Organizing for Rights: Reproductive Justice in Praxis

Throughout this session, Nana Abuelsoud situated reproductive justice within a long history of transnational feminist organizing, population control policies, capitalist development, and modern eugenic logics. Rather than treating reproductive justice as a narrow question focused solely on abortion, contraception, or individual choices, Nana traced how the meaning of “choice” is shaped by the political economy of who is allowed to make a family, who is pressured not to reproduce, and what material conditions make reproductive decisions possible or impossible.

She began the session with a historical timeline of population politics, starting with the 1927 World Population Conference in Geneva and the figure of Margaret Sanger. Nana used Sanger’s image as an entry point into the uneasy entanglement between reproductive rights and eugenics. Rather than being driven by feminist politics, Sanger’s support for contraception was tied to a belief that the “unfit” should be discouraged from reproducing, exposing how birth control could be rationalized through ableist and racialized ideas of social improvement. This history was placed alongside the legacies of Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, and later the WTO, showing how population, development, trade, debt, and reproductive life were never separate fields.

Nana showed how international policy spaces repeatedly framed overpopulation in the Global South as a blockage to development and even as a national security threat. At the same time, feminist organizers used these spaces strategically. The 1994 Cairo conference marked a shift from population control discourses toward people-centered reproductive rights, while the reproductive justice framework challenged the narrow pro-choice focus on abortion and contraception.

A central distinction in the session was between sexual and reproductive health and rights and reproductive justice. SRHR names the availability of services and the norms and rights attached to sexual and reproductive well-being. Reproductive justice, however, insists on a wider frame: the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise children in safe environments. Nana emphasized that this framework emerged from structural racism, incarceration, sterilization, and the erasure of Black women’s struggles by liberal white feminists, while also insisting that Global South feminists have long organized around reproductive rights through social justice frameworks.

The session’s political force came from Nana’s critique of how reproductive justice has been emptied out by donors, INGOs, and liberal feminist vocabularies, becoming “SRHR plus diversity” rather than a framework connected to fascism, colonization, international aid, authoritarianism, militarization, hyper-policing, and capitalism. For Nana, the IMF is central to this story. Structural adjustment programs, austerity, privatization, debt repayment, and cuts to health, education, subsidies, and social protection produce what she called a forced reproductive choice. People are not sterilized or openly coerced, but the material conditions of life make having children, not having children, or raising children safely increasingly impossible.

Through examples from Tunisia, Argentina, Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt, Nana showed how IMF conditionalities deepen unemployment, unpaid care work, regional inequality, health worker migration, chronic underfunding, and the demonization of the poor. In Egypt, this appears through nationalist campaigns that blame poor people for having too many children, while the state rolls back subsidies and disciplines access to public employment. Population policies re-emerge either as pronatalism or antinatalism, but in both cases they contest the core pillars of reproductive justice by allowing states and markets to decide which populations should grow and which should shrink.

Nana defined modern eugenics as a pseudoscience that rationalizes interference in people’s reproductive decisions according to traits and qualities deemed desirable by capitalist, ableist, imperialist, and supremacist systems. Desirability shifts across contexts, but it can be organized through race, class, citizenship, disability, religion, gender expression, migration status, caste, poverty, mental health, and sexuality. This is visible in European anxieties over aging populations alongside anti-migrant family reunification policies, billionaire fantasies of “designer babies”, and repro hubs that package IVF, sex selection, and surrogacy as medical tourism.

The session closed by insisting that reproductive justice is not possible under capitalism. To make it real requires transnational feminist organizing grounded in Global South realities, and a politics that is anti-capitalist, anti-militarization, anti-authoritarian, and attentive to migrants, incarcerated people, and all those rendered undesirable by the systems that organize life and death.