Reproductive Justice

Zakiya Luna and Kristin Luker’s review article provides a law and society entry point into reproductive justice. It traces how the framework emerged from women of color movements and changed scholarly questions about reproductive rights, reproductive health, legal strategy, and state power.

Its contribution is to place reproductive justice beyond rights and health as a third framework. Rights frameworks emphasize legal protection, and health frameworks emphasize access to services. Justice frameworks ask why some groups still cannot safely have children, not have children, or raise children even when formal rights exist. This requires research to address intersectionality, poverty, race, immigration status, incarceration, welfare policy, and medical systems.

For FemRes, this article works well as a classroom or research gateway. It is not a first-person account from a movement leader like Ross’s article, and it is less focused on organizing process than Luna’s 2009 article. Its value is mapping reproductive justice within broader legal, social science, and feminist research.