Bodily Autonomy in an Age of Reproductive Control
Written by Daphne Toglia
Content Note: This article discusses abortion, reproductive rights, forced sterilization, maternal mortality, and reproductive coercion in both human and nonhuman contexts.
This essay proceeds in three steps. First, it examines the current reproductive landscape in the United States after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), situating abortion restrictions within a longer history of reproductive governance shaped by race, class, and citizenship. Second, it explores how reproductive justice intersects with other systems of bodily control, including immigration enforcement and public health policy. Finally, the essay broadens the lens to consider how reproductive management operates beyond the human sphere, examining the systematic regulation of nonhuman animal reproduction in industrial agriculture and population control programs. While the experiences of humans and nonhuman animals are not morally identical, placing them in conversation reveals how reproduction becomes a central site through which modern societies manage bodies, populations, and economic systems.
In his most recent address to Congress, President Trump declared, “This is the golden age of America.” (Times, 2026). The phrase implies restoration — a return to order, strength, and moral clarity. There are, of course, many urgent issues shaping the current state of the United States: immigration policy, racialized policing, economic precarity, climate instability, healthcare access, and democratic integrity, to name only a few. This essay does not attempt to resolve them all. Instead, it focuses on one foundational dimension of political life that cuts across these domains: bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. On that front, the claim of national restoration warrants scrutiny.
Nearly three years after Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was overturned by Dobbs, reproductive rights in the United States remain deeply fractured. The fall of Roe did not simply shift abortion regulation to the states; it fundamentally altered the relationship between individuals and the state in matters of bodily decision-making. For the first time in nearly half a century, constitutional protection for abortion disappeared, allowing extensive state intervention in reproductive life.
If we are to measure national progress in any meaningful way, we need more than political rhetoric. We need a framework that centers power, inequality, and bodily autonomy. Reproductive justice—developed by Black feminist organizers—is one such framework. Rather than focusing narrowly on abortion access, reproductive justice insists on three interconnected rights: the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities. Scholars such as Loretta Ross and Dorothy Roberts have demonstrated that reproductive regulation in the United States has always been unevenly distributed, due to factors like race, class, disability, and citizenship (D. Roberts, 2014a; D. E. Roberts, 2019, 2019; Ross, 2017). From forced sterilizations to welfare surveillance to the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, reproductive governance has long functioned as a tool of social control.
This framework also illustrates how bodily autonomy intersects with immigration enforcement. The right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities is hollow when families are separated through detention and deportation. Immigration enforcement agencies such as ICE operate through direct control over bodily movement: detention, surveillance, confinement, and removal. Pregnant people in immigration detention have reported inadequate prenatal care, pregnancy loss, and coercive medical practices (Pregnant and Postpartum Women Face Neglect and Abuse in ICE Detention | American Civil Liberties Union, 2025; Venables, 2026). Historically, there have also been documented allegations of coerced sterilizations in detention facilities (Ghandakly & Fabi, 2021; Pregnant and Postpartum Women Face Neglect and Abuse in ICE Detention | American Civil Liberties Union, 2025). While immigration policy is often debated in terms of border security or national sovereignty, it is also a reproductive justice issue. The power to detain or deport is the power to disrupt families, to determine where children are raised, and to expose pregnant bodies to preventable harm. Bodily autonomy is not limited to decisions about abortion; it includes the basic freedom to remain with one’s family and to carry a pregnancy safely without state-imposed harm.
The overturning of Roe sits within that longer history. It signals not simply a moral disagreement over abortion, but a renewed willingness of the state to regulate reproductive bodies. As Roberts argues in Killing the Black Body (D. Roberts, 2014), control over reproduction has historically been central to racial hierarchy. The legal landscape after Dobbs does not invent reproductive control—it intensifies and redistributes it.
Yet reproductive control is not limited to human populations. A growing body of scholarship asks us to examine how systems of reproductive governance extend beyond our species. Denisa Krásná’s recent work on reproductive violence highlights how neoliberal systems commodify both minoritized human bodies and nonhuman animal bodies, rendering reproduction a site of extraction (Krásná, 2022). Paulina Siemienieć, writing in the Journal of Animal Ethics (Siemieniec, 2025), argues that domesticated animals are subject to systematic reproductive manipulation—forced insemination, genetic standardization, confinement—without any recognition of bodily integrity.
Meanwhile, sociologist Katja Guenther (2024) calls for feminist and queer theory to better incorporate animals into analyses of power and embodiment (Guenther, 2024). Her argument is not that human and animal experiences are identical. Rather, she suggests that the same logics—commodification, objectification, productivity, managed fertility—shape how bodies are governed across species lines.
At this point, an important distinction is necessary. My argument about bodily autonomy in the human context rests on the recognition of persons as rights-bearing subjects entitled to self-determination. That commitment does not straightforwardly translate into opposition to all reproductive intervention involving animals. Practices such as spaying and neutering dogs and cats or using contraceptive programs to manage rat populations occur within ecological conditions humans have created. Overpopulation, abandonment, and urban habitat disruption are not “natural” phenomena but consequences of human systems. In these contexts, reproductive intervention can reduce suffering and prevent more violent forms of control.
The ethical frameworks therefore differ. Expanding access to contraception for humans is typically framed as assistance because it increases individuals’ ability to determine whether and when to have children. By contrast, reproductive interventions involving nonhuman animals—whether through sterilization programs for companion animals or selective breeding in agriculture—are not matters of individual choice. They are decisions imposed by humans in order to manage populations, optimize productivity, or mitigate harms produced by human systems. Human reproductive justice concerns coercive control over rights-bearing persons; animal reproductive interventions operate within a damaged world where humans already govern the reproductive lives of other species. The two contexts are related but not morally identical.
This multispecies perspective sharpens rather than dilutes reproductive justice. It draws attention to a common thread: the normalization of reproductive management in the service of economic and political order. When the state expands its authority over abortion, it participates in population management. When industries optimize animal breeding for maximum yield, they do the same.
The difference, of course, lies in moral and legal status. Humans possess recognized rights; animals largely do not. But the structural logic—that certain bodies exist primarily for reproduction and use—remains strikingly consistent.
Reproductive justice challenges that logic. It asks whether autonomy is conditional or fundamental. It insists that dignity is not granted by productivity, compliance, or utility.
In the aftermath of Dobbs, autonomy has become geographically contingent. In some states, access to abortion and reproductive healthcare remains robust; in others, it is severely restricted (Dench et al., 2024). Maternal mortality rates — already disproportionately high for Black women—remain a pressing crisis (Black/African American Women’s Woes: Women’s Perspectives of Black/African American Maternal Mortality in the USA | Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities | Springer Nature Link, 2024.; Post et al., 2025). Scholars and public health experts have repeatedly shown that structural inequities in housing, environmental exposure, healthcare access, and income stability shape reproductive outcomes.
To declare that we are “in the golden age of America” without confronting these realities risks mistaking political victory (for a segment of the population) for justice.
At the same time, our economic systems continue to depend on intensive reproductive control of animals—from selective breeding practices to confinement systems designed around gestation and lactation cycles. If bodily autonomy is a principle we defend because coercion is wrong and integrity matters, it becomes harder to ignore how selectively we apply that principle.
This does not require collapsing distinctions between human and animal experience. It does require consistency. If reproductive justice is rooted in opposition to forced reproduction, commodification, and disposability, then its ethical horizon may be wider than traditional legal discourse suggests.
The question, then, is not whether a particular administration has restored order. It is whether our policies—across healthcare, environmental regulation, agriculture, and social welfare—move us toward a society that respects bodily integrity as a foundational value.
The fall of Roe marked a turning point. Whether that turn leads toward deeper control or renewed commitments to autonomy remains unresolved.
What would it mean to measure national progress not by economic growth or rhetorical declarations, but by the degree to which individual humans—and perhaps even other sentient beings—are free from reproductive coercion?
If bodily autonomy is not universal, it is conditional. And conditional autonomy is fragile.
The track we are on is not predetermined. The question is whether we are willing to redefine where it leads.
Literature Cited
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