UC Santa Barbara

In state legislatures across the United States, a coalition of progressive, moderate, and conservative lawmakers have come together in the last twenty years around a common goal: funding highly effective contraception for low-income state residents. The political tensions and media debates about contraception suggest it could be a difficult area for bipartisan collaboration. In fact, it represents an area of rare interest convergence for some members of the two major political parties and, more broadly, for a wide range of stakeholders. This study analyzes how this process unfolded in two states, Texas and California. Drawing from fifty-five interviews with actors across the ecology of reproductive policy advocacy in Texas and California, alongside qualitative content analysis of documents published online by the organizations that employ them, I ask how reproductive policy advocates in these states discursively construct long-term, highly effective contraception for low-income residents as a worthwhile state investment. Placing these efforts in the broader historical context of racialized and class-based reproductive control in the United States, I argue that framing low-income people’s pregnancies as expensive to the state, and long-term contraception as a solution, has been central to this process. I find that some stakeholders have drawn on the rhetorical construction of low-income people as simultaneously capable of reducing state spending by not becoming pregnant and too unreliable to take a daily oral contraceptive. I theorize these interrelated processes as reproductive responsibilization. I argue, moreover, that advocates should move toward a more sustainable advocacy in pursuit of the deeply important goals of expanding reproductive justice and access to reproductive healthcare.