Attacks on reproductive autonomy, LGBTQ+ parentage rights, and the rights of disabled people to live and thrive require social justice movements to stand together in order to ensure each person’s reproductive and family decision making, and to value all lives and all families. Reproductive and genetic technologies pose particularly complex challenges that require the shared focus of advocates for reproductive, disability, LGBTQ+, racial, and economic rights and justice, and health equity.
Organizations from these movements hold a range of perspectives on how to ensure equitable family formation, minimize risks to health and well-being, assure reproductive and parental rights, and affirm the humanity of all people. Even with shared values, their positions can be in tension.
Now is the time to foster collaboration across movements and address tensions arising around reproductive and genetic technologies. IVF has been positioned as a wedge issue in attacks on reproductive rights, and policymakers and cultural influencers are promoting deeply disturbing eugenic and pronatalist ideas and policies.
To meet these current challenges, the Center for Genetics and Society established a Leadership Team to pilot an initial convening series with partners who play leadership roles in reproductive justice, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and health equity movements and scholarship, and who are actively addressing issues related to the technologies. The conversations are grounded in an acknowledgement of the benefits of reproductive and genetic technologies, as well as the health risks, social implications, and eugenic potentials they entail.
After initial conversations to identify cross-movement tensions and opportunities for solidarity, the Leadership Team is now developing opportunities for social justice advocates and publicly engaged scholars to align key strategy and promote intersectional messaging on these technologies, ensure we don’t work at cross purposes or allow ourselves to be divided, and clarify approaches that challenge eugenics and promote equity and justice.
Both the technologies and the politics are likely to continue developing and shifting rapidly in coming years. CGS’ vision is to build out the convening series into an ongoing forum for relationship-building, cross-movement engagement, and rapid response in light of key policy, technological, and media developments.