After Roe: Race, Reproduction, and Life at the Limit of Law

Abstract:This article examines media portrayals of reproductive health care from the summer of 2022 as an entry point to reconsider liberal reproductive politics after the Dobbs decision. It argues that these commonsense narratives of medical and legal crisis reflect and reproduce long-standing liberal approaches to reproductive rights, mystifying contemporary reproductive coercion's origins in the management and exploitation of raced reproductivity. Greater attention to the historical racialized structures of reproductive unfreedom, I argue, would enable deeper understandings of the expansion of state control over physical and social reproduction.