Enforcing Motherhood, Suppressing Fertility: Reproductive Justice, Colonial Legacies, and the Limits of International Human Rights Law

Abstract

Reproduction has become a central site of public governance and political contestation, yet international human rights law’s (IHRL) capacity to deliver substantive reproductive justice remains deeply ambivalent. While IHRL has progressively expanded the recognition of reproductive rights and developed increasingly sophisticated standards of state responsibility, feminist scholars have questioned its capacity to transform the structural conditions through which reproductive injustice is produced. This article argues that reproductive governance operates through structurally opposite but analytically symmetrical logics—the enforcement of reproduction in some populations and the suppression of fertility in others—and that these seemingly divergent practices are connected through broader projects of nation-building, demographic management and social ordering. Drawing on feminist international legal theory, reproductive justice scholarship and post-colonial feminist critique, the article develops this argument through a dialogical reading of abortion governance in postcolonial Ireland and coercive sterilisation during the Fujimori administration in Peru. Read together, these cases demonstrate that, although IHRL has proved increasingly effective at rendering reproductive harms legally cognisable and securing accountability through legislative and institutional reform, its liberal, state-centric architecture remains principally oriented towards identifying rights violations rather than transforming the colonial, racial and institutional relations through which reproductive governance is constituted. The article concludes that substantive reproductive justice requires feminist engagement with the structural conditions that sustain reproductive injustice alongside, rather than instead of, rights-based legal reform.