Towards a More Inclusive Framework for Understanding Fertility Barriers

Abstract

An important focus for North American feminists has been addressing and improving women’s reproductive autonomy (Lorber, 1989; Rapp, 2001; Roberts, 1997). Since the beginning of the second wave of feminist activism, there has been an ‘explosion’ of feminist research on reproduction (Feree and Hess, 2000; Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995). As feminist scholars and others have worked to bring human reproduction onto centre stage in the sociological enterprise, they have emphasised that reproduction is not simply a biological process but a socially constructed reality involving power relations over who controls women’s bodies (Rothman, 1989). Many feminist scholars have made use of intersectionality theory (e.g. Collins, 1990), which emphasises the ways in which gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation — among other factors — interact to create social realities. Indeed, although (western) women in postmodern society are represented as having enhanced reproductive choices, feminist scholars have critiqued this as highly individualistic, ignoring the larger social context that such choices are embedded in (Bird and Rieker, 2008; Lublin, 1998; Nash, 2012a). In this vein, the concept ‘stratified reproduction’ (Colen, 1986) has helped to illuminate how reproduction is structured across social and cultural boundaries, empowering privileged women and disempowering less privileged women (Bell, 2010; Roberts, 1997).