Reproductive Justice and Agricultural Labor Migrants

According to the United Nations, international migrants in 2019 comprised 3.5% (272 million) of the world’s total population. Much of this migration stems from poverty, conflict, sexual and gender-based violence, and global economic disparities. Moreover, close to half of all migrants today are women, many of whom are of childbearing age. It is impossible to accurately consider these women’s concrete realities without also considering the social forces surrounding reproduction itself. Migrant women’s struggles are not only a matter of individual access to reproductive health care. Rather, their struggles involve intersecting questions of gender, race, class, and immigration status. Reproductive justice, with its central focus on social analysis, is therefore particularly well-suited to analyze their challenges. Further, Catholic Social Teaching offers analytical themes to redirect our focus to the structural forces contributing to those struggles. In this chapter, I examine these matters with particular attention to women laboring in agricultural contexts.