Reproductive Autonomy: Rights and Access for All
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The Future of Reproductive Autonomy
by Jo sePhine John ston and RacheL L. ZachaRias
S
everal years ago, The Hastings Center ran a proj-
ect to understand why fertility patients are more
likely than other women in the United States to
give birth to twins, triplets, and higher-order multiples
and to suggest policies and practices to reduce those high
multiple-birth rates. More than once, those of us run-
ning the project1 were told that clinicians were just do-
ing what women wanted: women sought out treatment
options associated with higher multiple-birth rates, and
they were happy to get pregnant with multiples, espe-
cially twins. Changes to policies and practices risked
infringing on women’s reproductive autonomy. Yet this
explanation is hard to square with the project’s findings.
These included the fact that the choices of many U.S.
fertility patients about which kinds of fertility treatment
to use and how aggressively to use them—whether the
treatment be ovarian stimulation followed by insemina-
tion or in vitro fertilization—are heavily constrained by
financial concerns, such that the patients have signifi-
cant incentives to maximize their chances of pregnancy
for each and every insemination or embryo transfer. In
addition, fertility treatments are physically and emotion-
ally arduous, the risks of twin pregnancies and births
are poorly communicated, and the fertility industry is
fiercely competitive, with success measured by rates of
live births following each treatment cycle. In the face of
these financial and emotional pressures—and in light of
clinics’ incentives to maximize their success rates—what
did it mean to say that women “want twins”?2
In a project The Hastings Center is now running on
the future of prenatal testing, we are encountering clear
examples, both in established law and in the practices
Josephine Johnston and Rachel L. Zacharias, “The Future of Reproductive
Autonomy,” Just Reproduction: Reimagining Autonomy in Reproductive
Medicine, special report, Hastings Center Report 47, no. 6 (2017): S6-S11.
DOI: 10.1002/hast.789
S6
of individual providers, of failures to respect women’s
reproductive autonomy: when testing is not offered to
certain demographics of women, for instance, or when
the choices of women to terminate or continue pregnan-
cies are prohibited or otherwise not supported. But this
project also raises puzzles for reproductive autonomy.
We have learned that some clinicians and patients do not
discuss the fact that prenatal testing can lead to a deci-
sion about whether to terminate a pregnancy—they just
don’t talk about it.3 And while the decision whether to
agree to prenatal screening and diagnostic testing is to
be made with women’s free and informed consent, many
screening tests have been routinized in such a way that
some women do not even recall agreeing to testing, while
others feel that agreeing to testing is what their clinicians
expect of them or that the testing is necessary to protect
themselves and their families from the significant finan-
cial hardship of raising a child with a disability.4 In the
face of these pressures, can one really say that women are
freely choosing to undergo testing or are freely choosing
to continue or terminate a pregnancy following receipt
of test results? The reality of these pressures is requiring
us to consider expanding the scope of our investigation
beyond the clinical encounter to the broader context—to
think harder about what reproductive autonomy means
and how best to enhance it.
Autonomy in Bioethics
F or students of bioethics, the term “autonomy” is most
familiar as one of the key principles of biomedical
ethics, along with justice and beneficence (sometimes
differentiated into beneficence and nonmaleficence). In
bioethics, we generally use the shorthand “autonomy,”
but when it was initially articulated in the 1978 Belmont
Report on research with human subjects, the full prin-
ciple was labeled “respect for persons.”5 The Belmont
November-December 2017/HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
Reproductive autonomy cannot exist without attention to context—
to supports, to barriers, to social policy, to social norms. We can then
work to create the preconditions for acting in accordance with one’s
values and priorities.
Report differentiated between acknowledging the auton-
omy of persons who are “autonomous agents” and pro-
tecting those with “diminished autonomy.”6 Autonomous
agents are defined with reference to specific capacities—
the ability to deliberate about one’s personal goals and the
ability to act on the basis of that deliberation. Clinicians
and others show respect to autonomous persons by giving
“weight to their considered opinions and choices” and by
“refraining from obstructing their actions unless they are
clearly detrimental to others.”7 In other words, if people
have the capacity to deliberate about and act on their goals
and values, then they should generally be left to do so—
whatever others might make of their choices. Doctors and
others should, in most cases, get out of their way.
The idea was not revolutionary. Paternalism in medi-
cine had been dying a slow death for decades, as evidenced
by court cases,8 the Nuremberg trials, and broader societal
trends focused on equality and individual rights. Still, in-
clusion of respect for persons as the first basic ethical prin-
ciple in the Belmont Report was a necessary and significant
sign of the ascendency of individualism in medicine.
In practice, respect for autonomy is closely associated
with the need for securing voluntary and informed consent
before proceeding with medical interventions or enrolling
subjects in research. In this way, it is primarily encoun-
tered as a negative right—a right of persons to be free from
unwanted or unauthorized medical interventions. But it
also extends to a right not to be obstructed from access-
ing available medical care, where that medical care includes
contraception, abortion, prenatal testing, and fertility pres-
ervation.
This kind of understanding of autonomy—one that
emphasizes negative rights—can be very welcome in repro-
ductive contexts, including when a woman seeks access to
contraception or abortion or is threatened with involuntary
sterilization. Yet it also has its critics, including several oth-
er authors in this special report. As Louise King considers, a
bald, hands-off approach to autonomy can sometimes have
the effect of abandoning patients at just the moment when
they most need guidance and advice.9 And as Kimberly
Mutcherson argues, a hands-off, negative-rights approach
can be insufficient to support a right as fundamental as
the right to procreate, leading her to argue for a positive
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legal right to financial assistance for assisted reproductive
technologies.10
We agree that a negative-rights–based, “get out of my
way” approach to autonomy, and by extension to repro-
ductive autonomy, can lead to failures—by researchers,
clinicians, policy-makers, and others—to recognize, let
alone address, some of the myriad factors that can con-
strain reproductive decisions. One can thereby miss oppor-
tunities—perhaps even shirk obligations—to enable and
to strengthen reproductive autonomy. For many women,
the principle of respect for autonomy has the potential to
transform their lives, promising them control over whether
and when to get pregnant, whether to continue pregnan-
cies, how many children to have, and how they will give
birth and care for their babies. Yet realizing that control can
be extremely difficult because freedom from unwanted in-
tervention can be separated by a great distance from access
to the means to fully actualize one’s reproductive choices.
That distance is the subject of this essay.
In what follows, we will briefly trace the development of
the idea of reproductive autonomy—the idea that people,
most often women but increasingly people of all genders,
should have significant—almost unfettered—“self-rule”
regarding their reproductive capacities and reproductive
decisions. We will survey the shortcomings, or limitations,
inherent in various understandings of this and related con-
cepts over the past half century. We will then argue for a
rich and nuanced understanding of reproductive autono-
my, one that is broad in its ambit and plays close atten-
tion to context—what we will call “reproductive autonomy
worth having.” This richer understanding of reproductive
autonomy will, at times, require that policy-makers and
leaders in the medical profession provide support and ser-
vices so that people can act in accordance with their con-
sidered decisions.
This kind of reproductive autonomy does not widely
exist in the United States, nor in many other countries.
Achieving it will not be easy. A variety of shiny objects (in-
cluding new technologies) could distract from the effort,
and persistent inequalities and other ugly truths that are
difficult to address could cause decision-makers to give up
on working for “reproductive autonomy worth having.”
While the hard-won victories of the negative-rights ap-
proach to reproductive autonomy must be defended, the
S7
 richer and fuller understanding of the good that reproduc-
tive autonomy can bring must also be pursued. This is the
unfinished business of reproductive autonomy.11
Before continuing, we must acknowledge that in this
essay we draw heavily on scholarship about and examples
relevant to women’s reproductive autonomy. We say little
about how reproductive autonomy might play out for men
or transgender people. While much of what we say applies
to all people, we agree that more work is necessary to fully
understand and realize reproductive autonomy.
The Evolution of Reproductive Autonomy
A constellation of terms surrounds the idea of reproduc-
tive autonomy, including “reproductive choice,” “re-
productive rights,” “procreative liberty,” and “reproductive
justice.” These terms are not identical in meaning, scope,
or impact. Yet they all begin with a core idea: that repro-
duction is a significant undertaking and that having or
lacking some degree of control over it can change the lives
of individuals, families, and societies.
The concept owes much to earlier political struggles for
women’s suffrage and women’s rights as well as to move-
ments focused on limiting population growth through ac-
cess to contraception and abortion. A goal in these early
movements was for women to be able to avoid “coerced re-
production” by being allowed to control their reproductive
capacities. This control primarily took the form of prevent-
ing or terminating unwanted pregnancies.12 Early writing
on reproductive autonomy focused on the importance of
enabling women to decide “whether or not to have sex,
whether or not to have children, the number and spacing
of children, and whether or not to carry a pregnancy to
term.”13 Because women often lacked the legal right to con-
trol their bodies in these ways, addressing these goals ini-
tially entailed a focus on securing negative rights—that is,
securing for women the legal right to be allowed to decline
sex, to access available forms of contraception and abor-
tion, and to decline sterilization.
In the United States, birth control was legal until the
late nineteenth century, when so-called Comstock Laws
were passed to prohibit distribution and use of contra-
ceptives and related educational materials. In response, in
1914, Margaret Sanger and other political radicals founded
the birth control movement to fight for the legalization of
contraceptives and for education and assistance in family
planning. By the second half of the twentieth century, legal
issues around access to contraceptives and abortion were
seemingly resolved following U.S. Supreme Court deci-
sions, first in Griswold v. Connecticut 14 and then in Roe v.
Wade15—although, as we will discuss, fuller demands of
reproductive autonomy were not met by those cases alone,
and the negative rights granted in those cases have been
S8
compromised by subsequent judgments and state-based
laws.
In the last two centuries, women in the United States
experienced government interference not only in the
right not to reproduce (a right promoted through access
to contraception and abortion) but also in the right to re-
produce—specifically as the result of forced sterilization.
American states had undertaken concerted programs in
forced sterilization as part of the eugenics movement in the
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late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in
the sterilization of more than 65,000 people.16 Although
sterilization programs had initially been affirmed by the
Supreme Court in the 1922 case of Buck v. Bell, their legal-
ity was undermined in 1942 with the decision in Skinner
v. State of Oklahoma, which recognized reproduction as a
fundamental right that was infringed by compulsory ster-
ilization. (Although rates dropped dramatically following
Skinner, compulsory sterilizations of certain classes of per-
sons were still legal and continued in the United States un-
til 1981.17)
By the 1960s, the legality of abortion was a major battle
ground. At this time, the term “reproductive autonomy”
began to appear in the legal literature, cited in amicus briefs
defending women on trial for murder after abortions.18
Although the term was not used in the pivotal 1974 case of
Roe v. Wade (which rested on the concept of personal liberty
guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause),
it was used over the next few decades to refer to both the
right to reproduce and the right to control reproduction—
or as one court optimistically put it in 1980, “[R]eproduc-
tive autonomy includes the entire decisional range,” meaning
“both the decision to bear children, as well as the decision
not to bear children.”19 While this use of the term sounds
all-encompassing, the understanding was limited because,
even across this “entire decisional range,” reproductive au-
tonomy was understood as a negative right—a right not to
be prevented from accessing contraception or abortion and
a right not to be forced to undergo sterilization. There was
no legal recognition of a positive legal right requiring any
actor, including a federal or state government, to provide
women with access to the technologies or services necessary
for them to exercise their reproductive autonomy.
Insofar as birth control, abortion, and sterilization are
technologies, the reproductive autonomy discussion al-
ready involved—and was responsive to—technology. That
responsiveness increased with the introduction in the later
twentieth century of assisted reproductive technologies.
These technologies offered new ways to reproduce, includ-
ing using donor sperm, surrogate mothers, in vitro fertiliza-
tion, and eventually, donor embryos and eggs. As medicine
began to offer these reproductive services, questions were
raised about their legality, their morality, and about who—
if anyone—ought to be allowed to access them.
November-December 2017/HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
 In 1983, law professor John Robertson began using a
new term, “procreative liberty,” 20—to argue for a set of
freedoms related to assisted reproductive technologies.
In constructing procreative liberty, Robertson recognized
the importance of the negative rights already established,
which protected the freedom to avoid conception and
childbirth—what he called “the freedom to have sex
without reproduction.” 21 But he argued that this free-
dom “is not the only aspect of reproduction that needs
legal protection. Another essential element of procreative
freedom is the right to become pregnant and to parent
. . . the freedom to reproduce when, with whom, and by
what means one chooses.” 22 This “freedom to reproduce
without sex” was to be captured by “procreative liberty.” 23
An extension of reproductive freedoms to include
procreative liberty was needed, Robertson maintained,
because “the interests and values supporting the right to
reproduce by sexual intercourse extend to external con-
ception and the need to contract with donors, surrogates,
and physicians for the creation, gestation, and rearing of
children.”24 Assisted reproductive technologies serve the
same good as sexual reproduction, Robertson argued,
and those goods ought to be accessible to a similarly full
range of persons. In the decades that followed, he devel-
oped and used the concept to argue against a variety of
proposed and actual limits on fertility services, including
laws against surrogacy and restrictions on access by single
women, lesbians, and gay men. 25
Robertson’s procreative liberty had two limits. He ex-
plicitly focused it on contexts where reproduction occurs
with the help of medical interventions. 26 He lists deci-
sions such as whether the father may be present at the
birth, whether midwives may assist in births, or whether
childbirth can occur at home as examples of decisions that
fall outside the freedoms protected by procreative liberty.
This demarcation is fairly arbitrary, however, and has
been criticized on that basis. 27 In addition, Robertson’s
procreative liberty was primarily an argument against
intervention and not for assistance; although he initially
referred to it as a positive-rights approach, procreative lib-
erty is primarily an argument against limits. 28 It largely
failed to attend to context and, specifically, to the contex-
tual factors that limit the ability of some people to take
advantage of or realize the liberty interests he so clearly
argues are at stake. 29
In many senses, the critiques of late-twentieth-cen-
tury understandings of reproductive autonomy and
procreative liberty mirror some of the most important
critiques of liberal political philosophy more generally.
As Canadian law professor Erin Nelson describes in
her 2013 book Law, Policy and Reproductive Autonomy,
“Liberal political philosophy has traditionally not been
particularly successful at taking into account the ways in
S P E C I A L R E P O R T: J u s t R e p r o d u c t i o n : Re i m a g i n i n g A u t o n o m y i n R e p r o d u c t i v e M e d i c i n e
which social context and oppression can affect one’s abil-
ity to become an autonomous person and to make auton-
omous choices.”30 She ties this failure to the broad way
in which liberalism understands autonomy, permitting
choice without a definition or evaluation of such choices:
“A political system based on a conception of autonomy
that is primarily concerned to ensure that people have
choices, but that is reluctant to spell out too many condi-
tions as to evaluating the genuineness of those choices,
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will generally be satisfied as long as choices are present.
From a traditional liberal point of view, as long as neither
men nor women are coerced into reproducing, or ster-
ilized without their consent, or prohibited from choos-
ing technological means of reproducing, all is well.”31 Yet
such an understanding is both hopelessly limited, often to
the point of being willfully blind to the realities of many
people’s lives, and grossly unjust. As Nelson points out,
understandings of autonomy that fail to attend to con-
text will “undoubtedly result in the denial of meaningful
reproductive choice for those who are economically and
socially disadvantaged.”32
The next stage in the evolution of reproductive auton-
omy, then, has been a move to a richer understanding of
autonomy, expanding beyond the focus on securing nega-
tive rights to include close attention to the contexts that
shape and constrain reproductive decisions. In the 1999
book Killing the Black Body, Dorothy Roberts notes that,
while Robertson’s approach provides compelling reasons
“to ensure the equal distribution of procreative resources
in society,” it needs to go further.33 There is “no good rea-
son,” she argues, “why our understanding of procreative
liberty must adopt a baseline of existing inequalities or
why the deepening of those inequalities should not weigh
heavily in our deliberations about policies affecting re-
production.”34 She calls for an approach to reproductive
rights that explicitly takes social justice into account.
Similar calls for a more contextual approach to repro-
ductive autonomy have been made by feminist schol-
ars—including Diana Meyers, Serene Khader, Catriona
Mackenzie, and Natalie Stoljar35—who have argued that
the capacity for autonomy develops in a social context
that contains long-running constraints on women, and
particularly on women who are poor, disabled, and of col-
or. As early as 1985, then U.S. Circuit Court Judge Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, discussing Roe v. Wade, wrote, “It is a
notable irony that, as constitutional law in this domain
has unfolded, women who are not poor have achieved ac-
cess to abortion with relative ease; for poor women, how-
ever, a group in which minorities are disproportionately
represented, access to abortion is not markedly different
from what it was in pre-Roe days.”36
This orientation—this attention to the relationship
between reproductive rights and persistent inequalities—
S9
 has led to the “reproductive justice” movement. The move-
ment includes groups focused on redefining reproductive
rights in ways that center indigenous women, women of
color, trans people, and other people marginalized by exist-
ing reproductive choice frameworks. One activist in this
area, Loretta Ross, the cofounder of the SisterSong Women
of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, describes the aims
of reproductive justice as fighting for the rights to have a
child, not to have a child, to parent the children we have,
and to the “enabling conditions to realize these rights.”37
This fourth point is the transformative and critical com-
ponent of reproductive justice, especially in comparison
with preceding approaches to reproductive autonomy. As
SisterSong’s online introduction states, “There is no choice
when there is no access.”38 Or as the feminist scholar Laura
Purdy has written, without “decent health care, education,
and alternative ways of supporting themselves”—what she
calls “autonomy’s prerequisites”—women cannot have real
reproductive autonomy.39
Reproductive Autonomy Worth Having
T he history of concepts and arguments focused on se-
curing rights, choice, autonomy, and liberty around
reproduction—an evolution we have very briefly outlined
here—is sometimes read as a series of critiques and com-
peting positions. Recognizing and addressing limitations in
these concepts has certainly driven scholarship and activ-
ism in this area forward. However, we call it an evolution
because we understand the work as building on itself, both
conceptually and practically. Today, society has a version of
reproductive autonomy that is, if not synonymous with,
then at least open and responsive to the demands of a re-
productive justice framework.
This version of reproductive autonomy has the capacity
to be broad in scope and attentive to context, demanding
attention to the factors that, following more traditional
conceptions of autonomy or liberty, exclude some people
from reproductive options. It is a more expansive and more
demanding understanding of the work required for repro-
ductive autonomy to be realized (or realizable). It requires
those of us in bioethics or medicine to look beyond the
clinical encounter to identify the financial, familial, cultur-
al, and other pressures limiting people’s reproductive op-
tions. Indeed, we would go so far as to say that reproductive
autonomy cannot exist without attention to context—to
supports, to barriers, to social policy, to social norms. If you
live in a country that systematically discriminates against
girls, then people will have social pressure to “choose”
against baby girls—their choice to select a male embryo
or abort a female fetus might be an informed choice, but
does that decision represent real autonomy? Similarly, in a
country that discriminates against people with disabilities
S10
or that fails to support those people and their families, de-
cisions about testing for or selecting against disability can
be very heavily constrained. Once constraining contextual
factors are identified, bioethicists, clinicians, and policy-
makers can begin to address them and work to create the
preconditions for people to be truly able to act in accor-
dance with their values and priorities—to attain a repro-
ductive autonomy worth having.
Seeking a fuller, justice-oriented approach to reproduc-
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tive autonomy is intimidating, in part because it forces
scholars, clinicians, and others to face seemingly intrac-
table and, in many nations, highly politicized problems
like poverty, violence, and discrimination. Perhaps at one
time those seeking to advance autonomy could appear
to be politically neutral. There is broad political support,
for example, for ensuring that pregnant women or IVF
patients receive valid information in advance of making
medical decisions. But such neutrality can be impossible
as scholars, clinicians, and others seek to squarely address
some of the most important factors driving those decisions,
whether those factors be the United States’ lack of univer-
sal health coverage, its increasingly limited abortion access,
inadequate public education, discrimination against queer
people, or entrenched economic inequality.
Yet grappling with this fuller understanding of repro-
ductive autonomy is vital to maintaining the integrity of
our work and—more importantly—to respecting persons.
An approach to reproductive autonomy that is broad in
scope and deeply attentive to context is necessary for a fu-
ture in which economic and social inequalities continue to
shape individual decisions and a future that includes ever
more technologies, such as egg freezing, expanded pre-
natal testing (including preimplantation genetic testing),
and new and expanded assisted reproductive technologies
that promise to expand reproductive choice yet risk im-
posing their own sets of constraints. This future needs a
richer approach to reproductive autonomy, one based in an
understanding of reproduction as a contextualized process
extending before and beyond conception and that works to
enable truly free and truly informed decision-making that
is, as much as possible, consistent with people’s values and
true to their commitments.
1. Hastings scholars Josephine Johnston and Michael Gusmano,
with Pasquale Patrizio from the Yale Fertility Center, led the project,
from 2011 to 2012.
2. J. Johnston, M. K. Gusmano, and P. Patrizio, “Preterm Births,
Multiples, and Fertility Treatment: Recommendations for Changes
to Policy and Clinical Practices,” Fertility and Sterility 102, no. 1
(2014): 36-39.
3. L. Parham, M. Michie, and M. Allyse, “Expanding Use of
cfDNA Screening in Pregnancy: Current and Emerging Ethical,
Legal, and Social Issues,” Current Genetic Medicine Reports 5, no. 1
(2017): 44-53.
November-December 2017/HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
 4. J. Johnston, R. M. Farrell, and E. Parens, “Supporting Women’s
Autonomy in Prenatal Testing,” New England Journal of Medicine
377 (2017): 505-07.
5. National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects
of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, The Belmont Report: Ethical
Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of
Research (1978; Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1979).
6. Ibid., part B.1.
7. Ibid., part B.1.
8. In the United States, these cases began with Schloendorff v.
Society of New York Hospital 105 N.E. 92 (N.Y. 1914).
9. L. P. King, “Should Clinicians Set Limits on Reproductive
Autonomy?,” Just Reproduction: Reimagining Autonomy in
Reproductive Medicine, special report, Hastings Center Report 47, no.
6 (2017): S50-S56.
10. K. Mutcherson, “Reproductive Rights without Resources or
Recourse,” Just Reproduction: Reimagining Autonomy in Reproductive
Medicine, special report, Hastings Center Report 47, no. 6 (2017):
S12-S18.
11. L Purdy, “Women’s Reproductive Autonomy: Medicalization
and Beyond,” Journal of Medical Ethics 32, no. 5 (2006): 287-91.
12. E. Nelson, Law, Policy and Reproductive Autonomy (Portland,
OR: Hart Publishing, 2013).
13. F. Naa-Adjeley Adjetey, “Reclaiming the African Woman’s
Individuality: The Struggle between Women’s Reproductive
Autonomy and African Society and Culture,” American University
Law Review 44 (1994): 1351-81, at 1352.
14. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381U.S. 479 (1965).
15. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
16. D. J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of
Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
17. Skinner V. Oklahoma Ex Rel. Williamson, 316 US 535
(1942).
18. F. A. Seidenberg, “Submissive Majority Modern Trends in the
Law Concerning Women’s Rights,” Cornell Law Review 55 (1969):
262-72, at 264-65.
19. Margaret S. V. Edwards, 488 F. Supp. 181 (1980).
20. J. A. Robertson, “Procreative Liberty and the Control of
Conception, Pregnancy, and Childbirth,” Virginia Law Review 69,
no. 3 (1983): 405-64.
21. Ibid., 406.
22. Ibid.
S P E C I A L R E P O R T: J u s t R e p r o d u c t i o n : Re i m a g i n i n g A u t o n o m y i n R e p r o d u c t i v e M e d i c i n e
23. Ibid.
24. J. A. Robertson, “Noncoital Reproduction and Procreative
Liberty,” Southern California Law Review 59 (1986): 249-58, at 253.
25. J. Robertson, “Embryos, Families, and Procreative Liberty: The
Legal Structure of the New Reproduction,” Southern California Law
Review 59 (1985): 939-1041, at 939; J. A. Robertson, “Procreative
Liberty and Harm to Offspring in Assisted Reproduction,” American
Journal of Law & Medicine 30, no. 1 (2004): 7-40.
26. J. A. Robertson, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New
Reproductive Technologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996), 23.
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27. L. M. Purdy, “What Feminism Can Do for Bioethics,” Health
Care Analysis 9, no. 2 (2001): 117-32; E. Nelson, Law, Policy and
Reproductive Autonomy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing: 2013).
28. Nelson, Law, Policy and Reproductive Autonomy.
29. D. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the
Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); L. M. Purdy,
“Women’s Reproductive Autonomy: Medicalization and Beyond,”
Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (2005): 287-91.
30. Nelson, Law, Policy and Reproductive Autonomy, 47.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 296.
34. Ibid.
35. C. Mackenzie and N. Stolijar, Relational Autonomy: Feminist
Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (Oxford: Oxford
University Press on Demand, 2000; S. Khader, “Beyond Autonomy
Fetishism: Affiliation with Autonomy in Women’s Empowerment,”
Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 17, no. 1 (2016):
125-39; D. T. Meyers, “The Rush to Motherhood: Pronatalist
Discourse and Women’s Autonomy,” Signs: Journal of Women in
Culture and Society 26, no. 3 (2001): 735-73.
36. R. B. Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality
in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” North Carolina Law Review 63 (1984):
375-386, at 377.
37. L. Ross, “What Is Reproductive Justice?,” in Reproductive Justice
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38. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective,
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39. Purdy, “Women’s Reproductive Autonomy,” 287.
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