“Let’s Make the Womb Safe Again”: Ethnographic Explorations of White Evangelical Women’s Language of Reproductive Injustice

Abstract

Like broader conservative movements, the pro-life movement in the United States has a fraught history regarding its alignment with White supremacy. Yet, the whiteness of the pro-life movement is often hidden behind the discourses of colorblind racism through the U.S. cultural moment. To uncover and deconstruct this supposed “anti-racist” discourse, I study Evangelical women and their roles in the pro-life/anti-choice movement to explore their consequences on the narratives of abortion and reproductive health care from the 1970s to present. I conduct interviews and participant observation with self-described Evangelical pro-life women through ethnographic opportunities and events. In this study, I explore the intersectional issues of reproductive injustices through fieldwork and interviews with anti-choice women. These interviews and ethnographic data focus on a particular group of anti-choice organizers who prepare and oversee the logistics of this movement: pro-life women. How does it come to be that conservative women control the narratives of reproductive health care? How can ethnographic methods be utilized to unveil new information and knowledge surrounding the barriers to reproductive health care by the pro-life movement? I analyze this qualitative data to understand how the rhetoric of the pro-life/anti-choice movement invades the language of reproductive health in the United States and how a reproductive justice framework can begin to deconstruct this problematic flow.