Recommitting to Reproduction: Shifting Care Ethics Towards Reproductive Justice

While pregnancy, motherhood and the lived experience of femininity were the starting point of care ethics, the topic of reproduction has almost disappeared from ethics of care scholarship in recent years. With the changing political climate, with the rise of right-wing political parties around the globe, the early feminist issues around care and reproductive rights require renewed attention. Questions of pregnancy and abortion, of sterilization and contraception, of the distribution of childcare, as well as the domination of heteronormative and patriarchal family structures, are in need of moral and political answers and revitalized resistance. This volume puts the question of sexual and social reproduction again front and center in the field of care ethics. The focus lies on the Black feminist concept of Reproductive Justice. While justice is the aim of any ethics, reproductive justice has always met with innumerable difficulties and faces new challenges today. This volume therefore argues that reproductive justice deserves to be in the spotlight of care ethics.

This volume is part I of a two-volume project on Care Ethics, Birthing and Mothering. Volume 17, edited by Amrita Banerjee and Priya Sharma, is the second volume of that project, which focuses on the critical interface between technology, mothering and care ethics.