During the summer of 2024, Republican vice presidential nominee Senator JD Vance’s criticized Democrats as being led by “childless cat ladies” a supposed insult towards those who have chosen not to have children. In response, crowds of women donned t-shirts and took to social media to share their pain of infertility reiterating that they were not anti-family. Narratives from those who were purposedly childless have been missing from this political theatre but are essential voices in the pro-family debates. Similarly, after the 2021 Congress failed to vote on the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act which would have included investments in community-based care for Black mothers, improved maternal health data collection, increased access to mental healthcare for postpartum mothers, as well as COVID-19 vaccination and data collection about COVID impacts on pregnancy, there was also a lack of attention given to Black mothers who were seeking policies that would address health disparities and implicit biases in healthcare.
This paper aims to give attention to these information and policy voids by examining reproductive justice and faith using a liberatory lens that takes seriously the embodied experiences of Black women acknowledging that historically as the Combahee River Collective noted the only “people who care enough about us to work consistently to work for our liberation are us” (Combahee, 18). Coming from this vantage point of creating an environment where Black women are trusted to make decisions for their own bodies, this possibility greatly increases the likelihood where this freedom is available to all—cis/trans; religious/non-religious, persons in every income bracket; of any citizenship status, of any age, etc.
Reproductive justice is a contemporary resistance to reproductive oppression and this paper privileges two perspectives of reproductive justice 1) the right to have a child under the conditions of one’s choosing and 2) the right to not have a child using birth control, abortion, or abstinence. The proposed paper “Free to be Me: Black Childfree Women’s Experiences Negotiating Pronatal Healthcare Policies” highlights the experiences of Black women who are childfree by choice (not because of infertility issues). Through autoethnography and qualitative focus groups, I aim to make visible and theorize the experiences of Black women of faith who are childfree by choice. 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.
Utilizing Black queer feminist ethicist Nikki Young’s concept of subversive and generative moral imagination and queer imagination and womanist ethicist Wylin Wilson’s womanist bioethics that prioritizes engaging policies by how they would impact vulnerable Black women, I will discuss themes of reproductive justice expressed by a dozen interviews with Black Christian childfree women. This paper illuminates the moral harms caused by the fall of Roe potentially saddling Black women who desire to be childfree with unwanted pregnancies. Part of the brilliance of reproductive justice is that it does not mandate Black motherhood and its embrace of the conditions and desires of parenting is an important missing component in contemporary debates about restricting abortion access. Theorizing from this perspective and from the qualitative research conducted with Black Christian women who have elected to remain childfree results in a moral case for trusting Black women’s autonomy.
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.