Reproductive Justice as Public Health

This course studies the development and historical perspectives of what constitutes public health in the United States and its development through the racialization and gendering of Latina/os communities. Particularly, it traces the foundations of medicine and reproductive health in the United States as methods for population management, border control, and ultimately white supremacy. Moreover, this course will explore how the tenets of reproductive justice enable us to build our understandings of abolition, public health, reproductive justice, and economic justice.

This course is an overview on how women of color activists have been central to thinking about reproductive and health justice. Most important, it draws on contemporary abolitionist feminist theory to explore how a just and equitable approach to health and safety aligns with, and relies on, an abolitionist praxis across institutions.