ABSTRACT
This chapter formulates the theoretical framework for the book Birth Justice: From Obstetric Violence to Abolitionist Care. I highlight four themes that correspond to five theoretical, and sometimes practical, fields. First, “reproductive justice,” and Black feminism. Second, “relationality,” and midwifery. Third, “reimagining reproduction,” and feminist theory. And fourth, “abolitionist care,” and the field of care ethics and abolitionist theory and activism. Consequently, a differentiation between two forms of justice in reproduction comes to the fore: a hegemonic, conservative conception of justice in reproduction that leads to the policing and controlling of reproduction by the dissolution of relationality, and a liberatory conception of reproductive justice that facilitates reproductive autonomy, through the healing of relationality through what I term “abolitionist care.”
