Events

Abstract: Reproductive Justice (RJ) is a theoretical framework developed by African-American activists and scholars in the 1990s, inviting us to broaden our understanding of reproductive rights beyond the right to not have a child, to also include the right to have a child and the right to parent in safe and healthy environments. However, it hasn’t yet had much impact on quantitative sociology and demography, despite its obvious relevance to inequalities in childbearing and parenting resources. In this seminar, I provide an overview, across three recent papers, of how we might usefully draw on RJ theory to quantitatively explore how social policy entitlements might inequitably restrict people’s rights to parent in safe and healthy environments, and their right to have a child.

In the first paper, we develop an index to measure the extent to which parental leave and child benefit policies meet Reproductive Justice principles, across 27 European countries.

In the second paper, I explore the consequence of restrictive family reunification policies for self-rated health among migrant parents and migrant non-parents, across 21 European countries between 2002 and 2018. I find that more restrictive family reunification policies are associated with better self-rated health for migrant parents specifically (but not other groups), indicating a strong selection effect - not only into migration, but into migrant parenthood.

In the third paper, we estimate the effect of major cuts in local government spending in England between 2010 and 2019, on women’s probability of giving birth by class and race. We find a significant, negative effect among the poorest third of the sample, and shocking inequalities in the scale of funding cuts by race.

Throughout, I will draw out how RJ’s framework invites us to ask new questions, set up different comparisons or models, and draw radical conclusions.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Jasmin Abdel Ghany and Nontokozo Langwenya. For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.