(Re)productive Dissent: Reproductive Justice in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Abstract

The overturn of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in June 2022 solidified the patchwork nature of abortion access in the United States and clarified, for some, the need to move beyond a framework of reproductive rights toward an approach to reproductive justice that would guarantee medical autonomy for individuals in the pursuit of (not) becoming parents. We present the dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as an attempt to create a legally intelligible reproductive justice. We analyze the excesses of the dissent—the violations of generic and institutional norms concerning, specifically, the inclusion of the lived experiences of pregnant people. We conclude, however, that the capacity for rhetorical invention in the dissent is muted by the uncritical (re)circulation of neoliberal tropes endemic to the Supreme Court and the broader abortion debate in the United States. We conclude with the implications for this (imperfect) articulation of reproductive justice in an institutional context.

Keywords:

• Abortion
• audibility
• excess, neoliberalism
• Supreme Court

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express gratitude to the editor, reviewers, and production team of Women’s Studies in Communication for their help and feedback in ushering this manuscript to its final form.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The dissent employs “woman/women” as stand-ins for pregnant people, which is itself a significant limitation on the potential for rhetorical invention. For accuracy and inclusivity, our article uses “pregnant person/people” while retaining the language of the dissent in textual exemplars. See Fixmer-Oraiz and Yam (2021) for a discussion of how queer ontologies are critical to RJ perspectives while insistence on reproduction as being inherently tied to femininity empties RJ of its liberatory potential, and Downing (2023) for a nuanced defense of imperfect rhetorics of care.