In early December, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in what may prove to be one of the most significant migration cases of our lifetime: a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks, and a corresponding legal maneuver to overturn Roe v. Wade that would, if successful, trigger sweeping abortion bans throughout much of the United States.
It may seem strange to describe the case this way. Roe v. Wade helps to protect safe and legal access to abortion, making this an abortion and reproductive justice issue. What commentators, analysts, and many ethicists regularly fail to grasp, however, is that abortion and reproductive healthcare are also straightforward immigration concerns.
Long before conservative members of the Supreme Court were comfortably positioned to overturn Roe, a process that I have elsewhere called abortion migration was extremely prevalent, both in the U.S. and on a global scale. Abortion migration occurs when pregnant people travel long distances, and even cross internal and national borders and barriers en route to abortion care. Here are some chilling facts: in 2014—in a nation protected by Roe—approximately 90% of U.S. counties did not have an abortion clinic, according to the Guttmacher Institute. As reported in 2017, 45 percent of reproductively aged women (and people with gestational capacity) lived in the approximately 125 countries in which abortion is illegal with almost no exceptions.
What does all this have to do with migration? When abortion is made illegal, and otherwise stigmatized, pregnant people who need to end their pregnancies cross internal and sometimes even national borders, travel long distances, borrow money and/or dip into dwindling savings, and sometimes put themselves in grave danger to migrate for abortion care. For example: when HB2 was passed in the state of Texas in 2013, thereby closing approximately half of the abortion facilities in that state, researchers noted a 747 percent proportional increase of Texans seeking abortion care in neighboring New Mexico, which has relatively liberal abortion laws that make it a destination for abortion migrants across the globe.
Of course, abortion isn’t the only migration-and-reproductive justice issue with which we should be concerned. As Loretta J. Ross has argued, the framework of “reproductive justice,” which was originally developed by 1994 by twelve Black women working in the realms of reproductive health and reproductive rights, “has eclipsed the binaried and under-theorized pro-choice/pro-life frameworks among both women of color and predominantly white organizations.” The reproductive justice framework deliberately transcends pro-choice politics and foregrounds the complex reproductive health challenges faced by women of color, poor and working-class women, and others of gestational capacity who face multiple, intersecting forms of oppression in their efforts to access to reproductive healthcare.
Understanding migration for reproductive healthcare through the lens of the reproductive justice framework elucidates how numerous forms of reproductive healthcare are, indeed, “migration issues”. These include, but are not limited to, pregnant people miscarrying while violently detained by immigration enforcement and while undertaking perilous migrant journeys; children dying, and suffering physical and sexual abuse, while migrating and enduring immigrant detention (Ross lists “the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments free from violence by individuals and the state” as one of three human rights on which the reproductive justice framework is based); pregnant people—and especially pregnant people of color—being unduly interrogated at borders on the base of visible pregnancy; the traumas associated with living as a “mixed-status family,” and so much more.
In sum, while not every reproductive justice issue is an immigration justice issue, and vice versa, reproductive justice is intimately intertwined with immigration justice. Furthermore, this understanding should shape our analyses of what lies ahead in a post-Roe world. I suggest in what follows that philosophers who work on these issues should ask what philosophical analysis can contribute to addressing these social problems, these acts of violence, and the global oppression of women/people with gestational capacity as manifested in restrictions on both migration and reproductive healthcare. I offer two recommendations.
First, we must think and write about so-called “women’s issues” as immigration issues when applicable. In so doing, we should continue to respond to the famous challenge issued by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo in 2000, when she argued that “immigration and feminism are rarely, if ever, coupled in popular discussion, social movements, or academic research.” And of course, since that time, feminist philosophers of migration (alongside other feminist migration scholars) have done precisely this, writing on previously unexplored issues (in academic philosophy at least) such as domestic violence experienced by immigrant women, and how it is, in certain respects, supported by immigration law (Uma Narayan); the “interpreter’s dilemma” that is frequently faced by immigrant children (Lori Gallegos); and the ways in which migrant care work is a “moral harm” and demands a “global right to care” (Eva Feder Kittay)—to literally name just a few examples of a body of normative scholarship that has steadily been growing.
Furthermore, feminist immigration ethicists also frequently employ, and develop, feminist philosophical frameworks such as care ethics, structural injustice, relational inequality, and “transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability” (as coined by Alison Jaggar) to both describe and “diagnose” the sexist social ills at hand.
Despite these vital efforts, theorizing the intersection of gender justice and immigration justice—a task that is perhaps more urgent than ever, as we anticipate Roe v. Wade’s demise—remains quite challenging in light of the historic “decoupling” of immigration and feminism that was highlighted decades ago by Hondagneu-Sotelo. The “stereotypical” image of a migrant is simply not a pregnant or miscarrying person, or an unaccompanied child, or a person crossing borders in a family unit, or an abortion seeker crossing the state of Texas, or an LGBTQ migrant from whom a “sexual confession” is being “extracted” by an immigration officer at the border. Consequently, the ethical concerns such experiences raise remain peripheral, rather than central, to our ethical and policy discussions about immigration justice.
In addition to calling for more theoretical work on the aforementioned aspects of migration, I trumpet the call for a feminist theory of borders—or, perhaps, more feminist theories of borders—to bring these specific issues from margin to center. For, as the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend wrote, “[e]xperience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without a theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience…” In other words, our theories of borders can make certain migration experiences intelligible, while leaving others difficult to evaluate and perceive.
Indeed, our ethical discussions of borders are always situated within some framework of what borders actually are. For instance: when Joseph Carens forcefully argued for a world of “open borders”, he initiated his analysis with the famous line: “borders have guards, and guards have guns,” and then made direct references to the violent, heavily militarized U.S.-Mexico border. Of course, not all borders have guards and guns—but violently guarded borders like that which separates the U.S. from Mexico is precisely the sort that those with a certain type of moral compass want to eliminate. Thus, the ensuing “open borders debate” tends to feature (though not always explicitly) this image, and this understanding, of a border.
Meanwhile, Gloria Anzaldúa’s famous theorization of borders represents the U.S.-Mexico border both materially and metaphorically. Materially, she was concerned, as Carens and other migration ethicists have been, with the barbed wire, the immigration enforcement officers, and the many other mechanisms of immigration enforcement of which the particular U.S.-Mexico border is comprised. Beyond this, however, Anzaldúa also spoke of the border metaphorically, as part of a mestiza consciousness that is the result of an epistemic “struggle of borders.”
She wrote that “la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.”
Thus, in Anzaldúa’s work and within a great deal of Latina feminist scholarship, “borders” are both material and epistemic, and “border crossing” is both an epistemic harm and virtue. Such approaches, in turn, understand borders as real components of certain social identities (like mestiza identity) and hermeneutic horizons.
Meanwhile, some Indigenous activists and scholars, including those whose traditional lands are bisected by settler state borders, describe such borders in terms of sites of resistance and, in Audra Simpson’s words, politics of refusal. As Simpson writes of Iroquois peoples crossing the Canada-U.S. border: “for Iroquois peoples the border acts as a site not of transgression but for the activation and articulation of their rights as members of reserve nations, or Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy peoples. Thus the people who cross borders are Iroquois before they cross, they are especially Iroquois as they cross, and they are Iroquois when they arrive at the place where they want to be.”
Such borders, then, are simultaneously acts of colonial aggression against Indigenous communities and places where, as Simpson explains, Indigenous peoples become especially Indigenous. This border theory enables Indigenous scholars and activists to achieve a difficult conceptual goal: that of articulating Indigenous acts of resistance at borders without losing sight of the fact that settler state borders are violent and unjust colonialist encroachments.
In sum, we can perceive a direction connection—and perhaps even an intimate relationship—between the philosophical goals of the immigration ethicist, and the border theory to which they subscribe. I want to suggest here that as we contemplate Roe’s demise—and also position Roe within a broader reproductive justice framework—we should follow in the footsteps of these aforementioned theorists, asking ourselves: what sort of border theory will render visible the intimate entanglement of reproductive and migration justice?
What theory of borders can help us to account for the moral harms endured by the Texan driving 16 hours for a desperately needed abortion she cannot afford, as well as the Central American child, separated from his parents and abused in an immigration facility? How can a theory of borders adequately represent borders as sites of coerced “sexual confessions” from LGBTQ border-crossers, and also as sites where many women of color feel compelled to conceal their visible pregnancies? How can we come to understand borders as places where—in the words of a Mexican woman I interviewed in a recent ethnographic study of abortion migration, who had been forced to cross multiple internal and national borders to get a legal abortion—it feels like God himself tries to stop people from accessing reproductive health care?
As reproductive rights are steadily eroded in this country, feminists have asked in numerous contexts what we “should do”—and there is, in fact, so much we should do. I want to direct feminist attention to asking also, how should we theorize, and therefore challenge, borders themselves in our fight for reproductive justice? For, as Anzaldúa wrote, “[b]orders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.” Failing to understand the intertwinement of immigration and reproductive justice keeps women and gestating people unsafe. It does this, first of all, by concealing from public and philosophical view their experiences of traveling, bordering crossing, and migrating for reproductive health care. It also does this by obscuring the fact that two of the biggest political controversies of our time are, in fact, connected at the core—calling for powerful, broad-based, grassroots activist coalitions—despite the morally arbitrary political lines that seem to divide them.
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Amy Reed-Sandoval
Amy Reed-Sandoval is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and participating faculty in the Latinx and Latin American Studies program, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Socially Undocumented: Identity and Immigration Justice (Oxford University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Latin American Immigration Ethics (University of Arizona Press, 2021). Currently, she is working on a monograph that is tentatively titled Intimate Borders: Feminism at the Boundaries of the State.
