Place-based reproductive justice and resistance: Human rights and abortion mobilities in the Post-Dobbs era

Abstract

This article integrates human rights and abortion mobilities frameworks to demonstrate the ramifications of abortion restrictions and highlights historic and emergent forms reproductive justice and resistance. It engages with and critiques narrow conceptualizations of reproductive rights and biopolitics and considers the complex ways that abortion legislation becomes embodied in the post-Dobbs era. Mobility is explored across three frames—repression, privilege, and resistance—to highlight the interconnections between reproductive (in)justice and place-based resistance. Situating the analysis within human rights scholarship and reproductive justice and mobilities scholarship, the article outlines the continuities and current configurations of place-based reproductive (in)justice across three interconnected axes. The first axis traces the embodied ramifications of anti-abortion laws for marginalized individuals and communities; the second axis explores the complex personal, political, and economic costs of travelling to access abortion care; and the third axis reflects on historic and current forms of community-based resistance and care. Read together, these axes challenge binary assumptions of agency or subjugation and instead reveal how embodied experiences of abortion restrictions for marginalized individuals and groups also run alongside radical forms of community care to resist these restrictions and address broader forms of lived intersectional inequalities.