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Birth, Breastfeeding, and Ballots: Expanding the History and Concept of Reproductive Rights
by Flora Stone Mather Center for Women
Back to The Essentials of Reproductive Justice: Access, Autonomy, and Action
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Three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Griswold v. CT in 1965 ensuring married people the right to use contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird in 1972 ensuring single people the right to use contraception, and Roe v. Wade in 1973 ensuring women the right to terminate a pregnancy before viability—were boons to women's reproductive rights. Reproductive rights, however, include not only a woman's right to abortion and contraception, but also the right to make fully informed, autonomous decisions about pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation. This talk will discuss the recent history of birth and breastfeeding practices and explain how focusing the meaning of "reproductive rights" on contraception and abortion not only endangered a woman's right to abortion but also, ironically, limited women's reproductive choices in other areas. Even as the concept of "choice" became synonymous with a woman's right to decide to become pregnant or not, and terminate a pregnancy or not, women's voices and choices in the birth and breastfeeding arenas have been constricted, to the detriment of women's and children's health.