Rising Up, Pushing Forward: Standing Our Ground in the Face of Injustice

Abstract

At the one-year mark since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there is an urgent, vital need for feminist scholarship that addresses the ways structural stigma and oppressive policy affect diverse groups of women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB). Accordingly, in this introduction to the special issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly, we provide a historical overview and timeline of reproductive rights and (in)justice in the United States in order to illustrate how we have arrived at this perilous moment in history. Reproductive (in)justice exacerbates inequities regarding who has been encouraged to reproduce, who has been denied reproductive autonomy, and who has been required to reproduce and refused the right to parent their children in safe environments. Accordingly, we aver the importance of centering an intersectional and reproductive justice framework in understanding how coalescing forms of oppression (e.g., racism, capitalism, sexism, ableism) circumscribe reproductive autonomy. We begin the special issue with articles that examine how social policy and structural oppression have violated women's and people AFAB reproductive healthcare, followed by articles that examine how such policy and oppression affect women's reproductive decision-making. We conclude this special issue with an article that centers reproductive justice advocacy in the ongoing fight for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy.

Reproductive Justice in the Post-Roe v. Wade Era: Examining Reactions to Dobbs v. Jackson and Psychological Distress Among Cisgender Women and People Assigned Female at Birth

“…For example, immigrant women have been sterilized in immigration and customs enforcement detention centers (Garcia, 2020); Black women have higher rates of maternal mortality compared to White women (Petersen et al, 2019); and the mortality rate of non-Hispanic Black infants is double that of non-Hispanic White infants (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). Thus, it is important to recognize the ways in which reproductive injustice has decreed who is encouraged or discouraged to reproduce, who has access to adequate reproductive health care, and who has been allowed the resources to parent in safe communities (Ross & Solinger, 2017;SisterSong, n.d.;Watson et al, 2023).…”

“…On the other hand, engagement in collective action may be associated with greater psychological distress. Although collective action may enhance personal agency and collective empowerment (Friedman & Leaper, 2010), those who engage in collective action may do so because they are distressed about structural inequities that uniquely affect them and their communities (Breslow et al, 2015; Watson et al, 2023). Among a sample of sexual minority Latinx people, engagement in immigrant rights collective action was uniquely positively related to both psychological distress and traumatic stress symptoms, while exacerbating the association between immigrant objectification and psychological distress (Flores Randelman & Watson, 2023).…”