CHOICE UNDER CONSTRAINT: GENDER, REPRODUCTIVE AGENCY, AND SOCIAL POWER IN CHIKA UNIGWE'S GRACE

This study examines reproductive agency in Chika Unigwe’s Grace, focusing on how family expectations, gender norms, economic vulnerability, and social judgment shape women’s reproductive decisions. Rather than treating reproductive choice as an expression of unrestricted individual autonomy, the study conceptualises agency as the capacity to negotiate decisions within materially and socially constrained circumstances. Through qualitative textual analysis, Grace’s teenage pregnancy and relinquishment of her first child are examined alongside her later role as a midwife who assists vulnerable young women in transferring their babies to wealthier couples. The analysis demonstrates that the reproductive choices represented in the novel are structured by unequal gender relations, family honour, economic dependence, stigma and expectations surrounding motherhood. The unequal distribution of responsibility between Grace and the boy involved in her pregnancy exposes the gendered operation of reproductive judgment. Grace’s maternity clinic complicates the distinction between agency and coercion: although it provides vulnerable women with alternatives to social rejection, educational disruption, and economic hardship, its involvement in the transfer of babies also raises questions about complicity and commodification. The study argues that Grace challenges individualistic understandings of reproductive autonomy by presenting choice as a negotiation with social power. Therefore, its central ethical question is not simply whether women choose but what conditions shape the choices available to them. The study contributes to feminist literary scholarship by foregrounding reproductive agency as a relational and socially conditioned process.