Session: Beyond Birth Control and Abortion: Reproductive Justice, Emerging Adulthood, and Social Work Research (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Rooted in human rights, reproductive justice is a social movement, feminist praxis, and intersectional theoretical and analytic frame. Reproductive justice emerged in the 1990s, conceived of by U.S. women of African descent frustrated with mainstream feminists’ rhetoric around reproductive “choice” and singular focus on abortion when many women of color faced tremendous challenges in parenting and sustaining their families. At its core, reproductive justice is concerned with promoting the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent with dignity, as well as to sexual and bodily autonomy for all.

Both social work research and reproductive justice share a commitment to furthering and shaping knowledge towards a more equitable society. Despite its pertinence, social work scholarship engaging reproductive justice is limited. This symposium highlights methodologically diverse research with emerging adults in order to advance both research and practice approaches. Using reproductive justice as a guiding frame, these four studies offer a means of operationalizing core social work values –justice, self-determination, and dignity– for practice and research with emerging adults.

To ground our discussion, Paper 1 provides a discourse analysis of the term “family planning” in recent social work scholarship focused on adolescents and emerging adults. The authors find that family planning is an understudied topic, and the scant literature does not engage reproductive justice. Two qualitative papers explore family planning desires. Paper 2 focuses on 20 transmasculine and genderqueer emerging adults. While few participants desired biological children, many expressed interest in fostering or adopting and were concerned with financial barriers, discrimination from providers, and lack of availability of trans-specific research, services, and information. Paper 3 draws on data from 50 young couples to investigate pregnancy desires. Structural inequities, which may already condense the transition to adulthood, influenced the trajectory from pregnancy desires to plans to actualization of goals. Emerging adults without social and economic advantage often found the notion of pregnancy planning to be immaterial when structural barriers to pregnancy preparedness appeared intractable. Paper 4 also examines the couple context, quantitatively investigating the relationship between young Latino couples’ (n=227) comfort with sexual communication and recent condom use. This study highlights the importance of relational context and shifting away from gendered approaches to sexual health promotion that reinforce women’s responsibility to bear the burden of pregnancy prevention.

By centering reproductive justice, this symposium locates conceptual and practice gaps in social work scholarship focused on emerging adults. Given that social justice is one of social work’s core values, a reproductive justice approach is a natural fit for advancing scholarship that centers the perspectives of emerging adults, particularly at the intersection of racial, class, and gender oppression. Attending to reproductive justice can advance robust social work scholarship, as well as inform practice approaches attuned to young people’s lived experiences.