Introduction

The year 2013 marks the fortieth anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade. This year has also witnessed the passage in Arkansas, North Dakota, Ohio, and Texas of some of the most restrictive legislation on abortion in the United States. Some of this legislation directly contradicts Roe’s establishment of a woman’s right to abortion until fetal viability (typically around twenty-four weeks) by banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected via ultrasound. Other new laws attack women’s access to abortion by creating licensing requirements that make it difficult, if not impossible, for abortion clinics to operate. Although some new legislation has already been overturned in the courts, this proliferation of anti-abortion measures highlights a central tension in US reproductive politics in the forty years since Roe. Even as the decision established a legal right to abortion, it also galvanized right-wing movements that have attacked abortion specifically and women’s reproductive rights more broadly. The result has been a relentless whittling down of the scope of abortion rights, ranging from the Hyde Amendment, which denies federal funding of abortion in most cases, to the “Global Gag Rule,” which prohibits foreign organizations receiving US aid from mentioning abortion. This toxic political environment has made abortion access difficult even for those women who can afford it; four decades after Roe, 35 percent of American women aged fifteen to forty-four live in counties with no abortion provider at all.¹ In Ohio, from where I write, clinic closures prompted by this year’s legislation leave women with fewer options for safe abortions than perhaps at any time since the Roe decision, and the situation faced by Ohio women is hardly unique.² In the face of these attacks on access to abortion feminist scholars and activists have called for a deepening and widening of reproductive politics that defends abortion rights while challenging the limitations of Roe. Perhaps the most important feminist legacy of the last forty years is the emergence of dynamic reproductive justice movements that extend abortion rights beyond Roe’s privacy doctrine, that expand reproductive rights beyond abortion, and that develop a field of reproductive activism that transcends individual choice to challenge systems of reproductive inequality and stratification.

The contributors to this special issue of Frontiers, “Reproductive Technologies and Reproductive Justice,” take this conversation forward. Drawing from diverse methods, sources, and frameworks, each of the pieces included here encourages us to reconsider the relationship between technologies of reproduction and the meanings of reproductive justice for women and their communities. These technologies may be relatively new developments in the fields of science and medicine, as in the case of noninvasive prenatal diagnosis (nipd) or stem cell research, both discussed in this volume. But feminist research can also help us to understand how older technologies, including abortion itself, develop new meanings in changing political and scientific environments. Whether “old” or “new,” there is no automatic trajectory—either progressive or regressive—between reproductive technology and struggles for reproductive justice. The discourse and rhetoric that frame these technologies, the ways in which they become embedded in existing structures and hierarchies, and the circumstances of women’s access all shape how far reproductive technologies bend toward justice for all women. The recent anti-abortion laws in Arkansas and North Dakota are a case in point. Part of a longer history of the role of ultrasound technologies in sanctifying fetal life, the new laws offer the supposedly objective evidence of abdominal and transvaginal ultrasound to police the boundaries of women’s abortion rights.³ The meanings of ultrasound technology thus develop in concert with “pro-life” politics to produce these most recent examples of anti-abortion legislation. In her classic study of another reproductive technology—birth control—Linda Gordon reminds us of the very broad stakes at issue in these debates. Any stable consensus about reproductive politics, Gordon argues, “will probably require a new social consensus about gender relations and women’s rights.”⁴ If we bear in mind that rights for all women will require tackling pervasive inequality along multiple axes, Gordon’s insight suggests the importance...