Holy Angels School Building, photo by author.
Mallory Davies
This is the seventh entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.
Coined by activist American women of colour in the 1990s, reproductive justice is an activist framework that provides an intersectional understanding of reproductive autonomy. Reproductive justice invokes the “sexual autonomy and gender freedom for every human being,” among the right to reproductive decision making.[1] Despite advancements, the last few years have witnessed a reduction in reproductive rights protections in the United States and Canada. In the United States, the overturning of Roe v Wade has led to a host of changes to medical care, often with the result that individuals are denied their reproductive rights.
In Canada, these conversations are being broached in the realm of education with the Alberta premier proposing anti-trans policies aimed at the sex education curriculum and switching to an opt-in approach for sex education, as was recently discussed in a blog post on this site by Karissa Patton and Nancy Janovicek. These contemporary conversations propose to limit reproductive decision-making for citizens and curtail the kinds of education available to students. Now more than ever, we need reproductive justice as a framework to be incorporated into the education system. To understand how early efforts of reproductive justice were incorporated into educational systems, I focus on some very early findings from my study on the history of education for teen mothers in Calgary, Alberta.
