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Women with an opinion on reproduction
One woman cleverly evaded an arranged marriage at age 10 by discoloring her teeth. A dozen endured horrific violence at the foundation of modern gynecology. Others gifted each other with durable underwear to protect their bodily autonomy postmortem.
In a nutshell (or an eggshell): Reproduction has meant many different things to many different women. Views on the role of childbirth, reproductive rights, sexuality, and the female body have fluctuated through time and place. In ancient Greece women were viewed as generators of life and souls. Over the following centuries many women took on the role of biological reproduction machines, with population growth and population control dictating how many babies women should have. In the wake of the Black Death of the 14th century, some members of the Christian clergy encouraged spouses to honor each otherâs desire for sexual gratification. In the 20th century womenâs and human rights entered the picture, with reproductive justice and sexual rights front and center. Today reproduction can exist outside the body, through sperm-egg test tubes and IVF treatments. With all that change the stakes for people who give birth have always been high. Pregnancy and childbirth are costly processes, increasing cardiac output, hypercoagulability, abdominal obesity, and risk of gestational diabetes. Reproduction impacts other pressing matters such as childcare, public health, and social inequality. Today statistics gathered by the United Nations indicate that at least 250 million women lack access to reproductive health services, family planning, and contraception. Actions to address this are complex and seemingly never-ending.
This list encapsulates century-defining women whose opinions and perceptions of reproduction continue to shape everyday lives, policy, and feminist pursuits.
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Minoans (ancient Greece)
Minoans had a lot to say about reproduction, and we didnât even know.
Bronze Age Minoan women practiced far more complex reproductive health care than they are typically given credit for. Minoan civilization, which flourished from about 3000 bce to about 1100 bce, is believed by some scholars to have been one of the earliest known matriarchies. Minoan frescoes and artifacts depict bull-leaping women, the snake goddess (associated with power, fertility, and the cycle of life), and the midwife goddess Eileithyia. Still largely unfamiliar to most people are the figurines found in Petsophas and other Minoan sanctuaries. These depict women, often pregnant and in birthing positions, with detailed anatomical models, challenging the notion that medicine and obstetrics were only developed later on. Notably, figurines of weasels have also been found. The animals, once ignored as common pests, in fact played a significant pharmacological and sacred role in delivery: Their parts were used in ancient uterine and gynecological treatments, helping stimulate contractions or manage labor.
Icamiabas (Amazonian mythology and history)
Reproduction could be sacred and transactional for Icamiabas.
The Icamiabas were a group of likely fictional Indigenous women who settled on the margin of the Yacy-uaruĂĄ Lake in what is now the Amazon. Having rejected the patriarchal grasp and formed women-only villages, the Icamiabas exercised bodily autonomy, reproductive choice, and cosmic sexuality unlike many modern women. Once a year they engaged in a structured fertility ritual, in which neighboring male groups were invited to reproduce under the moonlight, a symbol of maternity and renewal. The women would dive deep into the rivers to gather clay and stone from which they would sculpt protective talismans, called muiraquitĂŁs, to gift to the men. The Icamiabas kept the daughters and gave the sons back to their fathers, preserving the female group. The Spanish chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal recorded a 1542 encounter with a group of Indigenous women warriors (whom some later identified as the Icamiabas), comparing them to the Greek Amazon warriorsâhence Amazon forest, river, and region. Their tale may be myth or a reality covered up by defeated colonizers. Regardless, their DNA of resistance lives today within Indigenous women activists in South America, who invoke the heritage of the Icamiabas to protect the environment and its people against gender-based violence.
Foremothers of modern gynecology (Antebellum U.S.)
Modern gynecology was born from the enslavement of Black women and girls.
The uncredited foremothers of modern gynecology were the dozen, if not more, enslaved Black women and girls horrifically operated on between 1844 and 1849. Subjected to nonconsensual experimental surgeriesâfor which permission was granted only by their ownersâthese women brought to fruition repair techniques for post-childbirth complications, such as the vaginal fistula repair. The surgeon, James Marion Sims, often referred to as the father of gynecology, brazenly refused to administer anesthesia to his Black victims. Sims recorded some of their names in his writings: Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey. âLucyâs agony was extreme,â he wrote about an hour-long surgery that resulted in her illness and blood poisoning. He operated on Anarcha 30 times before a single procedure was deemed safe for white women. Today this legacy of ignoring or erasing Black womenâs pain contributes to their maternal mortality rate being more than three times higher than that of white women.
Red Stocking movement (1970s Denmark)
In Denmark the fight against bodily oppression moved from the home to the streets.
The Danish Red Stocking movement, or RĂždstrĂžmpebevĂŠgelsen, was established in 1970 and remained active until the mid-1980s, tying reproductive rights to workplace discrimination. The movement was inspired by the New York City Redstockings, a movement founded in 1969 with similar left-wing feminist values. The Danish women advocated for free abortion, contraception, maternity leave, equal pay, gender studies at universities, and gynecological self-education. Some women connected to the movement even contested taboos around menstruation. Their impact was tangible: They secured the right to free abortion in 1973, equal pay legislation in 1976, and a longer maternity leave in 1980. While three-quarters of Danish women were housewives in 1960, nearly half were in the workforce by 1985. Their achievements also had an impact farther north, sparking the Icelandic womenâs strike on October 24, 1975.
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Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt)
Women are not rabbits, according to El Saadawi.
âThat men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another,â wrote the Egyptian author, physician, and psychiatrist Nawal El Saadawi in her 1975 book Woman at Point Zero. As a child, the historical, socialist feminist was intellectually gifted but praised only when she learned how to light a kerosene stove. After her clitoridectomy at age six and near arranged marriage at 10âwhich she evaded by eating eggplant and discoloring her teethâEl Saadawi devoted her life to campaigning against female genital cutting (FGC; technically outlawed in 2008), the constraints of marriage on wives, and menâs control over womenâs education and bodies. âWeâre not rabbits,â she famously said. Some of her more than 50 books were banned for broaching sexuality, FGC, and sex work. El Saadawi was imprisoned in 1981, and during this time she wrote Memoirs from the Womenâs Prison (1983) using toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil smuggled in by a sex worker. She exemplified the sovereignty of the mind even in bodily confinement.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (contemporary U.S.)
Both men and women stand to gain from reproductive rights in RBGâs eyes.
Feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) was the second woman to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a justice, she pioneered womenâs rights, supporting abortion, equal responsibility for childcare, and equality in reproduction. Having faced discrimination in the workplace because she was pregnant and having built a loving partnership with her law school sweetheart Martin D. Ginsburg, RBG refused to pigeonhole men and women in traditional gender roles. She argued that equal treatment of women and men gives both more freedom to choose how they live. In a 1993 New York University Law School speech, she claimed that the 1973 Roe v. Wade caseâwhich ruled that the right to privacy extended to a womanâs choice to have an abortionââhalted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and therebyâŠprolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.â In 2022 Roe v. Wade was overturned. When RBG passed in 2020 (having served the rest of her life on the Supreme Court), her death overshadowed the outrage over newly discovered coerced hysterectomies and mass sterilization of immigrant women in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. This was an unfortunate twist of fate for a lifelong supporter of womenâs rights. RBGâs purpose and achievements remain ever relevant in the current backdrop of reproductive rights.
Chantawipa Apisuk (Thailand)
For Apisuk, sex work can be powerful.
Activist Chantawipa Apisuk posits that consensual sex work does not always entail victimhood; it can be an empowering source of income. Through her Empower Foundation, founded in 1985, Apisuk helps several thousand sex workers in Thailand with political tools to defend their rights to safer-sex resources, bodily autonomy, and HIV/AIDS prevention. She educates about reproductive health without pressuring women to leave the sex industry. After all, the demand-driven trade injected capital into the Thai economy during the Vietnam War (1954â75) and in 2015 generated an estimated $6.4 billion in annual revenue. Apisuk warns against rescue raids and state-run detention centers that attempt to remove young girls and women from the outlawed sex economy. She argues that they undergo more psychological and financial harm through criminalization than in sex work itself and campaigns for labor rights and the decriminalization of sex work.
Rigoberta MenchĂș Tum (Guatemala)
For MenchĂș the Indigenous womb is inseparable from the struggle for survival.
The Kâicheâ Maya activist Rigoberta MenchĂș Tum is at the forefront of reconciliation and justice following the Guatemalan Civil War (1960â96). The 1992 Nobel laureate sees reproductive justice as a fight against colonial rule, exploring the complicated roles that Indigenous women play in their Guatemalan communities: They are considered cosmologically sacred extensions of the earth but still experience machismo in their communities. They question the value Guatemalan society places on motherhood when many Indigenous children are systematically starved, killed by poverty, or slaughtered by military death squads. Since before the civil war, which decimated over 450 Maya villages, Indigenous communities have continuously struggled through structural poverty, colonial genocide, and high child mortality. MenchĂșâs political militancy comes before her traditional domestic role as the only way to guarantee the survival of her people. In 1981 MenchĂș fled to Mexico after her family was killedâher father was accused of guerrilla activities and died in a fire while protesting, her brother was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, and her mother was kidnapped, raped, and mutilated. In 2007 and 2011 she ran for president of Guatemala but did not win. Today she supports Indigenous survivors of sexual violence, such as 15 women survivors (respectfully called abuelas) who brought the 2016 Sepur Zarco trialâthe first time that former military officers were convicted by a national court of using sexual violence and domestic slavery as weapons of war.
The Zapatista womenâs movement (Mexico)
Reproductive justice for Zapatista women goes beyond colonialism and capitalism.
In the 1990s women of Chiapas, Mexico, were faced with slim odds: 117 out of every 100,000 women died in childbirth because of lack of health care; most teen girls were sold into marriage, giving birth to an average of seven children; 67 percent of the state was malnourished; 60 percent of women were illiterate; and more than 40 percent were monolingual, speaking only their native language, not Spanish. In the late 20th century the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EjĂ©rcito Zapatista de LiberaciĂłn Nacional; EZLN), named for the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, was founded to protect Indigenous communities. Its 1993 Womenâs Revolutionary Law, enacted in EZLN de facto territory, not Mexican law, sought to address sexual and domestic violence. The law protected Zapatista womenâs right to control their fertility, marriage, and communities alongside men, juntos y a la par (side by side). âWe are equal because we are different,â they said, believing male and female roles to be fluid and complementary opposites. In practice, however, Indigenous men largely remained in charge and fulfilled requests only when convenient for them. Issues with contraceptives, female hygiene, and sexually transmitted diseases prevailed. Researchers note that addressing the roots of gender inequality and poor reproductive justice in their own communityâbeyond the grasp of corporate extractivism (an economic and political model of removing natural resources and raw materials), colonial legacies, and displacement of Indigenous peoplesâwill determine whether Zapatista womenâs reproductive policies translate from paper into reality.
Kurdish womenâs movement (Kurdistan region)
Kurdish womenâs bodies are touched by the hands of foreign states.
For the Kurdish liberation movement, reproduction is not a matter of individual rights like in Western feminism; rather the female body is a sovereign zone of political warfare. Sexual violence is an element of the decades-long conflict between Turkey and Kurdish liberation groups, impacting 25 million Kurds and ethnic minorities in Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Some Kurdish women describe violations of their bodily autonomyâhaving something foreign planted into the Kurdish female body through torture, rape, and trauma in the collective memory. In the context of postmortem sexual mutilation, many women disassociate the spirits of their loved ones from their deceased bodies. Some female guerillas in the paramilitary force Womenâs Protection Units (YekĂźneyĂȘn Parastina Jin; YPJ) gift each other durable underwear before combat to protect bodily autonomy against postmortem sexual mutilation and virginity exams by enemy forces. At jineology (a combination of Kurdish jin, âwoman,â and -ology, âarea of knowledgeâ) academies, which center Kurdish women in knowledge production, they receive revolutionary education, and some reject biological reproduction. Many renounce traditional marriage and childbirth, redefining motherhood as a tool of social reproduction.
MĂłnica Roa (Colombia)
Roa proves that a threat to reproductive freedom is a threat to democracy.
MĂłnica Roa is the Colombian attorney and advocate who led the 2006 overturning of Colombiaâs total abortion banâwhereby the country joined more than 60 others with more liberal abortion laws. For Roa reproductive rights serve as a shield for democracy. She sees antiabortion movements as explicitly tied to the rise of authoritarianism. Her influence spans Latin America, with her strategic litigation setting the blueprint for the Green Wave (Marea Verde) feminist movement, which began in Argentina and rippled across the region. Roa advocates for cross-movement networks that unite such causes as reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and childrenâs welfare. The inclusion of religious voices is key in her work, demonstrating that human and reproductive rights can be compatible with, rather than opposed to, religious faiths.
Nadia Murad (Iraq)
Sexual violence such as that experienced by Murad does not need to be a silent tragedy of war.
Nadia Murad is a YazÄ«dÄ« activist and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, alongside Denis Mukwege. In August 2014 she was one of hundreds of women and children in Kocho, Iraq, who were captured by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and forced into sex slavery. She escaped after being held in captivity for three months, later saying, âI was not born to be a slave. I was born free.â Her refusal to be silent enabled her to transform her personal story into a global movement for justice. She considers her storyâpublished in the 2018 memoir The Last Girlâher best weapon. After treating the female body as occupied territory, perpetrators are supposedly scared to face survivors in court. In 2017 Murad partnered with human rights attorney Amal Clooney to form an investigative team (UNITAD) and help draft UN Security Council Resolution 2467, centering survivors in conflict-related sexual violence prosecutions. She believes failing to hold terrorist groups accountable invites others to commit the same atrocities. Through her organization Nadiaâs Initiative she ensures reparations, education, and safe return for displaced communities, emphasizing that survivorsâ stories need not end with their trauma. Muradâs new beginning is her act of hope and resistance.
Nanfu Wang (China)
Chinaâs war against overpopulation became a war against its own people, as exposed by Wangâs film.
Chinese documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang produced and directed One Child Nation (2019) alongside Jialing Zhang to explore the legacy of Chinaâs one-child policy (late 1970sâ2016). Wang was born after the policy was announced. Her family was expecting a boyâhence the name Nanfu, meaning âman pillar.â When her brother was born, her parents paid a substantial fine, and their two-child family was stigmatized. The film outlines how reproduction was no longer a private choice when population control became militarized through mass sterilizations, late-stage abortions, and infant abandonment. An unauthorized pregnancy was an act of subversion. Conditioned by state propaganda and authoritarian policies, health care workers transformed into both the perpetrators and victims of the violations against womenâs bodies and autonomy. In one oral history a village midwife who performed some 60,000 forced abortions and sterilizations atoned by dedicating herself to the treatment of infertile women. In her 2020 TED talk Wang said, âEvery society is vulnerable to accepting propaganda as truth, and no society where propaganda replaces the truth can be truly free.â
Narges Mohammadi (Iran)
Control over reproductive health upholds a political dictatorship, argues Mohammadi.
Iranian journalist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi has faced prison sentences totaling more than four decades, dozens of lashes, and extensive solitary confinement for her human rights activism. Her arrests came as a result of protests against restrictions on reproductive rights and state-deployed sexual violence carried out in part by the morality police. Cutting off access to contraceptives serves the Iranian governmentâs goal of population growth, reinforcing womenâs primary role as reproducers. The epicenter of Mohammadi and othersâ resistance is in prison. While in Tehranâs Evin prison, Mohammadi has conducted hunger strikes, highlighting the medical neglect and sexual violence against female political prisoners. âI am convinced that if the Islamic Republic survives any war, it will not survive facing the women,â she said on International Womenâs Day in 2025. After years of separation from her children and exiled husband, Taghi Rahmani, her health has deteriorated in prison, marked by a heart attack in March 2026. Mohammadi insists the state control over the womb is a gender apartheidâone that serves to preserve political power and suppress democratic dissent. She calls for the prosecution of reproductive violence and limited freedoms under international law: âIsnât it time we call gender apartheid a crime against humanity?â
Beyond chronology
Though these women are presented across history, the progress they envisioned rarely followed a linear path. The protection of womenâs bodies can be legally guaranteed and suddenly vanish. This makes the opinions and actions of women in any given time and space relevant, needed, and powerful.