Activist allyship, unspoken dilemma: deconstructing the tension between reproductive autonomy and disability justice

This article analyses Taiwan’s human rights treaty review process (2009–2022), examining an underexplored dilemma: the presumed tension between reproductive autonomy and disability justice. Since incorporating most core international human rights conventions into domestic law, Taiwan has created a distinctive monitoring arena that brings governmental agencies, advocacy groups, and international experts into dialogue. Drawing on documentary and discourse analysis, we show how abortion debates involving foetal impairment have been negotiated, obscured, or strategically silenced in these fora. Although treaties such as CEDAW and CRPD enshrine both reproductive and disability rights, legal and medical narratives continue to frame abortion in ways that affirm autonomy while also reinforcing ableist assumptions. Civil society organisations have advanced the reproductive health and rights of women with disabilities but largely avoided their underlying tensions. We consider this avoidance a strategic omission reflecting the difficulty of reconciling competing claims without a shared interpretive framework. To move beyond the false opposition between abortion rights and disability existence, we propose a harmonising approach centred on the notion of a liveable life as a common foundation, on which the agency of all persons, disabled or not, is enabled across infrastructural, institutional, symbolic, and interpersonal dimensions of reproductive decision-making.