Stratified reproduction is a widely used[1] social scientific concept, created by Shellee Colen, that describes imbalances in the ability of people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, and genders to reproduce and nurture their children.
[2] Researchers use the concept to describe the "power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered," as Rayna Rapp and Faye D. Ginsburg defined the term in 1995.
In a broader sense, stratified reproduction asserts that certain categories of people are encouraged and coerced to reproduced while others are systematically discouraged to do so.
The capacity to control one's reproductive choices is unequally distributed among race, sexual orientation, gender, class and socioeconomic status.
[5] In 1984, Shellee Colen coined the term "stratified reproduction" when studying West Indian childcare workers in New York City, who typically worked for wealthier white families.
Colen drew the conclusion that child birth and childcare is experienced, valued, and rewarded differently depending on a mother's socioeconomic status and availability of resources.
[3] They touch on Shellee Colen's research on West Indian nannies in New York and how they are unable to participate in their own child's childcare, because they must immigrate to America to find work to support their family.
[6] State policy required the Romanian women to birth at least four children in hopes of increasing the population for a more efficient socialist country.
They also discuss China’s limit on the maximum number of children per household, and low-income African American women’s struggle to obtain proper contraceptives and abortions.
Scarce financial resources deters mothers from being able to reach effective medical services to help prevent infertility.
In Central and Southern Africa "two-thirds of infertile women have diagnoses of tubal blockage attributable to sterilizing RTIs [Reproductive Tract Infections]" which is exactly what IVF was developed for.
[10] Without public or even insurance company funding for these ARTs, this suggest that those in a higher socioeconomic standing should be able to reproduce, while those who cannot afford these treatments should not have the same ability to do so.
[4] Sheoran uses Shellee Colen's 'stratified reproduction' conceptual framing to propose that contraception is experienced hierarchically in places like India.
Sheoran, when writing of Emergency Contraceptive Pills in India writes, 'ECPs in India thus make visible the reality of ‘stratified contraception,’ even as these technologies make inviting claims of eradicating stratification by providing all women with access to these pills at the local pharmacy'(pg.
This data is found to be surprising taking into consideration that women of color are less likely to receive reproductive care or have health insurance to cover the costs of this procedure.
These stories provided evidence that the United States had funded forced sterilization of Latino people and other ethnic groups.
He writes that their presence promoted anti-immigration sentiment and advertising suggesting that they should leave the United States and that their fertility was not welcome in the country.
Segregated communities often are characterized by more crime, greater pollution, higher population densities, more poverty, and fewer and lower-quality services, leading to infant mortality.
[19] This includes forms of environmental injustice, which incorporates the unfair plotting of landfill facilities and the deliberate targeting of minority and low-income communities as repositories for hazardous waste sites.
[20] Even though residential segregation affects various minority groups, in the United States there are stark health discrepancies between black woman and their white counterparts.