Murillo and Reed-Sandoval

Posted: Wed, Sep 17, 2025

Jigsaw

Stage 1: Expert Groups

I’ll assign each group to become the expert on one of two passages. Focusing on the passage you’ve been given, please work together on the following questions (one student should take notes, which I will ask you to post to CourseWorks > Discussions along with everybody’s names):

  • What is the story being told?
  • What broader point does the author use the story to make?
  • What does the author take reproductive rights to be an issue of? That is, what for them is at stake in discussions of reproductive rights?
  • What does the author’s discussion add to the analyses of reproductive rights we’ve looked at so far? In other words, what have prior analyses missed?
  • How is the author’s methodology different from what we’ve seen?

Here are the passages:

  1. Cheryl Bryant’s story, as told by Lina-Maria Murillo, pp. 795–96.
  2. Salma’s story, as told by Amy Reed-Sandoval, pp. 99–100.

Stage 2: New Intermixed Groups

Each expert group should have at least two cat persons and at least two dog persons. I’ll then ask you to find classmates of your species and form new groups.

In your new group, please first walk your classmates through the passage you are an expert on. Next, please reflect on the following questions as a group (again, one student should take notes, which I will ask you to post to CourseWorks > Discussions along with everybody’s names):

  • Is there a through line? How would you characterize what’s different about the analyses of reproductive rights in Murillo and Reed-Sandoval?
  • How should we approach the ethics of reproductive rights?

What are reproductive rights as an issue of?

  • Patient-physician autonomy?
  • Bodily autonomy?
  • Political/social equality?
    • Catharine MacKinnon: “In the usual argument, the abortion decision is made contingent on whether the fetus is a form of life. I cannot follow that. Why should women not make life or death decisions?”
    • Geduldig v. Aiello (1974): Pregnancy discrimination is not discrimination on the basis of sex under the Equal Protection Clause.
    • Salma’s story: Visibly pregnant + visibly Mexican + visibly working-class body aesthetic = presumptively “illegal.”
      • Legally documented vs. socially documented.
      • Pregnancy as an issue of reproductive biology vs. pregnancy as an issue of the social organization of reproduction.
    • Murillo: Racist tropes of Mexico as “filthy,” “dirty,” “immoral,” “backwards,” and “dangerous” “deployed to discredit Mexican providers were not abstractions but part of a century-long history of Mexicans and Mexico becoming scapegoats for failed US policies.”