DFC Sponsored: Analyzing the Criminalization of Reproduction: Strategies, Implications, and Resistance

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract/Description

Recent legal, medical, corporate and political efforts to roll back reproductive rights in our country have led to dangerous restrictions on access and availability of reproductive choices (including abortion) and significant risk of harm and/or criminalization for those seeking to make such choices. This criminalization is not without its political history and context, but the expansive utilization of criminal legal system logics and mechanisms across various activated institutions demands that the efforts be critiqued from multiple frameworks, including feminist, queer, and reproductive justice (RJ). The papers in this session do just that, invoking diverse theoretical, methodological, and substantive arguments to speak on and to the topic in various ways, such as from an historical racialized review, within incarcerated spaces of women and girls, from the perspective of abortion doulas, and in terms of politicized concepts of personhood and humanity in the debate.

Sub Unit

• Area IV. Correlates of Crime / 30. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Individual Presentations

• Unraveling Legacies: Exploring Race, Gender, and Reproductive Healthcare from the Victorian Era to Post-Roe America - MacKenzie A. Kibler, Old Dominion University

• Criminalizing Care After Roe: Impact on Incarcerated Girls and Women - Lisa Pasko, University of Denver

• Navigating the Criminalization of Reproductive Justice: The Role and Risks of Abortion Doulas - Kay Coghill, Virginia Commonwealth University

• The Impossibility of Humanity: Abortion, Rhetoric of “Life,” and the Black Female Body - Cassandra Young, University of Denver

Chair

• Michelle Hughes Miller, University of South Florida

Discussant

• Michelle Hughes Miller, University of South Florida

Organized by a Division or external group?

Division of Feminist Criminology