WHiCC’s work is informed by reproductive justice (RJ). An activist movement and scholarly framework formed by Black American women in the early 1990s, reproductive justice affirms every person’s right to bodily autonomy within a social justice framework. It asserts every person’s right to have children, not have children, and parent the children they may have in safe and sustainable environments. Current RJ organizations, such as SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, call our attention to individual rights and bodily autonomy while recognizing the essential contexts and circumstances in which all people may or may not have such rights. For example, many RJ scholars and activists encourage us to rethink the notion of “choice” in abortion, pointing out that real and informed choices are not possible for all people, particularly marginalized people, even when abortion is technically legal. Access, therefore, not choice, is the focus of many RJ movements and researchers. RJ has also encouraged researchers and activists to move beyond “reproductive rights” only related to abortion to recognize the wider issues that inform reproductive lives and decision making. Some relevant RJ issues therefore include the environment, gun violence, all forms of state violence including police violence, incarceration, reproductive coercion and obstetric violence, sexual violence, and gender-based violence.
WHiCC recognizes the centrality of space and place to people’s bodily autonomy, lived realities, and social justice. Our research asks how space and place, literally and metaphorically, affects not only experiences but also emotions and feelings of belonging.
Our projects fit within the framework of Working Outside the Lines by exploring how structures and institutions in the US, past and present, have attempted to confine and control marginalized people, keeping them within the lines of racism, sexism, the criminal justice system, and the prison-industrial complex. Our work asks how individuals and organizations can work outside the lines by embracing movements such as prison abolition or continuing to provide abortion services even during illegality.
Abortion in the American Southeast: Post-Dobbs Realities
This project, based on a national mixed-methods survey, investigates the lived realities, including spatial realities, bodily experiences, and socio-emotional outcomes, of abortion since the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health decision.
View our list of publications here.