‘The reproductive rights movement frames the issues around individual “choice” - does the woman have the choice to have or not to have an abortion. This analysis obscures all the social conditions that prevent women from having and making real choices - lack of health care, poverty, lack of social services, etc…. In the Native context, where women often find the only contraceptives available to them are dangerous… where they live in communities in which unemployment rates can run as high as 80 percent, and where their life expectancy can be as low as 47 years, reproductive “choice” defined so narrowly is a meaningless concept. Instead, Native women and men must fight for community self-determination and sovereignty over their health care….’

‘“Choice”… became a symbol of middle-class women’s arrival as independent consumers. Middle-class women could afford to choose. They had earned the right to choose motherhood, if they liked. According to many Americans, however, when choice was associated with poor women, it became a symbol of illegitimacy. Poor women had not earned the right to choose.’

…while the pro-choice camp contends that the pro-life position diminishes the rights of women in favor of “fetal” rights, the pro-choice position actually does not ascribe inherent rights to women either. Rather, women are ascribed reproductive choices if they can afford them or if they are deemed legitimate choice-makers.

The consequence of the “choice” paradigm is that its advocates often take positions that are oppressive to women from marginalized communities. For instance, this paradigm often makes it difficult to develop nuanced positions on the use of abortion when the fetus is determined to have abnormalities. Focusing solely on the woman’s choice to have or not have this child does not address the larger context of a society that sees children with disabilities as having lives not worth living and that provides inadequate resources to women who may otherwise want to have them….