Thoughts on Today's Lecture--Reproductive Justice

I can't stop thinking about today's guest speakers and what they had to say about reproductive rights, population control, and eugenics. I have never heard of some of the ideas they discussed, and I think it's important to know about it...I'm glad I do now! The idea raised in class about blaming fertility as the root cause of social conditions and environment degradation was the most stunning to me. As someone else mentioned in class (I think it was Rosie), I also have never thought about the relations between population control, reproductive rights, and the environment. The best example was given through their media/visual presentation picture about what family planning can do to our environment. Many of us had different interpretations, which for me tells us what a complex and difficult issue this is. Looking at it from all of the angles we discussed in class, it seems like there are two main issues: either people aren't given their "reproductive right" and allowed to have a family due to discriminatory factors that come through politically and socially OR the questioning of who should and should not be reproduced based on the same political and social factors of discrimination. Both of these issues seem legitimate, but what is the other side arguing? What is keeping us from eliminating these issues? It stems directly from the same things we've been talking about in class about prejudices of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. How is it that we're already able to label someone before they have even entered into this world?