Geographies of reproductive justice

I Introduction

Transnational organizing of feminist movements and the simultaneous rise of (far-)right politics across the globe in countries such as India, Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Poland, and the United States have turned reproductive politics – that is who has power over matters of sex and pregnancy and its consequences (Solinger, 2019) – into a main political battleground. Traditional, conservative moral values that defend a heteronormative model of the family are the ground for contemporary attacks on reproductive and sexual rights that many had taken for granted. In response, feminist movements stand up against these attacks on reproductive and sexual rights. Moreover, reproductive justice has turned into a key political claim demanding to connect struggles for reproductive rights to questions of social and environmental justice.

Black feminists and feminists of colour developed the concept of reproductive justice in the United States in the 1990s connecting reproductive rights to questions of social justice, pioneered by the SisterSong Collective, which first introduced the term in 1994 (e.g. Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, 2005; Luna, 2009; Luna and Luker, 2013; Ross et al., 2001; Ross and Solinger, 2017; Silliman et al., 2004). They were able to build on the work of Black thinkers such as Davis (1981) or Giddings (1984). As an intersectional activist concept, reproductive justice calls for a broader vision of reproductive rights that goes beyond the white liberal pro-choice focus on individual self-determination and abortion rights. Reproductive justice refers to three sets of rights: 1) the right to decide not to have children; 2) the right to decide to have children, and 3) the right to parent children in enabling economic, social, and environmental conditions and free of individual or institutionalized violence (Ross and Solinger, 2017). More recently, a fourth set of rights – the right to sexual autonomy that focuses on the human right to protect and maintain one’s body, sexuality, and gender freedom – has been added by younger activists (Ross, 2021).

The concept has been taken up by feminist Black, queer, and crip grassroot movements in Latin America (Schultz, 2023), Europe (Kitchen Politics, 2021), South Asia (South Asia Reproductive Justice and Accountability Initiative (SARJAI), 2022), and Africa (Ahaki, n.d). Black feminist NGOs in Brazil, for example, use the concept to fight against maternal mortality of Black women and police violence against Black youth (Criola, 2021; Schultz, 2023). In Germany, the concept allows to join forces of diverse activist collectives of migrant, dis_abled, trans* and Romn*ja perspectives among others (Netzwerk für reproduktive Gerechtigkeit, n.d). The transnational travelling of the concept poses diverse challenges and implies studying the context-specific historical racial formations and intersectional power relations (Kyere, 2021).

Given geography’s extensive engagement with bio- and necropolitics (Davies, 2018; Mbembe, 2003; McIntyre and Nast, 2011; McKittrick, 2011; Philo, 2005; for an overview see Rutherford and Rutherford, 2013; Tyner, 2009, 2015; Vasudevan and Smith, 2020), it is surprising that the discipline has been rather slow to take up the concept of reproductive justice. Our extensive literature research in the main anglophone human geography journals revealed that the concept has gained importance in anglophone geography only since 2020. Most of the empirical case studies that use the concept focus on North America and Europe, with few papers focussing on the Global South and Global East. For instance, it has been taken up in the context of the United States regarding debates on abortion since Roe vs. Wade was overturned (Calkin, 2021) and in Ireland concerning the abortion law reform (Calkin, 2019).

In view of the fast-growing field of reproductive geographies and recent conceptual discussions around intimate geographies (Smith, 2020), uterine geographies (Lewis, 2018a), and geographies of fertility (Coddington, 2021a), it is surprising that geography has not yet engaged in a more systematic manner with the concept of reproductive justice. We argue in this paper that developing a research agenda for a geography of reproductive justice allows us to advance the field of feminist geographies in general and reproductive geographies in particular by centring questions of spatial justice and linking research on reproductive geographies to intersectional feminist activism. Such a research agenda takes a normative stance seeking to contribute to feminist political struggles to address reproductive injustices. Joining forces between intersectional feminist movements and academic research would allow to develop utopias and progressive politics for a just society in terms of access to reproductive rights, sexual autonomy, and good conditions for parenting.

We argue that a reproductive justice research agenda calls for three major shifts in feminist reproductive politics, which have important implications for how geographers think about reproductive relations spatially:

(1) A shift from individualistic and liberal notions of bodily autonomy and self-determination towards a focus on structural inequalities as preconditions for a broad set of reproductive rights (e.g. Price, 2020). For geography, this means a shift away from focussing on the individual experiences of reproduction towards a relational approach which focuses on (re)productive relations of sexuality, parenting, and caring within systems of structural racism, sexism, violence, exploitation, and injustice.

In consequence, geographic research on reproduction, sexual autonomy and parenting needs to pay close attention to the (post-)colonial histories of reproductive oppression and current structural discrimination of selective, eugenic, and antinatalist policies.

The paper traces geography’s initial reluctance to engage with questions of reproduction and subsequent inroads of these questions in the fields of population, political, feminist, and reproductive geographies among others. We then discuss four broader themes where we delineate how geographers have already engaged with issues and sometimes also explicitly the concept of reproductive justice. Namely, (1) by contesting population geographies and antinatalist policies, (2) by studying spatially uneven and stratified access to reproductive healthcare, (3) by bringing reproductive justice into concert with environmental justice, and (4) and by engaging abolitionist approaches to reproductive issues. We show how each theme can contribute to formulating a geographic research agenda for reproductive justice. Thereafter, we discuss the practical implications of a justice-oriented research agenda. The conclusion highlights how such a holistic reproductive justice research agenda for geography expands the sites, scales, and spaces of research conceptually and empirically. We embed this endeavour into a vision of an anti-Malthusian geography that contests right-wing and fascist populationalist narratives and contributes to/fights for a social and climate justice agenda.

II Bringing ‘reproduction’ into geography

Within geography, population geography was traditionally the first subdiscipline to study questions of reproduction through a focus on fertility, however, doing so in a rather quantitative fashion. Thereby, population geography has for long neglected not only the intimate and embodied experiences of reproduction but also the biopolitics behind narratives of ‘population’ growth and decline. Calls for a greater engagement with social theory and attention to the multiple relationships between demographic questions, (geo)politics, culture, and mundane life (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995; Robbins and Smith, 2017; Tyner, 2013) have resulted in ‘more nuanced views of power and politics [in population geography]’ (Robbins and Smith, 2017: 205). Tyner (2013: 702) pushes the subdiscipline towards a politicized approach that asks, ‘Within any given place, who lives, who dies, and who decides?’ Departing from these questions, critical feminist and Black approaches to bio- and necropolitics in geography have started to ask whose bodies and social groups’ reproduction is desired and facilitated and whose reproductive futures are denied and discarded (Krupar and Ehlers, 2017; Pulido and De Lara, 2018; Schultz, 2019, 2023; Schurr, 2017; Smith and Vasudevan, 2017; Sziarto, 2017; Wang, 2017). This body of work not only relates directly to core questions of reproductive justice but also critically questions the ways population geography has been disciplinarily established within a eugenic and Malthusian genealogy. It shows population geography’s problematic linkages to global population politics and the (mis)use of demographic knowledge production for racist and eugenic politics and settler colonialism.

This criticism of the field of population geography led to the development of the new subfield of reproductive geographies. Over the last decade, intimate geopolitics (Brickell, 2014; Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher, 2024; Perler et al., 2023; Smith, 2012, 2020; Turner and Vera Espinoza, 2021; Tyerman, 2021) and reproductive geographies (Bagelman and Gitome, 2021; Boyer, 2018; Coddington, 2021a, 2021b; England et al., 2018; Hiemstra, 2021) have emerged as new fields of geographic research.

Building on geography’s turn towards the body (Longhurst, 1997; Nelson, 1999; Parr, 2002; Teather, 1999), the material turn (Boyer, 2018; Colls, 2007; Colls and Evans, 2013; Fannin et al., 2014; Marquardt and Strüver, 2018; Militz et al., 2021; Strüver, 2020), and the emotional, affective, and intimate turn (Bondi et al., 2005; Militz and Schurr, 2016; Moss and Donovan, 2017; Pratt, 2012; Schurr et al., 2023), intimate geopolitics, and reproductive geographies have diversified and politicized the approaches to reproduction in geography.

The field-shaping edited book ‘Reproductive Geographies: Bodies, Places and Politics’ (England et al., 2018: 5) departs by stating that ‘reproductive justice movements and new reproductive technologies are raising important questions about the changing social and spatial dimensions of reproductive life’. The edited volume, however, misses the opportunity to develop a holistic reproductive justice research agenda for geography. At the same time, we consider the edited book as the point of departure for geographers’ engagement with reproductive justice as it puts questions of reproductive rights and social inequalities onto the agenda of human geography.

III Population geographies and antinatalist policies

Geographers have already drawn on the concept of reproductive justice in their critical reflections on population geography’s history as a field that was disciplinarily established within eugenic and Malthusian genealogies (Coddington, 2021a; Hendrixson et al., 2020; Hübl, 2019, 2022; Siedhoff et al., 2023). These scholars criticize the subdiscipline’s lacking reappraisal of this history and its use of quantitative measures of demographic development, population distribution or fertility without reflecting inherent Malthusian presumptions and colonial biases of statistical knowledge production (Bendix and Schultz, 2018). Critical approaches to population geography argue that the epistemic object ‘population’ itself is highly contingent and needs fundamental epistemological reflection (Bhatia et al., 2020).

Feminist researchers suggest the critical notion of ‘populationism’ (Hendrixson et al., 2020). It refers to ‘ideologies that attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers’ (Angus and Butler, 2011: xxi) and questions how population studies support neo-Malthusian global policies which consider ‘population dynamics’ the central cause of different global crises ranging from food insecurity over climate change to migration. Authors of the Gender, Place and Culture special issue on populationism criticize the abstract and decontextualized use of global (or national) population numbers and call instead for a situated understanding of the multifaceted roots of current socioeconomic and ecological crises (Bendix et al., 2020; Bhatia et al., 2020; Ojeda et al., 2020; Rivera-Amarillo and Camargo, 2020; Shaw and Wilson, 2020).

Critical and feminist geographers show that the knowledge produced by population geography and population studies has contributed to an unequal landscape of projections towards different populations at a global and local level suggesting whose reproduction should be averted with the aim to reduce fertility rates – especially among racialized and poor populations (Bendix et al., 2020; Bendix and Schultz, 2018; Hendrixson et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2019; Smith and Vasudevan, 2017). This body of research speaks to the reproductive justice framework and has welcomed it as a helpful concept to analyse normative, unconsented, or even forced contraception or sterilization programmes (Schultz, 2023).

Antinatalist politics involve projections into specific narratives of the future (Smith and Vasudevan, 2017). The ‘demographization’ of social and ecological problems has resulted in an uneven geography of anti- and pronatalist policies (Schultz, 2022). Whereas pronatalist policies are directed towards people in the Global North who are white, educated, middle-upper class, and hold citizenship status, antinatalist policies target mainly poor and rural People of Colour residing in the Global South as well as proletarian, migrants, ‘unhealthy’ and illegalized social groups in the Global North. Wilson (2018: 3), for example, shows how the Indian state in the aftermath of explicit population control policies continues to target ‘poor, Dalit, Adivasi, and religious minority women’ with coercive mass sterilizations and unsafe injectable programs.

Feminist geographers have employed the concept of the global intimate to study the multiscalar relations between global programs of population control, national health policies, and intimate experiences of infertility, sterilization, and contraception (Perler et al., 2023; Perler and Schurr, 2021; Schurr, 2017). The influence of global philanthrocapitalist forces on the reproductive lives of people in the Global South becomes obvious in Shaw and Wilson’s (2020) paper, in which they study the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s strategies towards population and agricultural policies. Globally acting development agencies promote, for example, the contraceptive injection Sayana Press, particularly in Western and Eastern African countries, as a way to foster reproductive autonomy and self-determination (Bendix et al., 2020). These programs are deeply rooted in antinatalist aims of family planning policies within the FP2020 agenda, a program of a network of transnational and national donors, NGOs, government agencies, and Big Pharma (Hendrixson, 2019). They are embedded in a strategic focus of current global family planning programs on long-acting reversible contraception propagating hormonal injectables and implants for certain world regions having a supposed ‘population problem’. Such programs have been highly contested within global feminist reproductive health struggles for decades (Bendix and Schultz, 2018).

Research that critiques population geography and antinatalist policies for their colonial and Malthusian present offers four main insights to inform a research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice. Firstly, geographies of bio- and necropolitics have revealed how access to reproductive rights and individual choices about sexuality and reproduction are always inherently linked to state, transnational, and global politics that address not just individuals but population(s). Secondly, we cannot understand today’s reproductive injustices without understanding the afterlife and sedimentation of violent past bio-/necropolitics (Hartman, 2016; Pérez Hérnandez and Schurr, 2025). Thirdly, asking whose motherhood, parenthood, and children are desired and protected by society and the state and whose are discriminated against, stigmatized, and considered disposable allows us to analyse how certain bodies and future lives are valued over others within a spatially, socially, and racially uneven geography (Perler et al., 2023; Roberts, 1997, 2021; Schultz, 2022, 2023; Schurr, 2017). Fourthly, reproductive/pronatalist and disreproductive/antinatalist policies and technologies always need to be analysed as two sides of the same coin. Contesting the basic assumptions of population geographies enables to contribute to a geography of reproductive justice by showing the linkages between pro- and antinatalist policies and their intersectional effects on certain social groups in terms of geography, gender, race, sexuality, and ability, among others.

IV Health geographies and the spatially uneven access to reproductive healthcare

Geographies of (reproductive) health, which focus on the geographically and socially uneven access to healthcare provision, are an important field that can contribute to developing a research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice. Research in this field studies the ‘raced, classed, and gendered (among others) dimensions of inaccessibility’ (Lopez, 2019: 840) to reproductive healthcare. Lopez (2019) shows that despite the increase in enrolment in Medicaid, maternal mortality rates have continued to be over-proportionally high for Black women. Revealing that maternal and infant mortality vary significantly between different regions in the United States, she calls for the need of a spatial analysis to understand the (lacking) access to reproductive healthcare. In a similar vein, Nash (2021) emphasizes the importance of a geographical approach to unequal health outcomes regarding maternity and infant mortality. She engages with the concept of reproductive justice to study racist obstetric violence and Black women’s lack of access to reproductive health in the United States. Analysing the spatial webs of legal and medical actors involved in pregnancy, birth, and postnatal care, she argues that a singular focus on the hospital as the preeminent site of obstetric violence and medical racism responsible for the over-proportionally high deadly outcomes of Black women and their children is far too narrow. Instead, reproductive justice activists and scholars should consider a broader scope of actors when undertaking a multiscalar analysis of reproductive injustices. Sziarto (2017) also focuses on the racialized politics of reproduction, discussing infant mortality in Milwaukee’s Black community which is three times higher than for white babies. Calling for the need to craft an ‘anti-racist biopolitics’ (Sziarto, 2017: 315), she is in line with the reproductive justice movement when arguing that free choice is not enough but that racial, social, and economic justice are necessary preconditions for reproductive justice. Komposch et al.’s (2024) research on female migrant farmworkers’ access to reproductive health services in Spain shows in a similar fashion that free access to healthcare is not enough. They demonstrate that ‘liminality [in terms of lacking access to reproductive healthcare] often manifests itself through the absence of infrastructures, information, and resources rather than through visible barriers’ (Komposch et al., 2024: 8).

Lack of access to reproductive healthcare can also result in reproductive im/mobilities (Schurr, 2019; Speier et al., 2020). The uneven and unequal access to reproductive healthcare and dis/reproductive technologies engenders all kinds of mobilities in which ‘people travel abroad to seek treatment they have no access to or cannot afford in their home country’ (Schurr, 2018: 2). In general, im/mobility is one of the most applied concepts by geographers to study reproductive issues. Geographers have studied why and how people travel in search of in vitro fertilization treatment (e.g. Schurr, 2018), oocyte donation (e.g. Gunnarsson Payne, 2015; Perler and Schurr, 2021), surrogacy (e.g. Bhattacharjee, 2021; Schurr and Militz, 2018), and sex selection (e.g. Bhatia, 2018). Without explicitly referring to reproductive justice, they show how reproductive mobilities are embedded in colonial and postcolonial histories, emphasizing the ‘legacy of colonial plunder’ and the ‘ruthless utilization of the “native” body for western profit’ (Lau, 2018: 672). When linking women’s decision to provide their reproductive bodies/body parts for the national or global fertility market to culturalized obligations of care and the lack of a social welfare state, these scholars address key questions of reproductive justice (again, often without referring to the concept itself).

The recent rise of geographic literature on access to abortion and the linked im/mobilities incorporates reproductive justice more systematically than earlier work on mobilities (for an overview see Calkin et al., 2022). Given that the reproductive justice movement emerged in response to the white liberal feminist movement’s exclusive focus on abortion rights, this body of work recognizes this potential dissonance (Engle, 2022). Feminist geographers have begun to demonstrate how reproductive justice can be incorporated into scholarship on abortion mobilities and how geography’s attention to the ‘more intricate and often “invisible” realities of gender, poverty, rurality, and immigration statuses, as well as the intersections among these is crucial’ (Statz and Pruitt, 2019: 1107).

Given the increase of ‘abortion deserts’ not only in the United States but also in other contexts in which right-wing and conservative politics have gained force (e.g. Poland), ‘the burden of distance’ (Statz and Pruitt, 2019: 1107) not only implies long travels, time away from work, and care duties and severe health issues, but may eventually result in being denied the right for abortion when travelling is impossible. Distance, as a key geographical concept, is thus not merely about the physical distance but about topological distance (Katz, 2001) dependent on public transport, availability of information, legal entitlement, border regimes, and affordability. As recent research on abortion im/mobilities shows, gender, race, and class shape women’s ability to travel for an abortion (Calkin, 2019; Freeman, 2017; Jackson, 2020; Murray and Khan, 2020; Side, 2016, 2020), abortion medication’s cross-border mobility offers a way out for those not being able to travel for an abortion (Calkin, 2021, 2023). In sum, reproductive and abortion im/mobilities result from the fact that access to dis/reproductive technologies has not only a different cost in different places, but that certain technologies and services are only legal in certain places.

This second body of research on the uneven and stratified access to reproductive health and dis/reproductive technologies speaks to key concerns of the reproductive justice movements that fight for access to different kinds of reproductive healthcare ranging from alternative birth spaces over abortion to culturally and race-sensitive quality reproductive healthcare. We argue that mapping the uneven spatially distribution of healthcare institutions is a first step towards reproductive justice as it renders the often invisibilized neglect of certain communities and regions by state authorities visible. The multiscalar approach of geographies of reproductive justice allows the analysis of reproductive injustices in relation to questions of, for example, social inequality, racism, dispossession, working conditions, or imprisonment. Such a multiscalar approach pushes reproductive geographies to expand the scope of actors and spaces studied beyond the more traditional actors and sites such as gynaecologists, midwives, or hospitals.

V Environmental geographies and reproductive in/justice

A growing strand of literature in geography connects debates on reproductive rights not only with social but also environmental justice. As outlined by the SisterSong Women of Colour Reproductive Justice Collective, reproductive justice also includes the right to parent children in safe and sustainable communities (Ross and Solinger, 2017). This right can be interfered by multiple forces, such as environmental racism, urban segregation, or unsafe places for families such as war spaces or refugee camps.

A fast-growing number of geographers stress on thinking reproductive and environmental justice together, since ‘environmental justice shares with reproductive justice the essential and broad ideological frame of social justice with a focus on the whole instead of the sole’ (Cook, 2007: 32). It is important to understand environment in a broad sense: ‘By expanding our conception of the environment to include the place where we live, toil, and work, we underscore that all environmental matters are reproductive’ (Gay-Antaki, 2023: 18). Thinking the two social justice frameworks together not only allows to see reproductive health concerns linked with toxic exposures or the planetary climate crisis but also illustrates other systemic issues of discrimination of marginalized communities (Sasser, 2023).

Cairns (2022), for example, analyses Black mothers’ struggles to secure clean water for their children in a highly lead-polluted neighbourhood in New Jersey, USA. She concludes that the slow violence of environmental harm demands especially from women increased social reproductive labour to cure and care children, partners, and parents whose health is affected by the environmental toxins. Morrell and Blackwell (2022) draw similar conclusions showing how urban racial segregation pushes Black women in the neighbourhoods that are most environmentally degraded in Milwaukee County, USA. Urban segregation is one example of how place matters in understanding reproductive in/justices. Who has the right and access to parent their children in green cities and neighbourhoods with clean water? And who does not? Where does environmental pollution manifest and who’s bodies and reproductive capacities are getting affected by it? Jokela-Pansini’s (2022) research in the environmentally hazardous region of Taranto, Italy, unveils the deleterious impact of toxic air pollution on women’s reproductive health. She reveals that mothers’ apprehensions concerning environmental pollution compound their overall anxieties about pregnancy, breastfeeding, and uncertainties surrounding their reproductive well-being (Jokela-Pansini, 2022; Jokela-Pansini and Militz, 2022).

Reproductive justice also plays a key role at the intersection of mobility and agricultural labour. Within this domain, the prevalence of reproductive health issues resulting from the exposure to pesticides and unfavourable working conditions has become an inherent part of the daily lived experiences of agricultural workers (Barbour and Guthman, 2018; Cohen and Caxaj, 2018; Galarneau, 2013; Komposch et al., 2024; Sabin et al., 2024). The arduous nature of this work, coupled with its low wages, often falls upon marginalized communities, including migrants, People of Colour, and indigenous populations (McCovey and Salter, 2009) – highlighting the profound interconnection between reproductive justice and environmental racism. Barbour and Guthman (2018) found evidence for reproductive health damages in California’s strawberry industry, where female migrant farmworkers reported severe harm, including miscarriages and birth defects. These women also experienced mental stress due to the ‘additional moral burden on women farmworkers who are made responsible for protecting future populations’ (Barbour and Guthman, 2018: 1). These examples serve as reminders that environmental justice and reproductive justice are inextricably linked not only to factors of race, gender, ethnicity, and class but also to the element of mobility.

As already discussed above, the dynamics of reproductive in/justice unfold across diverse scales, ranging from the global and national to the local and intimately embodied level. The value of a multiscalar approach in comprehending reproductive injustices is further exemplified when examining instances of climate injustices. For example, in their research, Rishworth and Dixon (2018) delve into the historical foundations of inequality, poverty, and the precarious environmental conditions engendered by food insecurity and fluctuating climates in North Ghana, which lead to alarming maternal and child health outcomes. Or a study by Komposch (2025b) illustrates how the worsening of droughts in Spain and Morocco, coupled with repressive migration regimes, are shaping changes in the mobility patterns of migrant agricultural workers, resulting in longer periods of family separation and thus challenging the right to raise children in safe conditions. While such climate-change-related ‘geoviolence’ (Komposch, 2025b) – referring to anthropogenic environmental harm – can be traced back to global actors within capitalist economic flows, its effects are manifested across the planet, often locally and intimately experienced through extreme weather conditions, and deeply embodied in the physical and emotional well-being of entire families. Thus, embracing a multiscalar perspective of the ‘planetary-intimate’ (Komposch, 2025a) proves useful in discerning the intricate web of reproductive injustices and their interconnectedness with climate and environmental factors.

Integrative geographies of reproductive justice thus bring together insights from both physical and human geographies, allowing for a deeper understanding of the connections between the planetary climate crisis, environmental degradations, and everyday reproductive challenges, such as reproductive health problems or emotional distress in families. Further long-term, multi-method research is needed to allow for a better understanding of the multiscalar shape of geographies of reproductive justice and thus facilitate the identification of potential actors and sites of change. Furthermore, we join other feminist scholars in calling for a broader understanding of reproduction that integrates socio-ecological relations as a central moment of more-than-human care relations and bio-/necropolitics (Bhattacharjee, 2018; Murphy, 2017). Murphy’s (2017: 141) concept of ‘distributed reproduction’ points to the importance of turning from questioning ‘how much and which bodies get to reproduce, to what distributions of life chances and what kinds of infrastructures get reproduced’. Investigating these kinds of queries and thereby incorporating a holistic understanding of reproduction into geographies of reproductive justice enables to address pressing planetary challenges, thereby contributing to what Lobo et al. (2024) call ‘planetary justice’.

VI Abolitionist geographies and the right to parent free of state violence

Abolitionist geographies have potentially much to contribute to a research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice, but this connection has not been much developed so far (Gilmore, 2023; for an overview see Hamlin, 2023). Abolitionism, like reproductive justice, is a political-theoretical framework which currently gains much attention in critical geography and social science more broadly. Abolitionist geographies focus on the spatial arrangements and the scalar entanglements between global racial capitalism, settler colonialism, racialized state violence, and the effects and execution of violent state ideologies and policies on lower institutional scales such as the federal state, the county, the city, or the prison administration (Loick and Thompson, 2023). In recent years, border regimes and other forms of institutional violence in the context of the ‘welfare state’ and social and health policies have also come into view (Laufenberg and Thompson, 2021; Walia, 2013).

At the centre of abolitionist geographies remains the analysis of the spatiality and scalarity of carceral violence and the prison-industrial complex (Hamlin, 2023). Highlighting the challenges of parenting in highly institutionalized and regulated prison spaces, carceral geographers address struggles at the heart of reproductive justice without, however, necessarily referencing the concept (e.g. Etter, 2022; Moran et al., 2017; Pallot and Piacentini, 2012; Schliehe, 2017, 2021). Smith et al. (2019: 145) reveal how ‘forced sterilization’s denial of reproductive rights, reproduced in foster care and incarceration alike, and in the carceralization of urban spaces […] destroy Black family life’. They discuss the effects of patriarchal white supremacy as dictating ‘who gets to have ancestors and who gets to have children’, asking ‘in what contexts are children considered innocent and requiring protection?’ (Smith et al., 2019: 145). Meanwhile, in Brazil, reproductive justice advocates debate how to ally with the mothers’ movements within peripheric neighbourhoods who protest against police violence and the murder of their children (Schultz, 2023). These examples illustrate how centring reproductive justice in abolitionist carceral geographies’ inquiries can contribute to understanding and ultimately challenging the ways in which prison spatialities and police violence impend social relations of parenting (Dottolo and Stewart, 2008; Loureiro, 2020; Ouassak, 2020; Smith, 2016).

Denying reproductive rights and breaking family ties in the context of migration and border regimes is another issue at the intersection of abolitionist geographies and reproductive justice (Coddington, 2021b; Hiemstra, 2021; Komposch et al., 2024; Torres, 2018; Torres et al., 2022, 2023). Gahman and Hjalmarson (2019) draw on Walia’s (2013) concept of ‘border imperialism’ and propose the spatial perspective of ‘deracination’ as socio-spatial processes of violent dispersing of inhabitants from a territory. A reproductive justice perspective links deracination with the violent tearing apart – emotionally and spatially – of communitarian interpersonal and interfamily ties in the context of migration and border regimes. Family fracturing has many faces, from the history of national borders being imposed on indigenous communities, dividing them and ascribing them to two different nationalities to the tearing apart of families through restrictive migration policies (Gahman and Hjalmarson, 2019; Smith et al., 2019). Eaves (2019: 1317) also refers to the persistence of gendered violence ‘justified and/or upheld by the state’ and highlights the zero-tolerance immigration policy in the United States since 2018. As part of a broad strategy of criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants, there has been a ‘traumatic process of family separation, where children are detained separately from their parents’ (Eaves, 2019: 1317). Komposch et al. (2024) and Pratt (2012) show how migrants are forced to leave their children behind within gendered temporal labour migration regimes.

Reproductive justice as a concept with abolitionist claims itself (Roberts, 2021) enables to broaden abolitionist geographies’ scope towards violence against intersectional reproductive bodies and oppression of parents denying them their right to parent a child at all or in good conditions. Both conceptual debates share the concern of how to analyse institutional and state violence in the context of struggles for access to public services and social policies. This basic abolitionist question provides the framework for the search for a political programme that is conceptualized as anti-reformist reforms (Loick and Thompson, 2023). Nash (2021), for example, works in her research on anti-Black obstetric violence through this challenge for both the abolitionist project and reproductive justice. She asks what a critical stance might look like that both advocates for access to respectful public care and simultaneously positions itself against the violence inscribed within it: ‘At once, reproductive justice advocates contend that Black mothers should have access to institutional medicine, even as they underscore that institutional medicine is the site of violence’ (Nash, 2021: 314). ¹

Altogether, work in geography enables an intersectional view of the multiscalar dimensions of repressive statehood and broadens thereby the scope of abolitionist research. At the same time, abolitionist approaches shed new light on reproductive justice’s claim to parent children in good social conditions and free from violence. Abolitionist geographies thus contribute to a reproductive justice research agenda in geography by urging to pay attention to how reproductive relations are shaped and governed by disciplinary or violent practices of state institutions. Struggles for access to public services in the field of reproductive health and social welfare need to constantly reflect on how public services can be claimed while avoiding state violence on marginalized parents and families through state institutions.

VII Taking the justice claim seriously: Towards a justice-based agenda in reproductive geographies

A research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice does not only turn around the themes outlined in the previous sections. The question of justice – as an important dimension of this intersectional feminist framework – needs to be at the centre of such a research agenda. Adopting a research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice hence means being committed to a concept of justice that is transformative and tackles structural power relations and intersectional inequalities (Boyer et al., 2023; Capeheart and Milovanovic, 2020). Such a justice-based agenda departs from the conviction that reproductive relations are framed by and are at the heart of intersectional feminist struggles – from the daily and invisible ones to those that are organized and loud. The global intimate spaces of reproduction are embedded in translocal power relations and must be understood as inherently political spaces. Researching about these power saturated spaces and in collaboration with feminist intersectional social movements means that researchers cannot stay neutral and objective but that their research is inherently political. Geographers working within a reproductive justice agenda should be committed to advancing the transformative politics of these movements. Geographies of reproductive justice, hence, are challenged to position themselves in their research vis-à-vis the transformative, collective, anti-racist, decolonial, antipatriarchal, anticapitalist, and/or communitarian utopian visions embedded in the framework of reproductive justice. This implies for geographers to go beyond the interpretation and presentation of research results and to question and rethink the research process itself, making it more inclusive, democratic, transparent, and accessible to the (marginalized) communities affected by the questions researched.

We follow Hopkin’s (2020: 383) call in his progress paper for a social geography that is committed to social justice and that ‘should be explicitly political in advocating for it’. Questions of social and reproductive justice are underpinned by questions of spatial justice and are inherently ‘a struggle over geography’ (Soja, 2010: 2), as the sections above about the spatial uneven development of anti- and pronatalist policies and uneven access to reproductive healthcare outline. Thus, geographers have a role to play not only in researching these spatial (reproductive) injustices but also in contributing with their research to spatial (reproductive) justice. As Hopkins (2020: 382) argues, ‘social geographers have particular strengths in exploring lived experiences of those suffering due to social inequalities, including offering critiques of problematic government policies or welfare regimes’. Reproductive justice as a specific form of social justice needs careful attention by geographers to understand how it might play out for particular groups and how these groups envision reproductive justice for themselves in their communities.

Our agenda for geographies of reproductive justice needs to be understood as a call for action in these downright frightening times, when reproductive injustices result from multiple crises: from the climate crisis that destroys livelihoods and forces migration, to the welfare crisis with its cuts in social policies and health infrastructures, to the political crisis characterized by increasing attacks of the global (far-)right on basic reproductive rights and the diversity of sexual and family life. All these crises severely affect the intimate experiences of people, especially marginalized social groups. The consequences of politicians and parties that are elected often transcend national boundaries, as evidenced, for instance, by the substantial reduction in global spending on reproductive health under Trump (see, e.g. Tamang et al., 2020).

Geographers committed to this research agenda can promote reproductive justice not only in (1) research but also through (2) teaching, (3) in their academic institutions, and (4) in actively engaging in public discourse.

(1) Research: Beyond researching the topics outlined above, geographers committed to a justice-based approach can support reproductive justice movements’ intervention in protest campaigns as well as participatory planning processes or collaborate with them to formulate political and institutional demands, for instance, to improve their rights to parent also in those spaces that are deemed to rather impend parenting. They can support abolitionist interventions to rethink with the affected groups how more women* and family-friendly maternity wards, birth houses, or family wards in prison should look like in the sense of non-reformist reforms that are able to challenge existing power structures (see Loick/Thompson 2023). Geographers can work hand in hand with social movements deploying their participatory, (counter-)cartographic, or creative methods to support political struggles, for example, against the closure or privatization of healthcare institutions or against repressive practices within public healthcare. In so doing, they can endorse calls of the reproductive justice movement to make visible and value – also economically – collective care and community structures. Finally, geographic justice-based research can contribute to building transnational feminist solidarities across borders of race, class, and nation by mapping and visualizing stratified and uneven access to reproductive healthcare and reproductive im/mobilities.

VIII Towards geographies of reproductive justice

This paper calls for a reproductive justice research agenda in geography to address current global challenges and advance geography’s conceptual thinking and research practice with reference to reproductive relations and justice. For long, geography has tended to sideline questions of reproduction. Over the last decade(s), the fields of feminist geographies, intimate geopolitics, and reproductive geographies have started to engage with reproductive relations. However, the reproductive justice framework of the Black feminist movement has only recently been taken up. Our tour d’horizon of the state of the literature in Anglophone human geography shows that many of the debates that address issues of reproductive justice have traditionally been relegated to various subfields such as population geographies, geopolitics, health geographies, feminist geographies, environmental geographies, abolitionist geographies, and geographies of migration. Reviewing the already existing and potential connections between these fields and the concept of reproductive justice, this paper develops a research agenda for geographies of reproductive justice. We argue that such a research agenda can serve as a broader umbrella to connect and bridge these diverse debates. It further allows us to challenge and overcome the Malthusian thinking embedded in the genealogy of the discipline by questioning a separate quantitative entity (and research object) called ‘population’.

By expanding the perspective on reproductive relations, the reproductive justice framework also transcends (feminist) geography’s research on reproduction by shifting and expanding research questions and economies of attention to other spaces and structural relations where ‘reproduction’ takes place. First, it shifts from a primary focus on gender towards an intersectional lens to map unequal access to reproductive healthcare infrastructures and services by considering the lived realities along lines of gender but also sexuality, race, class, citizenship, residency status, rural/urban, im/mobility, dis/ability, etc. Beyond such an intersectional perspective on reproductive health, geographies of reproductive justice also focus on how certain spaces, such as social housing projects, community centres, maternity wards, foster care, prisons, or refugee camps, impend or enable social and reproductive relations like parenting for certain groups.

Second, it expands current work in reproductive geographies on how place, im/mobility, and distance matter in understanding reproductive in/justices. Attention to how one’s place or residence, one’s resources to be mobile, and the distances to access reproductive healthcare infrastructure but also to a green, clean, safe, and healthy environment in which to raise one’s children is crucial to meeting the demands of the reproductive justice movement. Employing a research agenda for reproductive justice in geography can enhance these concepts by analysing how contemporary migration and border regimes violate reproductive rights and fracture families. Its transnational scope can further help to reflect reproductive injustices in the uneven and hierarchical global fertility industry.

Third, it builds on and expands feminist geographies of scale (e.g. Perler and Schurr, 2021; Pratt and Rosner, 2006) by shedding light on how the intimate experiences of conception, contraception, abortion, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, and parenting are always enmeshed in broader political, cultural, economic, and ecological structures. A multiscalar analysis that attends to the entanglements of scale proves essential to grasp how planetary geophysical changes or global and national anti- and pronatalist agendas affect intimate experiences. Geographers’ work on scale jumping in the context of social movements (e.g. Andolina et al., 2005; Nicholls, 2007) allows for the simultaneous development of resistance and emancipation for reproductive justice.

Finally, addressing reproductive justice means necessarily addressing and confronting today’s bio-/necropolitics and considering how reproductive, body, and population politics are inextricably linked when it comes to issues of reproductive justice. The planetary future is increasingly under threat. The future of life itself is contested through climate, financial, political, and social crises resulting from the ‘white (m)Anthropocene’ (Di Chiro, 2017), the (post)colonial ‘plantationocene’ (Wolford, 2021), respectively, and the ‘racial capitalocene’ (Saldanha, 2020). A ‘Malthusian reflex’ (Schultz, 2021) has re-emerged in the climate change debate, which uses the strategy of demographization – claiming that the climate crisis can be addressed by reducing birth rates and controlling demographic growth (Ojeda et al., 2020; Sasser, 2014, 2018). This ‘Malthusian reflex’ can be observed in diverse political milieus from a technocratic mainstream to right-wing nationalist positions to some feminist and climate activist calls for a birth strike (Schultz, 2022). These strategies are incompatible with emancipatory feminist and decolonial projects of social transformation that are committed to fighting global power relations, capitalist exploitation, and social inequality rather than the fertility rates of some dispossessed and marginalized social groups. Geographies of reproductive justice have much to offer to understand the uneven effects of climate change and intersecting crises on marginalized communities. Moreover, the intersectional feminist movement approach of reproductive justice helps to formulate critiques against neo-Malthusian agendas and the associated fascist politics with their basic narratives of innate human inequality. Drawing on the reproductive justice framework – which builds on a long history of anti-Malthusian feminist, anti-racist, anti-eugenic and anti-fascist struggles – enables researchers and activists alike to ground intersectional reproductive politics in these histories. By centring on justice, geographers who work with the framework of reproductive justice are able to address the ‘slow and fast violence’ (Christian and Dowler, 2019) towards marginalized social groups by connecting bio- and necropolitical debates and questioning the uneven geographies that determine ‘whose lives count’ (Butler, 2004, 2009) or whose are considered ‘disposable’ (Pratt et al., 2017; Wright, 2006; Yates, 2011) in the current world order. Geographies of reproductive justice thus build on the principle that all lives matter equally rather than valuing some future lives over others. Bringing geographies of reproductive justice into our research, teaching, academic institutions, and public discourses can foster efforts to build and sustain a just socio-ecological environment for all.