Frances K. Furio

This study examines how reproductive autonomy is shaped across interconnected systems that structure criminalization and access to care, including the periods leading up to incarceration, during custody, and after release. While feminist scholarship has documented reproductive oppression inside jails and prisons, less is known about how control over reproductive life is organized across the broader institutional landscape that surrounds them. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with ten formerly incarcerated adults in California, this article traces how reproductive health care is disrupted, rationed, and reconfigured across time and settings. Participants described four linked patterns: early neglect in reproductive and menstrual care, intensified reproductive denial and control while incarcerated, institutional abandonment at the point of reentry, and ongoing exclusion from reproductive and sexual health services after release. These themes show incarceration functioning not only as a discrete episode of confinement but also as one site within a wider system of reproductive regulation structured by racia-lized surveillance, gendered discipline, and structural abandonment. The article advances feminist theory by framing reproductive control as a core mechanism of carceral power and by grounding debates about embodiment, autonomy, and state regulation in the lived experiences of people who have been incarcerated. It also examines the limits of reform, arguing that reproductive justice cannot be secured through improved services within punitive systems and instead requires forms of care and support that are not organized through punishment or control.

Reproductive justice centers the ability to make decisions about one’s body and to raise families in conditions of dignity, safety, and material support. Within U.S. carceral systems, these conditions are routinely undermined through gendered violence, family separation, and restricted access to health care, with disproportionate impact on women and people assigned female at birth. This interpretive phenomenological qualitative study draws on in-depth interviews with 10 formerly incarcerated participants to examine how reproductive autonomy and reproductive harm are experienced and understood across arrest, confinement, and reentry. Participants described how incarceration, child welfare involvement, policing, and institutional health care constrained reproductive decision making across the life course. Four themes captured shared patterns of meaning across the interviews: gendered violence as state violence, carceral control of parenting, reproductive resistance, and demands for structural change. Findings indicate that reproductive injustice operates as a structural feature of carceral governance rather than an incidental consequence. Framed through reproductive justice in conversation with abolitionist feminist scholarship, the study highlights participant-generated visions for care-based, community-rooted alternatives. Implications emphasize the need for social work, policy, and advocacy approaches that reject punishment as a pathway to care and invest in autonomy, dignity, and collective support. 

The 2022 overturning of Roe v.Wade, rising threats to women’s reproductive rights, and increasing

populations of incarcerated women inspired this secondary analysis of qualitative data exploring the

intersections between reproductive justice and mass incarceration. The original phenomenological

study focused on women’s perspectives on their interactions with law enforcement and the criminal

legal system at the time of their arrests. Participants were recruited from a women’s drop-in center

for a three-round interview process. This secondary study revisited 13 participants’ transcripts

to explore how the legal system intersected with and contributed to reproductive injustice.

De-identified transcripts were analyzed using open coding and focused coding to identify themes

and sub-themes. Four primary themes emerged, revealing a range of systemic inadequacies and

the need for systemic reforms in the legal system: parental rights, healthcare access, economic challenges

and homelessness, and systemic bias and discrimination. These findings amplify the oftenoverlooked

voices of those with direct lived experiences, with participants clearly emphasizing

the urgent need for adequate and equitable support and treatment. From a critical feminist perspective,

the analysis links mass incarceration with reproductive injustice, highlighting intersecting

systems of oppression.