Free to be Me: Black Childfree Women's Experiences Negotiating Prenatal Healthcare Policies"

Narratives experiences of persons who are purposedly childless have been missing from political and public pronatalist debates. This paper examines reproductive justice and faith by encouraging a liberatory lens that takes seriously the embodied experiences of childfree Black women. Through autoethnography, qualitative focus groups, and the theorizing of ethicists Nikki Young and Wylin Wilson, this paper illuminates the moral harms caused by the repeal of Roe potentially saddling Black women who desire to be childfree with unwanted pregnancies. Rejecting pronatalist arguments as limited constructs of family, my paper investigates how Black women make themselves over as participants in new familial structures that are not contingent upon reproduction, biology, and religious rhetoric. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the role of religion in supporting these Black women’s experience of reproductive freedom and suggests that this reproductive agency has ethical and political ramifications.