Abortion as Gender Transgression: Reproductive Justice, Queer Theory, and Anti-Crisis Pregnancy Center Activism

"Abortion as Gender Transgression" tells the story of End Fake Clinics, a queer reproductive justice student club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that worked with their student government to make UCSB the only university to ban crisis pregnancy centers from falsely advertising on campus. In this article-the first to analyze anti-crisis pregnancy center activism-we draw from End Fake Clinics' work to outline the contours of what a queer reproductive justice politic might entail. Through archiving and analyzing End Fake Clinics' Queering Reproductive Justice workshop, we argue that approaching abortion as a form of gender transgression allows us to recognize deeper connections between queer and reproductive issues, as well as to complicate this very distinction. In the case of End Fake Clinics, creating a queer reproductive justice politic was enabled, we argue, by the deep affective connections developed through the group as well as by participants' collective belief that their activism would be best when informed by feminist and queer theory. In discussing what we describe as End Fake Clinics' epistemologically based and affectively bound activism, we expand on the limited feminist scholarship on crisis pregnancy centers and queer theoretical scholarship on reproduction, putting these bodies of thought into conversation in new ways. As reproductive justice activists and scholars have begun to use the phrase "queering reproductive justice" to refer to the reproductive concerns of LGBTQ people, and as increasing numbers of LGBTQ people engage in reproduction, End Fake Clinics provides us with more complicated ways to approach queering reproductive justice beyond such identitarian models.