Pitt’s Center for Health Equity and Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child Health hosted a virtual panel on reproductive justice on Jan. 21.
Panelists discussed how recent challenges to reproductive care, immigration and birthright citizenship reflect the discriminatory treatment of several marginalized groups throughout history.
Arti Walker-Peddakotla, a William H. Hastie fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said a recent Supreme Court decision that allows ICE agents to stop individuals based on race, ethnicity, an apparent accent or their occupation promotes similar discriminatory practices that have been used to target marginalized women throughout history.
“The Supreme Court has now legitimized racial profiling and immigration enforcement in the Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo case, holding that the reasonable suspicion standard for an immigration stop now includes the ability for ICE agents to stop and ask individuals about their immigration status,” Walker-Peddakotla said.
According to Walker-Peddakotla, law enforcement agents are using surveillance and facial recognition technologies to similarly track and detain immigrants and people seeking abortion access, despite research that such technologies are prone to errors.
“You can work with your council members in Pittsburgh to get them to cancel their surveillance contracts,” Walker-Peddakotla said. “The surveillance data that is collected by your local municipalities is fed to the federal government and to ICE and to DHS, and that is how they are tracking migrants and people seeking reproductive care.”
Walker-Peddakotla said recent attacks on reproductive rights and immigrants’ rights pave the way for discussion surrounding birthright citizenship.
“We can see this most clearly in the January 2025 executive order signed by President Trump that sought to strip birthright citizenship from children whose mothers were undocumented or on temporary visas and whose fathers were not citizens or lawful permanent residents,” Walker-Peddakotla said.
Theresa Chapple-McGruder, a professor in the School of Public Health and director of the Center for Health Equity, said she has seen firsthand the effects of ICE on communities in Chicago, specifically pertaining to healthcare, during Operation Midway Blitz from September through November of 2025.
“I have personally seen — during the 67 days in Chicago — that people did not go and get their routine medical care,” Chapple-McGruder said. “People didn’t go for their prenatal care. People stayed indoors because they were afraid of what’s happening outside.”
Gabrielle Evans-Mitchell, postdoctoral scholar in the School of Public Health, pointed out that reproductive injustices are much more recent than many might realize.
“A lot of people think that a lot of these reproductive injustices were done way, way back when but it actually happened in the 1960s and ‘70s under the Nixon administration,” Eddins said. “Approximately 25 to 50 percent of native women and girls, as young as 15, were forcibly sterilized through the Indian Health Service without proper consent or through coercion.”
Evans-Mitchell said skepticism around medicine and medical providers during the COVID-19 pandemic was a lasting effect of reproductive injustices such as the forced sterilization of native women and girls.
“We saw a lot of medical mistrust when it came to the COVID vaccine because of what happened with reproductive health,” Evans-Mitchell said. “We’re still seeing it when [women] are afraid to go to the doctor to talk about their birth control options or they’re being pressured to choose [certain] options because the healthcare provider is saying, ‘This is what you need.’”
Fabiola Morales González, a Pitt graduate with a Master’s of Public Health in epidemiology, said recent anti-immigration and anti-abortion crackdowns are a means to maintain power over marginalized groups.
“We’re seeing this pattern through immigration policies and the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” González said. “It’s really about controlling not just health but who belongs — whose families matter and whose futures are worth protecting.”
Through her research, González said she has discovered trends of governmental control over female reproduction in Puerto Rico, similar to those of Native American groups.
“In 1937, there’s this law — Law 116 — that essentially legalized sterilization and framed it as a solution to poverty and unemployment in Puerto Rico,” González said. “You had this environment where what looked like choice was really just structural inequality by limiting people’s options.”
Less than two decades after Law 116 was enacted, early clinical trials for the birth control pill took place in Puerto Rico in 1955. About 200 women were participants in the first large-scale clinical trials, many of which died in the process.
“Puerto Rico was chosen for a reason, just as Native Americans and African Americans,” González said. “The colonial status that Puerto Rico has means that there’s fewer legal barriers than the United States in some cases.”
Crystal Eddins, a professor in the sociology department, said the reproductive rights of Black women today are a result of systematic oppression that began during the transatlantic slave trade.
“The lack of bodily autonomy, the lack of family creation and the meanings of family is a significant legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas,” Eddins said. “During slavery, families were routinely separated and sold from one another. That continued to divide family units and undermined what it meant to be a parent and a mother.”
Throughout the transatlantic slave trade and the centuries that followed, Eddins said Black women’s fertility continued to be controlled, and their children became “a form of property,” a system that left lasting effects on reproduction.
“The ways that the reproductive justice framework considers the right to have children and the right to raise existing children reflects this historical development around the forcible reproduction that enslaved women endured,” Eddins said. “As we approach the 20th and 21st century, we still see examples of where that struggle over bodily autonomy and family formation continues.”
Eddins said it is important to stand up for one another moving forward in order to fight against the systems that have historically oppressed minority groups.
“Structures of imperialism create these patterns where the U.S. exerts its dominance on Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican [and] Latin American communities,” Eddins said. “Trying to build networks of solidarity is something that is needed in this day around reproductive justice [and] other issues, especially among communities that are facing attacks in many different directions.”