Paper short abstract:

This paper evaluates the concept of reproductive rights in the context of Puerto Rican women’s notions of reproductive freedom and their experiences with sterilization. It analyzes how women make fertility decisions and their individual, social, cultural, and historical constraints.

Paper long abstract:

In the twenty first century Puerto Rican women have the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of tubal ligation in the world. La operación, as Puerto Rican women colloquially refer to sterilization, is an integral part of Puerto Rico's colonial political history and cultural beliefs. This paper traces how sterilization, a method of population control, was transformed into a popular method of fertility control over four decades. Drawing upon twenty-five years of research on sterilized Puerto Rican women from five different households in Brooklyn, New York (15 families), I explore the interplay between Puerto Rican women's agency and constraints. This framework transcends the traditional binary framework that classifies Puerto Rican women either as victims or agents who exercise complete reproductive freedom. Instead it explores la operación within the broader context of an integral model of reproductive freedom. This model critically evaluates the concepts of reproductive rights and "choice" for their individualistic cultural ideology and examines Puerto Rican women's notions of reproductive freedom based on their individual, cultural, social, and historical experiences. Rather than just engaging in a rights discourse, the women's voices centered on their family's and community's needs and relationships as well as their own. This has implications for how rights are understood and used by such women and calls for a more expansive framework for addressing health inequalities with respect to women's reproduction as well as for promoting development.