Levonorgestrel-releasing implant, sold under the brand name Jadelle among others, are devices that release levonorgestrel for birth control. It is one of the most effective forms of birth control with a one-year failure rate around 0.05%. The device is placed under the skin and lasts for up to five years. It may be used by women who have a history of pelvic inflammatory disease and therefore cannot use an intrauterine device. Following removal fertility quickly returns.
A self-induced abortion is an abortion performed by the pregnant woman herself, or with the help of other, non-medical assistance. Although the term includes abortions induced outside of a clinical setting with legal, sometimes over-the-counter medication, it also refers to efforts to terminate a pregnancy through alternative, potentially more dangerous methods. Such practices may present a threat to the health of women.
Hormonal contraception refers to birth control methods that act on the endocrine system. Almost all methods are composed of steroid hormones, although in India one selective estrogen receptor modulator is marketed as a contraceptive. The original hormonal method—the combined oral contraceptive pill—was first marketed as a contraceptive in 1960. In the ensuing decades many other delivery methods have been developed, although the oral and injectable methods are by far the most popular. Hormonal contraception is highly effective: when taken on the prescribed schedule, users of steroid hormone methods experience pregnancy rates of less than 1% per year. Perfect-use pregnancy rates for most hormonal contraceptives are usually around the 0.3% rate or less. Currently available methods can only be used by women; the development of a male hormonal contraceptive is an active research area.
Etonogestrel is a medication which is used as a means of birth control for women. It is available as an implant placed under the skin of the upper arm under the brand names Nexplanon and Implanon. It is a progestin that is also used in combination with ethinylestradiol, an estrogen, as a vaginal ring under the brand names NuvaRing and Circlet. Etonogestrel is effective as a means of birth control and lasts at least three or four years with some data showing effectiveness for five years. Following removal, fertility quickly returns.
Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Sexology has a basis in psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian theory, which played a big role in early sexology. This reactionary field of feminist sexology seeks to be inclusive of experiences of sexuality and break down the problematic ideas that have been expressed by sexology in the past. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the overarching field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or "normality" for women's sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. It is a young field, but one that is growing rapidly.
Dorothy E. Roberts is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her concerns include changing thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Reproductive justice is a critical feminist framework that was invented as a response to United States reproductive politics. The three core values of reproductive justice are the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments. The framework moves women's reproductive rights past a legal and political debate to incorporate the economic, social, and health factors that impact women's reproductive choices and decision-making ability.
People v. Pointer, 151 Cal.App.3d 1128, 199 Cal. Rptr. 357 (1984), is a criminal law case from the California Court of Appeal, First District, is significant because the trial judge included in his sentencing a prohibition on the defendant becoming pregnant during her period of probation. The appellate court held that such a prohibition was outside the bounds of a judge's sentencing authority. The case was remanded for resentencing to undo the overly broad prohibition against conception.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
The birth control movement in the United States was a social reform campaign beginning in 1914 that aimed to increase the availability of contraception in the U.S. through education and legalization. The movement began in 1914 when a group of political radicals in New York City, led by Emma Goldman, Mary Dennett, and Margaret Sanger, became concerned about the hardships that childbirth and self-induced abortions brought to low-income women. Since contraception was considered to be obscene at the time, the activists targeted the Comstock laws, which prohibited distribution of any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail. Hoping to provoke a favorable legal decision, Sanger deliberately broke the law by distributing The Woman Rebel, a newsletter containing a discussion of contraception. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, but the clinic was immediately shut down by police, and Sanger was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
Birth control in the United States is available in many forms. Some of the forms available at drugstores and some retail stores are male condoms, female condoms, sponges, spermicides, and over-the-counter emergency contraception. Forms available at pharmacies with a doctor's prescription or at doctor's offices are oral contraceptive pills, patches, vaginal rings, diaphragms, shots/injections, cervical caps, implantable rods, and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Sterilization procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies, are also performed.
Reproductive coercion is a collection of behaviors that interfere with decision-making related to reproductive health. These behaviors are meant to maintain power and control related to reproductive health by a current, former, or hopeful intimate or romantic partner, but they can also be perpetrated by parents or in-laws. Coercive behaviors infringe on individuals' reproductive rights and reduce their reproductive autonomy.
In the United States, black genocide is the notion that the mistreatment of African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans, both in the past and the present, amounts to genocide. The decades of lynchings and long-term racial discrimination were first formally described as genocide by a now-defunct organization, the Civil Rights Congress, in a petition which it submitted to the United Nations in 1951. In the 1960s, Malcolm X accused the US government of engaging in a genocide against black people, citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence against blacks by whites.
Khiara M. Bridges is an American law professor and anthropologist specializing in the intersectionality of race, reproductive justice, and law. She is best known for her book, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, in which she argues that race and class largely affect the prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal experiences of women.
Donald Kimelman is an American journalist and former managing director of The Pew Charitable Trusts, who continues to serve on the Pew Research Center's board. He is the son of Henry L. Kimelman, who served as United States Ambassador to Haiti.
Stratified reproduction is a widely used social scientific concept, created by Shellee Colen, that describes imbalances in the ability of people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, and genders to reproduce and nurture their children. Researchers use the concept to describe the "power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered," as Rayna Rapp and Faye D. Ginsburg defined the term in 1995.
Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
Lisa Campo-Engelstein, Ph.D., is an American bioethicist and fertility/contraceptive researcher. She currently works at the University of Texas Medical Branch as the Harris L. Kempner Chair in the Humanities in Medicine Professor, the Director of the Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities, and an Associate Professor in Preventive Medicine and Population Health. She is also a feminist bioethicist specializing in reproductive ethics and sexual ethics. She has been recognized in the BBC's list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world for 2019.
My body, my choice is a feminist slogan used in several countries, most often surrounding issues of bodily autonomy and abortion.
Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood is a nonfiction book by American scholar and law professor Michele Goodwin. The book details the criminalization of reproduction in United States and argues for choice movements to expand to a reproductive justice framework. It was released on March 12, 2020, by Cambridge University Press.
