Will Sex and Reproduction Remain Separable in the United States? It’s a Matter of Life and Death

Abstract

Gender scholars contend that heterosexual intercourse and reproduction were made separable in the second half of the twentieth century through social, legal, and technological developments. Widespread availability of the birth control pill, the legalization of abortion, and the emergence of assisted reproductive technologies alongside powerful social movements for gender, racial, and sexual equality enabled sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex. In this essay, we offer a brief review of this history before contemplating the likely dire future of the relationship between sexuality and reproduction in the coming years, especially given the 2024 American election results and threats to health privacy from new forms of digital surveillance. We discuss the very real possibility that (hetero)sex and reproduction may not remain separable in the United States, a health- and life-threatening situation that would affect people of all gender identities and sexualities.

Keywords

sex sexualities gender/race/class LGBTQ+reproduction contraception abortion assisted reproductive technologies IVF gender-affirming care reproductive justice law and policy digital privacy digital surveillance United States

Introduction

Reproductive politics in the United States has never been a sanguine business. But as Trump assumes the presidency for a second time, carting advisers who spent years plotting their return to power, political observers are predicting a massive new wave of restrictions on many different forms of bodily autonomy. A nationwide abortion ban, reduced access to contraception, limitations on assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), barriers to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people (which can include preserving gametes for future fertility); the list starts there and goes on and on and on (e.g., Bernstein, Friedrich-Karnik, and Damavandi 2024). Individual states have already enacted—or are attempting to enact—many of these restrictions. If Republicans, who gained control of all three branches of the federal government in the November 2024 elections, fully realize their draconian visions of reproductive fascism, a vast trove of empirical research is unequivocal that everyday existence will involve a great deal of avoidable suffering and even death.

In this essay, we argue that contemporary efforts to restrict reproductive decision-making can be understood as part of a broader history of the relationship between sex and reproduction. Gender scholars argue that twentieth-century social movements, technological developments such as the pill and IVF, and legal shifts enabled the separability of heterosexual intercourse from reproduction. This fostered “women’s liberation” by making possible decisions about if, when, and how to have children (e.g., Gordon 1976; Mitchell 1966 [1984]), albeit always constrained by intersecting inequalities of race, class, and sexuality (e.g., Ross and Solinger 2017). Given the intentions of conservative lawmakers to eliminate various forms of reproductive autonomy, coupled with novel digital threats to privacy, we pose the question of whether (hetero)sex and reproduction will remain separable in the coming years. If the answer is no, the evidence from historians and social scientists is clear that the consequences will be health- and life-threatening for people of all gender identities and sexualities. We conclude by making recommendations for scholars whose work is focused on gender, sexuality, health, and medicine during such a treacherous time for reproductive politics in our country.

Separating Sex and Reproduction in Twentieth-Century America

From Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir, feminist scholars have spent centuries challenging biology-based claims about women’s inferiority to men, claims that are often rooted in body parts associated with reproduction and sexuality.¹ Armed with the insight that the personal is political, the “second wave” of the women’s movement in the second half of the twentieth century was especially focused on the question of how to theorize the relationship between bodily sex differences (gametes, gonads, hormones, etc.) and the massive inequalities among women and men in realms such as education, income, and political power. De Beauvoir’s (1952 [1989]) famous intervention that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (p. 267) underscored the social construction of biology and was one of the foundations on which Gayle Rubin could insert a slash when conceptualizing the sex/gender system, “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity” (Rubin 1975:159). Challenging the myopic focus on sex and gender, the Black feminist Combahee River Collective (Collective 1977) developed an influential “integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” including “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression.”

These philosophical innovations emerged alongside major social movements oriented to equality based on gender, race, and sexuality as well as significant changes in the law and the development of new technologies, both contraceptive and conceptive. In 1959, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid, the first oral contraceptive pill, which became even more widely available—at least to married heterosexual couples—after the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) overturned that state’s nineteenth-century Comstock law banning contraception. Less than a decade later, the Supreme Court expanded the right to privacy established in Griswold with Roe v. Wade (1973), which made it legal for individuals to decide whether or not to continue their pregnancies. Meanwhile, fertility doctors were experimenting with various ways to “assist” reproduction, ranging from low-tech sperm insemination to high-tech IVF, first successfully performed in 1978.

Together, seismic shifts in social norms, legal rights, and technological options made possible the separation of heterosexual intercourse and reproduction in the latter half of the twentieth century.² In contrast to previous decades, when any episode of intercourse—whether wanted, unwanted, or coerced—could result in pregnancy, women could now use more reliable forms of contraception, and, if that failed, have an abortion. As Mitchell (1966 [1984]) argued at the time, reproduction was no longer an “unmodified biological fact” and women had more autonomy in choosing whether and when to have children (p. 32; see also Gordon 1976:417 and Luker 1984). Many took advantage of this greater reproductive control by delaying marriage and parenthood, exploring various forms of sexuality, seeking higher education, and pursuing careers (e.g., Bailey 2006; Goldin and Katz 2002).³

But while individual women, especially those whose privileges afforded them access to contraceptive technologies and education, could experience the separability of sex and reproduction as “liberation,” scholars such as Roberts (1997) underscore “how poverty, racism, sexism and other systems of power—often facilitated by government action—also impair people’s decisions about procreation” (p. 297, emphasis added). Pointing to the forced reproduction of Black women during slavery and unethical sterilization policies that persist into the present day, advocates and scholars led by the women-of-color collective SisterSong developed the reproductive justice framework, which contends that it is critical not only for people to have the right not to have children (via contraception or abortion), but also the right to have children and to parent them in safe communities (Luna 2020). One example of people being stripped of their right to have children is the large number of women of color and poor women who have been sterilized throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, either without their knowledge or with coerced consent (Sariego 2025; Stern 2005). This can involve the unwanted severing of sex and reproduction.

Another form of separation between heterosexual intercourse and reproduction was occasioned by conceptive technologies, such as “artificial” insemination, IVF, surrogacy, and egg and sperm donation.⁴ They allowed for the possibility of reproduction without sex and were taken up not only by heterosexual couples experiencing infertility (e.g., Becker 2000) but also by LGBTQ+ people and single women (e.g., Hertz 2006; Mamo 2007). The use of technology and/or the body parts and processes of third, fourth, or fifth parties constituted significant challenges to conventional definitions of the family, which had revolved around the “biogenetic kinship” formed by a married heterosexual couple using their own gametes to conceive and gestate a child they would parent (Franklin 2013). Yet here too, intersecting inequalities of race and class severely limit access to these often-expensive technologies (Bell 2014), especially in states where coverage by health insurance is not mandated.

Although in different ways, contraceptive and conceptive technologies available from the 1960s onward definitively interrupted the everyday ways that (hetero)sex → reproduction. Having sex could be for its own sake—for pleasure, not just for procreation. At the same time, it became possible to procreate without engaging in heterosexual intercourse: reproduction without sex. Importantly, these forms of separation between sex and reproduction aligned with a broader effort to disrupt traditional associations between female bodies, feminine gender norms, and cultural expectations of women. This ushered in more expansive understandings of everything from the relationship between body parts, gender identities, and sexualities (e.g., Butler 1990; Fausto-Sterling 2000) to women’s ever-increasing educational attainment, income, and career success (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2017). The question is: Are things about to change dramatically?

Will Sex and Reproduction Remain Separable in the United States?

Social conservatives have long opposed the separation of sex and reproduction, advocating for a social system in which sexuality is limited to heterosexual intercourse within marriage for the sole purpose of procreation, in which White, the marriage is ideally Christian, and the procreation requires no technology (e.g., Collins 1998; Gorski and Perry 2022). From papal statements against contraception, abortion, IVF, and gay marriage to the influential 1980s-era coalition for a “Moral Majority” or more recent state-level bans on abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, and gender-affirming care, there are endless examples of conservatives seeking to impose their narrow vision of the “charmed circle” (Rubin 1993) on all of us.⁵ But the difference now is their simultaneous ascendance to the top of all three branches of the federal government—the Presidency, the majority of seats on the Supreme Court, and majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives—where they have more power to define the relationship between sex and reproduction for hundreds of millions of Americans.

While it is impossible to predict exactly what will transpire, conservatives have made no secret of what they hope to accomplish. The Trump-stacked Supreme Court already eviscerated the federal right to abortion in 2022, and Justice Clarence Thomas suggested going even further, revisiting the right to privacy that undergirds longstanding precedents for contraceptive access and same-sex marriage (Stolberg 2022). The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, organized more than 50 organizations and at least 100 staffers from the first Trump administration to develop a 900+ page roadmap for changes to federal policy titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, which has colloquially come to be known as Project 2025. The first pillar is to “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children” (Dans and Groves 2023:4), with family being defined as “a married mother, father, and their children” (Dans and Groves 2023:451).

Specifically, Project 2025 advocates an end to insurance coverage for birth control that was mandated in the Affordable Care Act (Dans and Groves 2023:483), calls on a Trump-led FDA to reverse its decades-old approval of medication abortion (Dans and Groves 2023:458), argues that “mail-order abortions” be criminalized (Dans and Groves 2023:459), and calls for more attention to how “radical gender ideology is having a devastating effect on school-aged children today—especially young girls” (p. 346). As in previous Republican administrations, including Trump’s first presidency, the Mexico City Policy, more commonly known as the “global gag rule,” has been reinstated. This means that American conservatives’ reach extends beyond our borders by reducing support for sexual and reproductive health among organizations receiving U.S. aid, part of a broader effort to halt foreign aid programs, including dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (Wong and Mandavilli 2025).

Each and every attempt to reduce or eliminate access to contraception, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, and gender-affirming care should be understood as part of a concerted effort to undo the separability of (hetero)sex and reproduction. It involves not only dramatic restrictions on reproductive autonomy but a broader struggle over definitions of family and kinship, with conservative politicians seeking to be the ultimate arbiter of who should have children and how. If they succeed, the consequences will be dire for all Americans.

The Consequences Are Life and Death

When people do not have access to health services such as abortion, contraception, and gender-affirming care, the consequences can be life and death. In particular, efforts to ban abortion never fully succeed because people who do not want to be pregnant will often make every effort to end their pregnancies (Almeling and Svitak 2022). Abortion restrictions simply drive the practice underground, leading to tens of thousands of deaths every year in what The Lancet has called a “preventable pandemic” of unsafe abortion, that is, self-induced or performed by people without proper medical training (Grimes et al. 2006; see also Suh 2021). One of the most infamous attempts to eliminate abortion was perpetrated by the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who rendered it illegal with the stroke of a pen in 1966. Sociologist Kligman (1998) documented the excruciating results of 23 years of state interference in intimate life: nationalist demands that each family bear multiple children, regular pregnancy testing on the factory floor to ensure that those who became pregnant stayed that way, imprisonment of women and physicians, and thousands of unwanted children neglected in decrepit orphanages. Ultimately, more than 9,000 Romanian women died from complications related to unsafe abortions; Margaret Atwood has cited this history as one of the inspirations for her classic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Needless deaths are not the only consequence of abortion bans. Forced births are traumatic in and of themselves, with implications far beyond the nine months of gestation. The Turnaway Study (Foster 2021) conclusively demonstrated the many consequences of not being able to access a wanted abortion: increasing difficulty making ends meet, rising risks of bankruptcy and eviction, higher levels of physical violence from abusive partners, effects on childhood development, and increased rates of life-threatening complications and chronic health conditions. All of this is on top of stark racial inequalities in maternal mortality, with the latest figures showing Black women facing three times the risk of pregnancy-related death compared to White women (56 vs. 18 per 100,000; Hill et al. 2024). In addition, taking a page from the gender scholarship reviewed above, it is not out of the realm of possibility that rendering (hetero)sex less separable from reproduction could also reverse the gains in gender egalitarianism, women’s educational attainment and income, and the-less-measurable-but-just-as-important: individual well-being, self-efficacy, and happiness.

All of these consequences fall hardest on people who can become pregnant and are only exacerbated by the racialized and socioeconomic inequalities that continue to plague our society. But the ripple effects extend to their loved ones, their doctors, and frankly, anyone seeking health care whose treatment may be compromised by state interference in medical decisions. Even the most wanted pregnancy can go wrong in a thousand different ways, and when physicians cannot provide evidence-based prenatal care, people suffer and even die, a tragedy that is becoming an everyday reality in the United States in the wake of state-level abortion bans (Presser and Surana 2024).

It’s Not 1950

Even as conservative policies are already wreaking reproductive havoc across the country, it is hard to imagine they can fully turn back the clock to an earlier era. While under threat, legal protections for contraceptive access and same-sex relationships are still the law of the land. Technological developments such as medication abortion and hormone treatments make it more difficult to fully monitor and control decision-making about sexual and reproductive health. Culturally, we are a long way from 1950. Decades of activism within social movements for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, patients’ rights, and trans rights have powerfully shifted cultural norms and beliefs around gender, sexuality, and reproduction. National surveys reveal a declining proportion of Americans who espouse traditional beliefs in men’s superiority and more people embracing gender-egalitarian views (e.g., England, Levine, and Mishel 2020). More Americans are identifying as lesbian, gay, queer, transgender, nonbinary, and intersex (Reczek 2020), and they have benefited from increasing social support in recent decades (Adamczyk and Liao 2019). In addition, public support for legal abortion has remained remarkably stable for decades (Hout, Perrett, and Cowan 2022), reflected most recently in majorities voting to preserve abortion rights, even in very conservative states (Zernike 2024). These developments underscore that the conservative turn in politics is by no means indicative of the social and political beliefs held by most Americans.

Digital Surveillance

However, another way in which the current moment differs from the mid-twentieth century is the ubiquity and reach of digital technologies. Some of the world’s wealthiest men—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—run giant tech firms, including social media platforms used by billions of people, and each has worked to curry favor with the Trump administration (Scherer and Parker 2025). Concerns about the “broligarchy” (Norden and Weiner 2025) are compounded by how they reap substantial profits from the intertwining activities of the accrual and sale of user data to third-party digital advertisers (Vallas and Schor 2020).

Some of this data is created consciously by people in the form of user-generated content—what Fuchs (2012) terms “prosumer labor”—such as the logging of symptoms into a menstrual-tracking app. Yet, most data gathered by tech firms stems from what has been called “behavioral surplus” (Zuboff 2019) or “data exhaust” (Schüll 2019), which people leave behind as they wander the Internet, buying things, searching for information, using maps, and communicating via email and social media. Tech firms merge such data with machine learning algorithms to classify users, typically based on demographic categories such as race, gender, and sexuality. This form of classification is not only hard for individuals to see—because it happens behind layers of code—but is maintained by platform architects to generate a segmented user base that is desirable to digital advertisers, data brokers, and developers alike (Bivens 2017).

Harvesting user data en masse is not just a commercial jackpot for tech companies. It can also become a potent tool in the hands of any entity seeking to surveil the reproductive activities of individuals and populations. At present, when a doctor knows a patient is pregnant, it is considered specially protected health information under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). However, as Prince (2021) explains, HIPAA only applies when health information is used and disclosed by a narrow set of health-related actors (e.g., health plans and clinicians). The privacy protections do not extend to digital platforms, and tech firms exploit such loopholes to turn users’ health data into a product for sale. For example, anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers have purchased such data to send targeted ads to any person whose geolocation (culled from mobile phones) indicates they have been in the vicinity of an abortion clinic (Prince 2021).

Even more ominous is how tech firms’ data collection can work in tandem with the state, turning platforms into surveillance and investigative tools with clear legal ramifications. Following the overturn of Roe, there were widespread fears that digital technologies would be repurposed by authorities to root out newly defined reproductive criminality. Google, for example, already had an established history of responding to requests from law enforcement agencies seeking access to their vast collection of user data, including search history and location data. In just one six-month period in 2022, Google received nearly 47,000 such inquiries, implicating more than 100,000 accounts, and responded with data to 80 percent of the requests (Bhuiyan 2022). While not all of these requests involved cases seeking to criminalize individuals’ reproductive choices, they do represent the immense capacity for collaboration between tech companies and law enforcement.

Amidst the uneven landscape of reproductive rights across the country, there are already several examples of American law enforcement utilizing user’s digital data to track and prosecute people seeking abortions. In Nebraska, for instance, a teenager was jailed for self-managing an abortion, following a tip-off from a neighbor that led the police to subpoena Facebook messages (AP News 2023). With the looming possibility of a national abortion ban, tech firms’ willingness to collaborate with government authorities raises the prospect of widespread and personalized surveillance of reproductivity. While investigative efforts, such as applying for search warrants, are typically governed by democratic oversight, law enforcement’s use of data gathered by tech firms can be done in comparable opacity, presenting serious threats to judicial transparency and procedural rights to due process (Wexler 2018).

Although a less direct form of power and control, another social process through which digital data can affect autonomy is that it can be used to mold what information people receive online. Relying on inferences from user data, tech firms hypothesize about an individual’s body and, more specifically, their reproductive state and choices. Such inferences can then be fed back to individuals in the form of assessments, scores, recommendations, and targeted advertisements, which are often shaped by normative expectations associated with gender and sexuality, producing the potential to affect how people think about themselves, their bodies, and the decisions they are making. For instance, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that crisis pregnancy centers pay for their pages to be the top search result on Google when people look up terms such as “abortion pill cost” or “abortion clinic near me” (Shah 2023). In another example, an extremist anti-abortion group used location data to target people who visited 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in 48 states with misinformation about abortion, perhaps the largest anti-abortion ad campaign using purchased data to date (Ng 2024).

What Then?

In responding to the conservative onslaught against reproductive rights, health, and justice, our core argument is that restrictions on contraception, abortion, assisted reproductive technologies, and gender-affirming care should be understood as part of a singular effort to render inseparable (hetero)sex and reproduction. As scholars who research, teach, and write for academic audiences, policymakers, and the broader public, we need to mobilize our hard-won knowledge. We need to make clear the inevitable social, political, and everyday bodily consequences when people cannot forge the reproductive futures they desire with the people they choose, which extends not only to health and happiness but to life itself.

There is much we can do. First, and in keeping with the goals of a new research-focused journal spotlighting sex and sexualities, we encourage our fellow social scientists to more fully attend to the theoretical and empirical relationships between reproduction and sexuality. In a quick search of peer-reviewed articles published from 2000 to 2024 and cataloged in the Sociological Abstracts database, about 20,000 included terms associated with reproduction, and nearly 16,000 included terms associated with sexualities.⁶ Just 886 included both terms in the abstract of the article, suggesting little overlap between these areas of study.

Moreover, if it is accurate to say that the sexualities literature has been more focused on identities than practices (e.g., Russell, Bishop and Fish 2023), while the reproduction literature has been more focused on practices than identities (e.g., Almeling 2015), then bringing both topics into the same analytical frame will produce new questions, such as: What constitutes a reproductive identity, and how do different identities affect sexual practices? Flipping the lens from those who experience reproductive and sexual injustice to those who cause it, how do privilege and power associated with social processes such as masculinity and Whiteness shape reproductive and sexual politics? And, given the major concerns we raise in this essay: How might dramatic new constraints on bodily autonomy influence the sexual practices of those who are capable of pregnancy versus those who produce sperm?⁷

Even just placing the two terms next to one another—reproduction and sexuality—reveals how the different endings may have shaped academic inquiry. Perhaps a focus on reproductivity (which appears in just a handful of Sociological Abstracts), and not just reproduction, renders the concept more of a verby noun like sexuality, which may invite new sociological approaches to reproduction that would be informed by typical approaches in the sexualities literature. For example, reproduction appears to connote more of a thing, while reproductivity references potentiality. Likewise, compare action to activity. The difference is likely to matter both for individuals and polities.

We would also encourage social scientists to expand their scope to encompass questions about how reproductive and sexual identities and practices are being shaped by new digital and algorithmic technologies, especially those enabling digital surveillance. This is key given the historical criminalization of same-sex sexuality (Chauncey 2004) and the ongoing reality of racially unequal mass incarceration in this country (Alexander 2010; Haney 2025; Paltrow and Flavin 2013). The ever-growing surveillant potential of digital technology continues to foster the need for privacy protections and to ensure accountability for the misuse of these new tools. The United States has no federal data protection law for adults and remains one of the few democracies without a data protection agency. Nongovernmental organizations have sought to take up the slack, initiating legal efforts to attain some safeguards. For instance, Accountable Tech and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Google’s privacy breaches (Electronic Privacy Information Center n.d.); despite repeated promises not to, the tech firm is still not deleting user location data for abortion clinics. In addition, scholars can work to promote transparency and effective democratic oversight of how tech companies’ algorithms and artificial intelligence are being harnessed by law enforcement agencies to surveil and criminalize users’ reproductive decisions.

Meanwhile, in the absence of meaningful legal protections, individuals and reproductive health organizations must take action to protect their data and the data of those who rely on their services. Detailed guides, such as those produced by the Digital Defense Fund (2021), have been developed to offer advice about how to protect one’s data related to reproductive health. Scholars also need to be prepared to fight for and protect their own data amid threats of censorship from both the government and their own institutions.

Research along any of these lines would contribute to ongoing efforts to examine the relationship between bodies and societies, especially in terms of the intersections between gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, nationality, and sex (the latter of which always needs to be specified given that the same word can refer to sex acts and biological similarities and differences between bodies historically categorized as male and female). One terrific forum for conversations about all of these issues that includes both academics and advocates of reproductive rights, health, and justice is ReproNetwork, a listserv that has been running for 25 years.

Beyond research, many of us work in institutions where we have the privilege of teaching the next generation. Whenever possible, our courses can incorporate the critical lessons from other times and places when those in power sought to control whether, how, and with whom people have children (excellent readers are available, including Joffe and Reich (2025) and Hopwood, Flemming, and Kassell (2018)). We can think with our students about what the relationship between reproduction and sexuality could be, imagining a society in which any and all decisions that people make about their own bodies would be supported: clinically, financially, politically, technologically, and socially.

******

We write these words in February 2025, a moment in which our society has simultaneously produced the most detailed knowledge about reproduction and sexuality in history as well as the most sophisticated technological interventions into contraception, conception, and birth. Yet the United States is on the precipice of going back to the darkest of ages in terms of policy and politics. Even as access to reproductive health care has always been stratified by economic resources and other forms of inequality, Americans who are currently of reproductive age have lived most of their lives under a regime in which heterosexual intercourse and reproduction can be separated. This is an absolutely crucial form of bodily autonomy, and we stand ready with other scholars to wield the power of the pen—the power of ideas and knowledge—to fend off grave threats to our health, happiness, and, indeed, our very lives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

It is always exciting when a new scholarly journal comes into being, and we are grateful to the editors for the invitation to be part of this inaugural issue. We also thank Laura Carpenter, Alka Menon, Jennifer Reich, Sarah Richardson, Carlo Sariego, and Natali Valdez for feedback on earlier drafts.

ORCID iD

Rene Almeling

Statements and Declarations

Notes

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