- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week, I mostly focused on preparing my final presentation for class. I did incorporate two new sources (see below). I feel like my argument is coming together and I’m almost ready to begin writing. I want to find more news sources, including some more conservative ones.
Lopez, Iris. 2008. Matters of choice: Puerto Rican women’s struggle for reproductive freedom. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
This book is a great example of how “choices” made under extremely limiting circumstances are not evidence of reproductive justice. The Puerto Rican women in this book choose to get sterilized at extremely high rates, but it is because they have very little money, access to healthcare, and access to other forms of birth control. Lopez also explains how this group of women has historically been discriminated against and the impact that their lack of autonomy has on their reproductive habits. This is a good source for my argument about the flawed language of choice.
Kennedy, Angela. “Abortion, Patriarchy, Neoliberalism.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 90, no. 358 (2001): 162-70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30095455.
This journal article is one of the best and most interesting that I’ve found in this research. Kennedy makes several arguments that are crucial to my research, particularly regarding the neoliberal construction of good vs. bad pregnancies. I definitely want to rely on this article to support some of my central points about the ways in which neoliberalism effectively limits the reproductive choices of women while perpetuating the rhetoric of choice.