Collins Living-Learning Center

In mainstream debates over reproductive rights in the United States, the mantra “my body, my choice” emphasizes individual decisions and privacy. This course uses historical case studies to reframe modern fights over reproduction as collective struggles for social, economic, and political power. Legal battles over access to birth control and abortion provide a limited view of the long fight for global reproductive justice and state attempts to exert power over private life. Together we will read about family separation, pronatalist interventions, mass sterilization, and other policies in and outside of the US. Using primary and secondary sources, we will consider connections between contemporary and historical interventions in reproductive lives. Having sex, accessing reproductive care, and raising families are deeply personal experiences. Yet, past efforts to regulate and control reproduction remind us that having (or not having) children has never been merely a private matter.  

• S&H
• DUS
• What are CASE requirements?