Privacy, precarity, and political change: Connecting gendered violence to reproductive injustice

This essay examines the interplay between systems of gendered violence and reproductive injustice especially as they exist within frameworks of public and private spheres of knowledge/ experience. I suggest that like domestic violence, abortion care is often articulated as a private issue in need of public support and resources. This framing undercuts the systemic operation of power and control at the cultural level that sustains intersectional violence against people who are already most vulnerable under neocolonial/ hetero-patriarchal/ white supremacist/ capitalist oppression. As feminist activists in the U.S. lament the fall of Roe v. Wade, we ought to use the exigence of the Dobbs decision to collectively demand more robust access to reproductive justice by centering the intersectional experiences of people for whom abortion care in the U.S. has never been meaningfully accessible.