Disability Justice as Reproductive Liberty: A Historical Examination of the “Pro-Life” and “Pro-Choice” Scapegoating of Fetal Disability

Abstract

This article explores and addresses a quandary that lies at the intersection of disability rights and reproductive rights, and that has only grown more exaggerated after the Dobbs decision in June 2022. The anti-abortion movement exploits this quandary by weaponizing disability rights rhetoric in service of their anti-abortion agenda. For instance, the National Right to Life Committee claims that disability-selective abortion is “the height of prejudice,” and other advocates assert that pregnancy termination based on a prenatal diagnosis epitomizes ableism. Such rhetoric not only scapegoats fetal disability, but also co-opts complex histories of reproductive oppression. The anti-abortion movement’s neoliberal version of anti-ableism is in fact a calculated rhetorical technique that contributes to their broader political project of reproductive control. Their appropriated rhetoric obscures ongoing histories of ableist, racist, and classist reproductive violence in the United States.

Meanwhile, the abortion rights movement has capitulated to widespread stigma, and resorts to ableist narratives in order to underline the importance of legal abortion. This article contextualizes the historical background of eugenic projects in the United States, drawing from scholars who have detailed these reproductive injustices and their entanglement with perceptions of risk, morality, and responsibility. This article’s central intervention is its direct confrontation with hypocritical anti-abortion rhetoric and with deep-rooted traditions of eugenics and ableism. I argue that the abortion rights movement should center a definition of reproductive liberty that renounces the concept of disability as somehow “grievable” and that more comprehensively integrates disability justice into the reproductive justice framework.