This essay examines the history of the deployment of spectacles of death in the fight over reproductive rights in the United States. Antiabortion activists have staged fetal funerals to capture media attention and confirm the concept of "fetal personhood." The apotheosis of antiabortion spectacularized death occurred in the mid-1990s with the homicides of abortion doctors and care providers. While such domestic terrorism waned considerably following the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994, antiabortion groups have continued to utilize spectacles of "fetal death" as a key strategy to further erode what reproductive rights remain in this country, with fetal burials and monuments to the "unborn" proliferating in recent years. Meanwhile, abortion rights groups represented female death in a number of ways, from the use of photographs of women who had died due to unsafe abortions, to carrying women in coffins at protests, to "die-ins," to the use of the coat hanger as a stand-in for the lost lives of women. After the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, some activists re-thought this strategy and called for a move away from invoking female death. Assessing all the visual strategies deployed in the fight over reproductive rights, and in particular the historical context of contemporary efforts to ensure fetal personhood rights through images of "fetal death," is crucial to the ability of the reproductive justice movement to identify a path towards a durable future in the post-Dobbs era.
The Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson is widely understood to be responsible for the revoking of reproductive rights in the United States in 2022. This essay asks how to respond to events construed as rights-loss, through closer attention to their "productive" effects, their stimulation of retroactive and anticipatory meanings and occlusions, and the complex, multiple, and contradictory governmental techniques of power with which they bind. How can we analyze the violence of rights-loss in terms that are consistent with long-standing critiques of rights discourse? How can we reorient the framework of rights-loss towards a more capacious understanding of "revocability?" A revised lexicon is suggested for interpreting its milieu, including "not rights," "buffering rights," "exception," and the desecuritizing rights of (de)capacitation and "allowability." The essay further interrogates international references to Dobbs as a marker of regress with a critical focus on exceptionalist discourse surrounding France's constitutional protection of abortion as a recourse in 2025.
This article advances a genealogy of the Hippocratic oath in Roe v. Wade. It excavates and analyzes the role that the Hippocratic oath plays in the majority opinion's grounding of a right to abortion in the privacy of the physician-patient relation. I show that the classical Greek oath, which the opinion quotes and interprets at length, is really about a different relationship-not the one a physician has with a patient but the one a physician has with a patient's guardian, usually a husband. Restored to the reproductive politics of classical Greece that Roe carries forward in its opinion, the Hippocratic oath figures a tacit alliance between two groups, male physicians and male heads of households, for maintaining the inequality of women and the political rights of men, equal to each other, through sexual and reproductive control. What happens when we take this as the origin story baked into Roe? The problem is no longer simply that the ruling grants a physician, rather than a patient, the authority to terminate a pregnancy, as long argued, but that this authority, at bottom, really belongs to another man. The article complicates the feminist critique of the decision's focus on the privacy of the physician-patient relation by showing what this privacy actually consists of: a foundational scene of male collusion and female inequality. A new and suspicious practice of medicine allies with an established practice of marriage and guardianship to secure the androcentric order that will serve them both. The interests of professional medicine and patriarchy are impossible to disentangle at the heart of Roe. The majority opinion provides an etiology for Roe's own overturning in Dobbs.
While research on reproduction has historically been marginalized in many disciplines, the post-Dobbs political crisis has brought renewed attention to the importance of understanding reproduction. In the background, a growing academic attention to the expansive reproductive justice framework has produced a range of projects and institutionalized efforts under the name. This article focuses on pre- and post-Dobbs reproductive justice enterprises in university settings to consider how they articulate their motivations and operationalize their named interest in reproductive justice. Implications of post-Dobbs enterprises focusing primarily on topics traditionally associated with reproductive rights, rather than expansive reproductive justice, are considered. How the current political environment simultaneously makes reproduction research more tenuous and suggests a need for expansive reproductive justice to be pursued concludes the article.
This article traces the history of American abortion activism in the 1960s to recover the little-discussed history of the movement to repeal all abortion laws. By focusing on five figures in this movement-Patricia Maginnis, Lana Clarke Phelan, Lawrence Lader, Caroline Myers, and Florynce Kennedy-I aim to show how the arguments legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade were not inevitable, and that there might have been another way forward to overturn anti-abortion laws. The abortion activists discussed in this article emphasized women's bodily autonomy and their rights to legal, safe, and accessible abortions. They believed that until all abortion laws were overturned, women would never have reproductive freedom and the ability to be mothers on their own terms. The article returns to this history to show how their arguments led to the first national abortion rights organization-NARAL-and the first legal and legislative cases that attempted to repeal abortion laws to consider how returning to their positions might help us find a way forward in this post-Dobbs era.
