The socially engrained notion that motherhood is essential to womanhood is strongly portrayed in how states view women's political participation through their reproductive capacities. In Lebanon, the state's political agenda influences laws and policies that restrict or encourage women's procreation, depending on their nationality, sect, marital, and legal status. Since 1943, Lebanon's system of proportionally allocating parliamentary seats to sectarian political parties, based on their population size, has spurred fears of demographic changes across sects. This fear is also referenced by politicians as the reason why Lebanese women are legally denied their rights of passing citizenship on to their children and non-Lebanese spouses. With Lebanon holding the highest refugee population per capita in the world, the fear of disturbing the "sectarian balance" directly collides with the reproductive autonomy of both Syrian and Palestinian refugee women. Migrant women living in Lebanon are also restricted to playing out their role as workers and therefore have their sexual and reproductive health and rights denied. Another fear of the state is that of changing moral values, whereby motherhood and parenthood in single women, queer, transgender, and intersex persons are perceived as deviant and a threat to traditional values. This review aims to display how, through fearof changing moral values and demographic shiftsthe Lebanese state practices reproductive oppression on part of the population, while neglecting them and exacerbating their difficult living conditions.

Reproductive justice is a framework encompassing reproductive and sexual health and rights in a social justice lens that targets reproductive oppression inflicted through multiple systems of oppression of race, class, and gender. In this paper, we aim to highlight the importance and relevance of adopting a Reproductive Justice framework, as opposed to a reproductive rights one, in order to build cross-movement solidarities that organize against the multiplicity of oppressions and inequalities facing women and trans* persons in Lebanon. Through a Reproductive Justice lens, we analyze the points of convergence of citizenship, migration, refuge, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, sexual violence, access to sexual and reproductive health services, in addition to gender identity and sexual orientation, adoption and assisted reproductive technologies, and environmental justice. Mobilizing under Reproductive Justice as a holistic framework, and away from operating in silos within the confines of singular rights, connects different struggles and creates a remarkable opportunity for cross-movement building and solidarities.