Birth Rights and Wrongs: Reproductive Outsiders in <i>Azar v. Garza</i> and <i>Madrigal v. Quilligan</i>

Amid a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and abortion restriction in the United States, theorizing state control of the reproductive choices of immigrant and migrant women is crucial. Historically, this control involved forced sterilizations, as exemplified by Madrigal v. Quilligan (1978). However, the recent denial of an abortion to a detained migrant teenager in Azar v. Garza (2018) introduces a contradiction: How does the state foreclose reproduction (in Madrigal) yet force it (in Azar)? This article provides a close analysis of these two legal cases, through the lenses of nationalism, anti-immigration policy, and overpopulation discourses. Situating this article within the context of feminist and sociological scholarship, I introduce the concept of reproductive outsiders to designate the victims of state reproductive intervention. Further, given the paradox described above, how does state reproductive care become abuse? Four key elements emerge by way of explanation: national health, securitization, institutional power, and paternalist state actors. The two cases are discussed in terms of their relevant political contexts: in both the overpopulation fears of 1978 (Madrigal) and the abortion fears of 2018 (Azar). American ideologies of belonging are at play; nationalist fantasies undergird racialized reproductive hierarchies, which rob Latina immigrants and migrants of autonomy and bodily sovereignty. Reproductive outsiders are policed according to both external and internal reproductive politics. State intervention is justified through external logics of border security and internal logics of paternalistic care. I conclude that the contradictions in Madrigal and Azar are a feature, not an aberration, of state control.