Despite growing recognition of the barriers disabled people face in fully accessing their sexual and reproductive rights, they have remained underrepresented in the reproductive justice movement. The 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States and the increasing restrictions on reproductive, sexual, and gender-affirming care demonstrate the urgency of this dialogue. These restrictions reflect a broad and historically entrenched pattern of reproductive control sustained by racism, classism, sexism, and ableism. When disability intersects with their bodies and identities, women, trans or gender-diverse people, Black and racialized women, and Indigenous people are particularly vulnerable to reproductive violence and the denial of their sexual and reproductive rights.

Through various legal mechanisms, forced sterilization remains legal in twelve European countries (and others such as Australia), which disproportionately impacts women with disabilities. Three of these countries allow forced sterilization of minors—despite the fact that this practice, like forced abortion, has been condemned by the United Nations and the Istanbul Convention as reproductive violence. This violence is not limited to sterilization but is also exercised through the imposition of long-term contraception, the omission of informed consent, barriers to intimate relationships, and systematic removal of custody under the pretext of parental incapacity due to disability.

While reproductive technologies and prenatal diagnosis are celebrated as a means to empower individual reproductive freedom, they often reinforce ableist narratives that devalue disabled life and portray disability as a tragedy—something to be avoided and prevented, rather than celebrated (Ginsburg and Rapp, 2023). Within these discourses, the pro-choice movement emphasizes disability (Jarman, 2015) and instrumentalizes it to justify restrictions on reproductive freedom. These technologies are underpinned by socially shared narratives about which lives are worth living and which are not. As Alison Kafer (2014) argues, Western culture promotes the ableist vision of a future “free of all disabilities” as inevitable and desirable.

The Cripping Reproductive Justice symposium is grounded in the theoretical framework of reproductive justice (SisterSong, 2004), coined in 1994 by the Black Feminist Collective Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice (later SisterSong). This framework posits the right to reproductive autonomy, the right to procreate or not to procreate, and the right to parent in safe environments free from systemic violence. The Disability Justice framework, articulated in 2005 by the Sins Invalid collective (2006), expands on this concept by centering the first-person lived experiences of people with disabilities and recognizing the intersectional forces of racism, sexism, and classism that shape reproductive oppression. While the first of these theoretical frameworks, reproductive justice, has advanced by assimilating other approaches, such as environmental reproductive justice (Hoover, 2018) or queer reproductive justice (Smietana, Thompson, & Twine, 2018), disability justice has remained underrepresented in both mainstream discourse and scholarly production on sexual and reproductive rights.

Cripping reproductive justice views disability not as an individual condition, but as something shaped by social, political, cultural, and relational systems, situating disabled lives as political and integral to reproductive justice movements (Kafer, 2014). It recognizes that reproductive justice is disability justice (Sins Invalid, 2022) and advocates for collaborations between movements that understand disability as an intersectional, systemic condition. This approach questions the unique shape that reproductive oppression gives to disabled lives, while imagining alternative futures rooted in interdependence, care, and liberation. One approach that advances these conversations is cripping, a term emerging from crip theory within critical disability studies and disability activism. Similar to queering in sexuality studies, this concept challenges both “the compulsory able-bodied system” (McRuer, 2006) and “the compulsory able-bodied system” (Price, 2015). In the crip perspective, disability is not something to be fixed or eliminated, but rather an identity with intrinsic value. Related concepts, such as crip time, disrupt social expectations of productivity, valuing alternative temporalities in reproduction, care, and kinship.

Speculative methodologies are complementary to cripping (Benjamin, 2016; Schalk, 2018) and offer a means to reimagine futures in which the sexual and reproductive rights of disabled people, reproductive autonomy, kinship, and care networks are fully recognized and supported. This approach allows us to go beyond documenting violations and oppression, allowing us to project ourselves into possibilities that challenge current structures of reproductive injustice. By engaging with these ideas alongside the material realities of reproductive (in)justice, we seek to (re)imagine another time and space (Kafer, 2013)—a future in which disability and disabled lives are considered fully integrated into society.

In this speculative reimagining, this symposium invites a generative approach and encourages us to speculate and reimagine the following:

• What new freedoms can we imagine?

• What possibilities arise when reproductive imaginaries conceive disability as something to be celebrated rather than something to be prevented?

• What everyday acts of resistance already existing within disabled communities can be expanded and nurtured?

• How might CRIP reproductive justice intersect with and strengthen other social movements?

• Benjamin, Ruth. (2016). Racial fictions, biological facts: Expanding the sociological imagination through speculative methods. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2(2), 1-28.

• Ginsburg, Faye, & Rapp, Rayna (2023). Cripping reproduction: The intersections of pregnancy and disability. En C. C. Van Hollen & N. Appleton (Eds.), A companion to the anthropology of reproductive medicine and technology (pp. 282–297). Wiley Blackwell.

• Hoover, Elizabeth (2018). Environmental reproductive justice: Intersections in an American Indian community impacted by environmental contamination. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 8-21.

• Jarman, Michelle (2015). Relations of abortion: Crip approaches to reproductive justice. Feminist Formations, 27(1), 46-66.

• Kafer, Alison (2013). Feminist, queer, crip. Indiana University Press.

• McRuer, Robert (2006). Introducción: Compulsory able-bodiedness and queer/disabled existence. En Robert McRuer (Ed.), Crip theory (pp. 1-32). New York University Press.

• Price, Margaret (2015). The bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia, 30(1), 268-284.

• Ross, Loretta, & Solinger, Rickie (2017). Reproductive justice: An introduction. University of California Press.

• Schalk, Samantha (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction. Duke University Press.

• Sins Invalid. (2016). Skin, tooth, and bone: The basis of movement is our people—A disability justice primer. Sins Invalid.

• Sins Invalid. (2022). Reproductive justice is disability justice. Recuperado de https://sinsinvalid.org/reproductive-justice-is-disability-justice/.

Smietana, Marcin, Thompson, Charis, & Twine, France Winddance (2018). Making and breaking families: Reading queer reproductions, stratified reproduction, and reproductive justice together. Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online, 7, 112-130.