Borders and Reproductive Violence
Borders built on colonialism, racism and structural dispossession are designed and enforced to exclude and externalise people. From Gaza, to the English Channel; from pregnant women incarcerated in Larne House immigration detention centre to mothers kept apart from their children by the UK’s broken family reunion system; reproductive violence is not just a consequence of border regimes but a deliberate outcome.
In recent weeks the medical journal, The Lancet asked: ‘Will there be a future for newborns in Gaza?’; citing an unprecedented rise in maternal deaths, miscarriages and stillbirths as a result of Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Blockades, destruction of hospitals and homes, widespread malnutrition and the perpetual displacement of people akin to modern day ‘death marches’, are evidence that women and children are not ‘collateral damage’, but direct targets of state and supranational body mandated gender violence. The EU might present itself as a project of human rights, peace and democracy but the gendered and racialised violence at the core of its Frontex-led border regime and its inaction on Gaza reveal this narrative as untenable.
Doctors Without Borders describe 2024 as the deadliest year for English Channel crossings in the last eight decades, with at least 70 people losing their lives or going missing while attempting the journey. Afghans were the nationality most often recorded crossing the Channel; where is the support for Afghan women fleeing the Taliban? Instead of humanity and compassion, the EU - with the UK’s support - has opted for militarisation of the border and an ever-expanding EU border guard, Frontex, who spearhead a ‘forever war’ on the global movement of people. The six children and a pregnant woman who died after a boat carrying dozens of people trying to reach the UK was ‘ripped open’ were not just ‘collateral damage’ but a deliberate outcome of a state-sanctioned gender violence that continues to ignore calls for safe routes.
The broken family reunion system which pushes people into making dangerous journeys is expensive, bureaucratic, often prohibitively evidential, based on insurmountable hurdles and is symptomatic of a system that sees a case file and not a mother, yearning to be reunited with her child. Not ‘collateral damage’, but the deliberate outcome of a system of state reproductive violence.
Closer to home, in Larne House immigration detention centre, we discovered through an FOI request that eight pregnant women had been detained there between 2016 and 2022. Reproductive justice means a society where the reproductive health and rights of women and pregnant people are fully available to all without discrimination. It includes the right to a safe pregnancy, to give birth with dignity, to have equal access to maternity healthcare, to have babies born into safe environment, yet this is not the case in Northern Ireland. The withdrawal of reproductive justice by those enforcing border regimes is not ‘collateral damage’, but the direct outcome of state gender violence. Larne House, opened in 2011, is a monument to racism and xenophobia and exists as the infrastructure of border regime reproductive violence. It must be shut down immediately.
Our feminist solidarity with those suffering reproductive violence doesn’t stop at borders. There is no such thing as ‘collateral damage’ when systems are designed to harm. Today and every day, we commit to resisting reproductive violence and injustice wherever and whenever it is meted out.
End Deportations Belfast is a campaign group opposing border regimes, detention and deportation in Northern Ireland.
https://enddeportationsbelfast.com/
