Birth Rights and Wrongs: Paradoxical Reproductive Abuse and the Maintenance of Migrant Intervenability

Carlo Sariego, Yale University

The entwinement of nationalism and population control policy is well documented within studies of migrant reproductive abuse. Historically, this abuse has taken the form of coerced sterilizations, as exemplified in Madrigal v. Quilligan (1978). However, the recent restriction of abortion rights for migrants in Azar v. Garza (2017) requires a re-theorization of migrant reproductive control. How do state-funded anti-immigrant initiatives both forcibly restrict (through sterilizations as in Madrigal) and require (through mandated birth as in Azar) immigrant reproduction? Drawing on legal documents, court transcripts, and historical materials from the two cases, I identify four institutional discourses that position migrants as vulnerable to contradictory forms of reproductive intervention and abuse. This analysis demonstrates that the simultaneity of forced sterilization and forced birth is a result of the intersection of pro-life and anti-immigrant political movements in the resurgence of ethnonationalism in the United States. I find that the forms of control undergirding state reproductive abuse are not purely restrictive, as has been formerly argued. Rather, restriction is one side of an ethno-national logic that expresses itself both negatively and positively through the sustained intervenability of migrant bodies.

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 Presented in Session 237. Migration, Regulation, Exclusion, and Control at and within Borders