Reproductive Politics in the Age of Trump and Brexit

For feminists and feminist scholars who have been active in reproductive rights since the 1980s, Donald Trump' s policies concerning national autonomy, religious freedom, increased police and military spending, racial profiling, and border control rearticulate a tragically familiar grammar grounded in a distinctly American legacy of white Christian nationalism and its highly racialized reproductive politics. Above all, this grammar feels familiar from decades of American conflict over the practice of abortion, a political struggle in which, as Faye Ginsburg (1998) documented in her pathbreaking study of the abortion debate in Fargo, North Dakota in the 1980s, issues of race, class, gender, generation, religion, sexuality, and reproduction emerge as the fault lines of mainstream political division and struggle-far more than party politics. In the name of promoting and celebrating a "culture of life," U.S. right-to-life groups have for more than three decades maintained a campaigning strategy that powerfully links traditional gender roles