Dying for life: reproductive governance redux … redux … redux

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• . As the articles in this issue clearly demonstrate, the many violences associated with reproductive governance are relentlessly presented as, or masquerade as, “something else”: a concern with criminal or immoral behaviors, for example, sometimes resulting in a moral panic; the imposition of allegedly necessary controls, most often on women’s and other Othered bodies; or the placement of those bodies outside the realms of dignity and humanity, which so often materializes through racialized discourses, as with migrants, for example.

• We present the articles in this issue, all of which offer rich analyses around reproductive and gender/sexual governance, in that spirit.

• Belfrage offers a nuanced approach to the ways in which power is shifting through abortifacient pills, not only in the hands of women, but also within processes of neoliberal governance that are ongoing, partial, and contested

• Madeleine Belfrage, whose article works to conceptualize self-induced abortion as a part of reproductive governance mechanisms in Mexico.

• while this change was potentially feminist in its orientation, implicitly acknowledging the limits of the essentialist, pronatalist approach of the MNCH policies, its implementation followed a neoliberal, developmentalist approach committed to a human capital model of empowerment, which transformed the maternal subject into a wise capital investment by focusing mainly on pregnant adolescents.

• She queries what the implications of this paradox are for gender justice, particularly concerning its impacts for countries, communities, and individuals in the Global South.

• In her analysis of Canada’s evolving global reproductive policy commitments in the context of global maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH) policy since 2010, Candace Johnson