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reproductive justice
Immigration Detention Is Reproductive Violence
Politicians who call themselves “pro-life” support policies that detain pregnant people, criminalize pregnancy, and separate families.
Dec 21, 2025
Early this month, The 19th reported that a 22-year-old mother named Nayra Guzman was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on her way to the neonatal intensive care unit to see her newborn daughter, just days after a long and complicated delivery. While her daughter remained hospitalized, Guzman—still recovering from a C-section and managing Type 1 diabetes—was taken to an immigration detention center and held for 34 hours without adequate medical care, food, or water, or access to a breast pump.
This is not an isolated failure. It is reproductive violence by design.
Immigration in the US has always been about control—controlling who belongs, who gets to build a family, and who is deemed worthy of safety and care. Early laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Immigration Act codified eugenicist ideas about which communities were deemed “desirable” and which the country sought to exclude. During World War II, Japanese Americans were subject to mass incarceration, families were separated, pregnancies endangered, and women sterilized. More recently, between 2017 and 2021, more than 4,600 children were kidnapped at the US border—1,360 of whom still remain unaccounted for.
Reports show this has been the deadliest year in immigration detention since 2004. Next year is projected to be even worse. People are dying from untreated infections, suicide, dehydration, and preventable complications. Investigations have documented hundreds of human-rights abuses—including pregnant people miscarrying, being shacked across their stomachs during transport, placed in solitary confinement, and denied translation during medical procedures.
We must dismantle the systems that cage people, separate families, and dictate who is allowed to parent safely.
Major medical, public health, and advocacy organizations have long recognized that pregnant and postpartum people should not be incarcerated. Under the Obama administration, ICE was directed to avoid the detention of pregnant people whenever possible, citing serious health risks and the agency’s inability to provide appropriate care. Under both Trump terms, those protections were rolled back. And last month, Intercept uncovered that the Trump administration has been actively concealing how many pregnant people are in ICE custody.
What we don’t know should scare us even more. Until recently, the Department of Homeland Security was required to publish semiannual reports detailing how many pregnant, postpartum, and lactating people were detained, and what care they received. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, those reports have stopped, and Congress quietly dropped the reporting requirement altogether.
Without even basic reporting requirements, what happens inside detention becomes nearly impossible to track, and people vanish. They are transferred in the middle of the night, across state lines, with no transparency, and no way for their families to know where their loved ones are or if they’re safe.
What we are seeing today are the consequences of a system rooted in racialized policing and mass incarceration—one that criminalizes migration and is built to financially benefit from human suffering. Today, detention quotas and private contracts dictate immigration policy.
For nearly a century after Ellis Island first opened, immigration detention was relatively rare. But by the 1980s, as the "War on Drugs" expanded the criminal legal system, immigration enforcement adopted the same punitive logic. The Reagan administration imposed the nation’s first immigration detention quota, ensuring that thousands of migrants—many fleeing violence or seeking family reunification—would be incarcerated at any given time. After 9/11, detention intensified with the “War on Terror” and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Private prison companies secured lucrative federal contracts, new facilities opened nationwide, and immigration violations—many of them civil, not criminal—were now punished with incarceration. ICE’s own data shows roughly 72% of people in detention have no criminal record. Yet thousands are incarcerated for civil violations that carry no criminal penalty under federal law.
As prison beds became profitable, people became commodities. Today, the US operates the largest and fastest-growing immigration detention system in the world. In July, Congress budgeted $45 billion for ICE to build more immigration detention centers, and an additional $30 billion for arrests and deportation. The two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group, have reported record-breaking profits and described the Trump administration as offering “unprecedented growth opportunities.”
As climate change, war, and economic and political instability drive global displacement and migration, the US has responded with cages instead of care. And apathy feels endless. Politicians who call themselves “pro-life” support policies that detain pregnant people, criminalize pregnancy, and separate families. The American people, exhausted and complacent, have learned to tune it out. Silence has become a coping mechanism.
Working in policy, I live with a constant tension: I know change is incremental, that the system moves slowly, but I am also an abolitionist. I do not believe in prisons or borders. I believe health and reproduction are human rights, and that no one should be imprisoned for migrating or for being pregnant. I think of my policy work as harm reduction—protecting people’s dignity and autonomy now, as we fight for collective liberation in the future.
Calls to release pregnant people from detention are growing. In November, the Democratic Women’s Caucus declared the treatment of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing people in ICE custody “unacceptable,” and last week, Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez introduced a resolution urging congressional action.
But that demand cannot come from advocates and politicians alone—change depends on ordinary people determined to not look away. Our outrage is long overdue. Call your representatives and let them know that cruelty is a political choice we refuse to normalize. Join groups organizing on the ground, donate to local defense funds, and talk about this in your circles.
In the long term, we must dismantle the systems that cage people, separate families, and dictate who is allowed to parent safely. That vision is at the heart of reproductive justice—because every struggle is connected, and every win brings us closer to the world we deserve.
As Fannie Lou Hamer said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
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Young Pregnant People Need Choices, Not Shame
With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Aug 09, 2025
Access to affordable family planning and sexual health services is under attack, with the current administration threatening millions of dollars in Title X funding.
Millions of poor, uninsured, low-income individuals rely on this program not only for contraception but for cancer detection, HIV testing, and other essential services. The administration’s hostility toward proven programs like this puts young people at greater risk of pregnancy, in an environment where reproductive choices are limited. The consequences of abortion bans are clear: People are getting sick and losing their lives because access to basic reproductive healthcare is being stripped away. But what if you are young? What if you are Black? What if you live in a state restricting abortion? What if you do not get to decide?
For young pregnant people, these bans and funding cuts are even harder to navigate because of barriers to their independence. With the potential cuts to Title X programs, young people’s access to contraception will be even more limited. If they become pregnant when they don’t want to be, some states that still allow abortion have restrictions requiring consent from parents. With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Reproductive justice is a human rights framework coined in 1994 by 12 Black women in response to the reproductive rights and health groups that excluded the lived experiences of those who have been marginalized. This concept includes the right to parent, the right not to parent, the right to parent children in safe and healthy communities, and the right to bodily autonomy. Young people, too, deserve reproductive justice.
What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame?
A powerful misconception is that we are often just one decision away from shaping the course of our lives. But it isn’t the one individual decision. It’s the collective punitive reaction from society that stands in the way of young people getting the support they need. For the young pregnant person who is parenting, there is a systemic lack of support coupled with stereotypes that lead to negative outcomes.
As a child, my knowledge about the consequences resulting from decisions we make about our bodies was limited to the concrete and practical, such as skinning my knee in the neighborhood kickball tournaments when I ran around the bases too quickly. That knowledge quickly expanded when my older sister became pregnant as a teen, and I observed the organized shunning she experienced from family members to healthcare workers to teachers and friends. This was the first time I witnessed shame. I heard how family members talked about her pregnancy as a defining moment, as if any glimpse of a future was now extinguished. Those family members and friends who were “supportive” disappeared once my niece was born. It was at this moment that I decided that I wanted to offset that shame for her, for us, for every young Black girl who is navigating a pregnancy.
I did my best to be a supportive little sister as a child, standing up to all who spoke negatively about my sister and her choices. This experience stayed with me, and as a first year medical student, I founded Sisters Informing Healing Living Empowering (SIHLE) Augusta, renamed Choices Within Reach, an organization that works to support young Black mothers in Augusta, Georgia, through providing community, financial resources, and infant supplies. For the past seven years, in addition to my medical and residency training, we have worked to disempower the systems that shame and marginalize young people about their reproductive choices. Transforming that childhood rage to triumph, this ever-expanding sisterhood is my greatest accomplishment.
Now, as an OB-GYN and community organizer, I continue to hear the echoes of my sister’s story through my patients and the young people I serve in Georgia.
These stereotypes of young parenting people that go back to public condemnation of “teen moms” and “welfare queens” in the 1970s and 80s are still alive in the collective shunning of young Black pregnant people. In many schools, there is a “pregnant student” policy that states that the school won’t make accommodations for a pregnant student unless required by documented medical circumstances. High school students are not granted “maternity leave.” These policies are penal and don’t support the pregnant student’s success, especially when combined with isolation that the pregnant adolescent may be enduring within her community.
It is these punitive policies and attitudes that lead to statistics like only 50% of teen mothers receive their high school diploma by age 22, compared to 90% of teens who do not give birth in their adolescence. The lack of education and support makes it hard for them to find job opportunities, leading to a hard time making ends meet, and so on. This is a collective shunning of young motherhood.
These roots also shape our healthcare system. Just as young moms slip through the cracks of the community, they also often do in the healthcare system. Adolescent medicine providers try to close these gaps for young people. However, the gap widens when they become pregnant. Is it the OB-GYN who receives little to no training on how to specifically care for a pregnant teen or the pediatrician who has not specialized in pregnancy that is trying to care for the teen who is pregnant? When the gaps are felt by young moms, they might disengage from prenatal care, lose trust in their providers, and face poor health outcomes for the mother and baby.
This is especially true when the stereotypes of pregnant adolescents are woven into the implicit and explicit biases of the providers. These biases affect how their providers view them, the care they receive, and their outcomes. Kia, who experienced pregnancy at 16 years old, had her pregnancy confirmed by her pediatrician, who had been caring for her since she was an infant. However, once her urine pregnancy test was positive, there was an obvious disconnect. They told her she could no longer be seen in the office and was not offered any options counseling, OB-GYN references, or even an ultrasound. This experience led Kia to delay seeking prenatal care. What if the pregnancy was in the wrong location? What if there were complications? As we attempt to close the gap of maternal morbidity and mortality rates in the U.S., which are disproportionately higher in Black people, we must address the systems that increase risks faced by young Black parents.
The fight against the societal punishment of young Black parents is an issue of reproductive justice. In a nation where systemic barriers persist, the futures of young Black parents don’t come down to personal choices; they are intricately tied to the what kind of support, education, and resources they can access. It is far beyond time to restructure the narratives and fill the gaps society created for our young Black pregnant and parenting people.
What if we had culturally sound, group prenatal care that focused on and highlighted the needs of young, Black pregnant people? What if we built a community that came together to support young parents with childcare, financial resources, and school or job support? What if medically accurate, comprehensive sex education were available to all young people? What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame? We can create the kind of world where we all have equitable access to the full spectrum of reproductive freedoms, no matter our age or location.
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Beyond Motherhood: Reclaiming Women's Agency in an Era of Control
We must advocate for a society where women's autonomy, choices, and identities are respected and celebrated in all their diverse forms, irrespective of their maternal status.
Jul 16, 2025
I have yet to be a mother, but I froze my eggs a few years ago, and am thankful to have that choice to have a family of my own one day—that ability to have a choice was taken away from a woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead in February, yet kept on life support and forced to carry her fetus until she gave birth this June. This harrowing situation unfolded because hospital officials feared they'd violate Georgia's law banning most abortions after fetal cardiac activity.
A few years ago, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, some anti-abortion advocates were taking issue with IVF procedures, citing that destroying unused embryos is equivalent to taking a life.
In May 2025, a car bomb exploded in the parking lot at a fertility clinic in Palm Springs. Upon hearing the news, I immediately felt concern for the individuals who kept their eggs and embryos at this clinic. While no individuals or reproductive materials were harmed, the fear was palpable for me, having stored my own eggs in a Massachusetts clinic. This incident was deemed an act of terrorism, carried out by the perpetrator because of his anti-natalist views—his belief that it is wrong to have children.
What all these stories have in common is the insidious attempt to control women—control our reproductive health, our bodies, whether we live or die. They are only the most recent examples of how women's choices are being systematically stripped away.
This societal obsession with motherhood as the pinnacle of female existence not only devalues women who choose not to have children or are unable to, but it also places undue pressure on those who do.
Even the way those in power respond shows a disturbing and deeply ingrained narrow view of women and their choices. In response to the Palm Springs incident, Attorney General Pam Bondi stated in a post on X, "Let me be clear: The Trump administration understands that women and mothers are the heartbeat of America. Violence against a fertility clinic is unforgivable." That sentence, though seemingly innocuous, reveals a troubling worldview. It implies that women are primarily valued as mothers, that our worth as women is intimately connected to our reproductive lives, and our health choices are directly tied to our ability to fulfill this singular role.
Yet, there are myriad valid reasons why a woman may never have children: health issues, infertility, personal choice, not finding a suitable partner, or socioeconomic instability, to name a few. Despite this, the current Trump administration and the conservative faction in our country seem fixated on justifying womanhood solely through the lens of motherhood. This reductive stance is evidenced by Vice President JD Vance's dismissive "childless cat lady" comment, where he questioned the stake of childless individuals in the nation's future, and further underscored by the Trump administration's proposals for 'baby bonuses' and tax-deferred investment accounts designed to incentivize childbirth.
Consider the ripple effects of this narrow perspective.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade has paved the way for states to make abortion illegal or incredibly restrictive, fundamentally stripping women of their agency and bodily autonomy. Once pregnant, in 41 states, a woman's body is now no longer entirely her own, but rather a vessel subject to state control.
The very act of bombing a fertility clinic, while deplorable, was deemed so primarily because a fertility clinic is associated with the creation of babies. The outrage stemmed from the perceived threat to potential motherhood, not necessarily the broader violation of individual liberty or the act of terrorism itself.
This singular focus extends to how women are perceived even in death. The Georgia case forces us to confront a horrifying reality: Even when a woman is brain dead, her bodily autonomy can be overridden in favor of a fetus. Her existence, in this context, is reduced to her reproductive capacity, even in her final moments. This legal and ethical quagmire highlights how deeply ingrained the concept of women as mere incubators has become in some interpretations of the law.
Individuals should be valued for more than their potential or actual role as mothers. I do not disagree that motherhood can be a profoundly important and vital aspect of life, and for many, it is. As someone who still hopes to be a mother, it is for me. Yet, I do not know the future, and there is a real possibility that I may never have children. Therefore, to define a woman's entire identity and worth by her reproductive capacity is a dangerous reduction, not to mention emotionally charged for individuals such as myself. Like any human, women are multifaceted beings with diverse aspirations, careers, contributions to society, and personal lives that extend far beyond the biological function of childbearing.
This societal obsession with motherhood as the pinnacle of female existence not only devalues women who choose not to have children or are unable to, but it also places undue pressure on those who do. It limits our collective imagination of what a woman can be and achieve. We must challenge this pervasive narrative and advocate for a society where women's autonomy, choices, and identities are respected and celebrated in all their diverse forms, irrespective of their maternal status. It is time to assert that a woman's life, and her death, should be her own.
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