Reproductive Dystopias and Black Futurity

The urgency of reproductive politics has gained new prominence. Abortion bans sweeping the southern U.S. and family planning campaigns in West Africa amplify calls for states to secure greater access to birth-limiting technologies. However, calls for juridical and legislative solutions to ensure reproductive freedom obscure the state’s role in manufacturing these reproductive dystopias.

Dr. Harper-Shipman discusses how states routinely turn to poor Black women’s fertility to resolve enduring social and economic crises. Equally, Dr. Harper- Shipman attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discrete forms of resistance establish new reproductive possibilities that scaffold a decolonial reproductive politic---one that ensures Black futurity.