Precarious Care: Medicine, Morality, and Resistance in Post-Roe America

Abstract

This thesis explores the shifting landscape of reproductive health care in the United States through an ethnographic lens, focusing on how the individuals most engaged in this field- activists and physicians- navigate, reinterpret, and anticipate change in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Drawing on interviews with those across a wide range of ideological lines, I explore how participants understand their roles within a rapidly changing sociopolitical environment and how these roles are constantly renegotiated in response to legal, cultural, and institutional uncertainty. As opposed to previous literature which has framed abortion as a binary conflict, this research foregrounds the complexity of lived experience and moral understanding across the reproductive health spectrum. Building on anthropological scholarship of care, uncertainty, temporality, and moral subjectivity, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how reproductive futures are endlessly shaped in the present.