Pursuing Reproductive Justice for Rainbow People in Aotearoa/New Zealand through Research: Insights from the Field

Abstract

Rainbow people experience unique challenges to equitable reproductive healthcare access and outcomes, resulting from entrenched norms and assumptions embedded in health services that anticipate, legitimise and privilege (White and able-bodied) cisgender, heterosexual women as the users of these services. This article presents a discussion of two recent Aotearoa/New Zealand research projects that have identified and addressed the effects of such norms and assumptions across two reproductive healthcare spaces: perinatal care and abortion care. The operation of cisheteronormativity within these services is explored through a reproductive justice lens that directs our attention to the broader power relations and social structures that shape and determine people’s control of their reproductive destinies. The need to address cisheteronormativity and its intersectional entanglement with other oppressive power relations, such as colonisation and racism, to secure Rainbow people’s reproductive self-determination is affirmed.