justice framework rooted in Black feminist thought, our project interrogates the ways in which intimate partners, family members, and institutional actors weaponize the state and its surveillance apparatus to exert coercive control over the reproductive autonomy and parenting rights of women. The project relies on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with women in Ohio (n=40) and Oregon (n=31) with histories of arrest and involvement in the criminal legal system. Emergent findings highlight pervasive maternal shaming and the need to unpack and expand the concepts of reproductive coercion and coercive violence in the framework of reproductive justice. The concept of reproductive coercion denotes intimate partners’ behaviors that restrict or sabotage women’s autonomous decisions about reproduction—including birth control sabotage, pregnancy coercion, and controlling the outcomes of pregnancies. Our data speak to the need to expand the concept of reproductive coercion to include the right to parent one’s child as well as to expand the theory to include family members and state actors as invading women’s bodily autonomy. Another central contribution of the project is the empirical unpacking of coercive violence as a gendered mode of intimate partner violence distinguished by the abuser’s and family’s? intentional invocation of state power to surveil, punish, and dispossess women. Our findings highlight that not only partners, but also other family members, manipulate institutional channels—calling CPS (child protective services)/DHS (department of human services) repeatedly, instigating criminal investigations, and colluding with legal authorities—to deprive women of reproductive justice (the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent in a safe and healthy environment).

Authors

• Daniela Franziska Jauk-Ajamie, University of Akron

• Melissa Thompson, Portland State University