THE INCREASED BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL OF WOMEN’S BODIES THROUGH REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE REGULATION; AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS.
Recently proposed laws that enact abortion and reproductive health care regulation have been marked as safety precautions in order to protect the health of women. However, these laws do not consider which groups are most often impacted by their enactment, and what the consequences of said enactment may be. If clinics in low income neighborhoods cannot meet requirements set by new laws, they shut down. This leaves vulnerable populations such as low income and minority women in a position where they cannot access reproductive health care, while increasing the amount of biopolitical control the government has on these women. My project focuses on three main points: 1. Who does increased reproductive health care regulation really affect? 2. How do intersectional identities relate to the impacts of said regulation (for example, middle class vs. lower class Latina women, documented vs. undocumented women)? 3. How does education combine with these laws in order to create a health care disparity? This project builds on a previous project in which I …show more content…
Biopolitics come from Foucault’s work, the idea that individuals are not “individuals, but rather groups whose biological processes such as birth and death can be controlled by a larger entity (Foucault, 2003). This can be applied in the sense that government regulations of reproductive health care access are controlling the biological processes of women. The second theoretical framework, Intersectionality, states that individuals have different identities which intersect, and then later shape the social interactions of said individuals (Allan, 2011). This theoretical framework can be applied to examine how these reproductive health care regulations impact on particular group over
Recently proposed laws that enact abortion and reproductive health care regulation have been marked as safety precautions in order to protect the health of women. However, these laws do not consider which groups are most often impacted by their enactment, and what the consequences of said enactment may be. If clinics in low income neighborhoods cannot meet requirements set by new laws, they shut down. This leaves vulnerable populations such as low income and minority women in a position where they cannot access reproductive health care, while increasing the amount of biopolitical control the government has on these women. My project focuses on three main points: 1. Who does increased reproductive health care regulation really affect? 2. How do intersectional identities relate to the impacts of said regulation (for example, middle class vs. lower class Latina women, documented vs. undocumented women)? 3. How does education combine with these laws in order to create a health care disparity? This project builds on a previous project in which I …show more content…
Biopolitics come from Foucault’s work, the idea that individuals are not “individuals, but rather groups whose biological processes such as birth and death can be controlled by a larger entity (Foucault, 2003). This can be applied in the sense that government regulations of reproductive health care access are controlling the biological processes of women. The second theoretical framework, Intersectionality, states that individuals have different identities which intersect, and then later shape the social interactions of said individuals (Allan, 2011). This theoretical framework can be applied to examine how these reproductive health care regulations impact on particular group over