Carolin
Schurr

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Carolin Schurr is professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. She is the principal investigator of the SNSF project "Reproductive Geopolitics" project. MORE

Laura
Perler

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Laura Perler is a postdoctoral researcher in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. In her research she investigates inequalities in relation to reproductive technologies and the Swiss asylum system.  MORE

Nora
Komposch

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Nora Komposch is a PhD student and assistant in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. She researches about migrant workers in Spain's strawberry industry. MORE

Mirko
Winkel

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Mirko Winkel is the coordinator of the mLAB. The artist and curator teaches at the University of Bern and other places with the aim of synthesizing art with scientific research and socio-political concerns.

Yolinliztli
Pérez-Hernández

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Yolinliztli Pérez-Hernández is a PostDoc in Social and Cultural Geography. She researches the experiences of sterilization (tubal ligation and hysterectomy) of low-income, rural, peasant, and indigenous Mexican women as part of national family planning and global birth control policies in developing countries. MORE  

Milena
Wegelin

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Milena Wegelin is a social anthropologist and research associate at the Department of Perinatal and Maternal Health of the Bern University of Applied Sciences. Sie is collaborating with Laura Perler in her subproject “Governing and Contesting In/fertility within the Swiss Asylum Context”

Susanne
Schultz

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Susanne Schultz is lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the Goethe University Frankfurt a.M. She is a visiting researcher who collaborates with the team of the project „Reproductive Geopolitics“ with a SNSF Scientific Exchange Grant in 2023. MORE

Veronika
Siegl

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Veronika Siegl, holding a PostDoctoral position in Social and Cultural Geography, is a social anthropologist and gender researcher. Her research focuses on ethics, inequality and self-determination in the context of reproductive medicine.   MORE

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Carolin Schurr
2020
Paper
biopolitics
mobilities
Elisabeth Militz
global intimate
intersectionality
reproductive rights

Reproductive Rights

Carolin Schurr and Elisabeth Militz

 

 

Abstract

Reproductive rights are about the legal right to contraception, abortion, fertility treatment, reproductive health, and access to information about one’s reproductive body. Reproductive rights secure people’s freedom to decide about their body’s capacities to (not) reproduce. Departing from a feminist understanding of the reproductive body as the most intimate site for/of political struggle, reproductive geographies have emerged as a relatively new field within human geography. Reproduction used to be a traditional topic of a quantitative population geography. More recent geographic work on reproduction, however, is inspired by feminist, Black, postcolonial, and critical theories to address the uneven geographies of access to spaces of reproductive health and justice. Research in the field of reproductive geography increasingly employs an intersectional perspective investigating how questions of reproductive rights intersect with environmental, racial, sexual, and gender justice. While research on intimate geopolitics looks at how reproductive freedom and autonomy are embedded in wider geopolitical, geoeconomic, and biopolitical power relations, reproductive geographies study the spaces, mobilities, and practices of fertility, pregnancy, and birth.

 

Full Text

Schurr, Carolin; Militz, Elisabeth (2020). Reproductive rights. In: Kobayashi, Audrey (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (pp. 435-442). Elsevier doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10234-3