It took until July 7, 2026, for the world’s leading human rights body to call forcing someone to be pregnant — or forcing them not to be — what it is: reproductive violence. In a landmark resolution adopted unanimously, the UN Human Rights Council formally recognized “reproductive violence” as a specific, systemic form of gender-based violence.
The resolution defines reproductive violence to include “forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced contraception, denial of contraception, and targeted attacks on reproductive healthcare facilities.” The resolution focuses on humanitarian situations, but the definition creates a new framework for protecting against “intentional acts or omissions that cause harm by interfering with reproductive autonomy,” defined as “the ability to make independent decisions about one’s reproduction free from coercion.”
Recognizing reproductive violence as a human rights violation is a critical step, said Dr. Diana Pulido of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “By naming reproductive violence, the Human Rights Council has made visible a distinct and devastating form of harm that has too often gone unrecognized. Survivors can now name what happened to them in language the system finally recognizes.”
This historic UN declaration has implications for the United States, where the state itself sanctions, funds, and enforces reproductive violence. Forty-one states, including Massachusetts, ban abortion at some point during pregnancy. These bans block medical providers from offering needed care. To make matters worse, police and state attorneys are arresting and criminally prosecuting pregnant women whose reproductive decision-making they oppose.
Any law or government action that requires a person to carry a pregnancy to term against their will is a form of bodily assault. The dynamics mirror domestic violence and sexual assault. The core of rape is the violation of consent — taking control of another person’s body and forcing them to submit. Abortion bans likewise hijack a person’s body, stripping them of their bodily integrity and self-determination.
As anti-violence advocate Irene Weiser once asked: “How can we ever begin to end violence against women if the laws of our society will not even guarantee the most fundamental of human right to women — to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies?”
The answer, so far, is that we cannot. In the U.S, interpersonal reproductive violence is condemned, but when the state commits reproductive violence through laws, policies, and institutions, this form of violence is tolerated.
The parallels between interpersonal abuse and state violence are reflected in the medical understanding of reproductive coercion. Medical literature defines reproductive coercion as behavior that interferes with autonomous decision-making in reproductive health —specifically, attempting to maintain power and control over a partner’s sexual and reproductive lives. This coercion rarely exists in a vacuum: it is almost always accompanied by other tactics of coercive control, including isolation from friends and family, surveillance and monitoring of movements and communications, deprivation of basic necessities, gaslighting, degradation, and threats of violence.
These exact abusive behaviors are mirrored in U.S. laws, law enforcement actions, and state-funded anti-abortion violence. State “aiding and abetting” laws mimic the isolation tactic, criminalizing anyone who helps a person obtain an abortion. Police engage in digital surveillance, tracking the digital footprints and physical movements of women travelling out of state for healthcare. Law enforcement arrests, detains, and prosecutes pregnant women for behaviors that do not violate the law. Meanwhile, police stand by as anti-abortion groups harass, intimidate, and threaten abortion providers and patients seeking care. Beneath it all is a single premise, enforced by political, cultural, and religious institutions alike: women’s bodies are state and community property.
This systemic reproductive violence has already cost us dearly. Maternal mortality is surging, with death rates rising rapidly in states banning abortion, where women are denied emergency medical care. The federal Hyde Amendment weaponizes poverty, turning abortion into a right that women on Medicaid cannot afford to exercise. Millions in federal and state taxpayer dollars bankroll unregulated “crisis pregnancy centers” that prey on women with medical misinformation, pressuring them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. ICE is transporting pregnant minors as young as 13 to detention camps in ban states to block abortion access, while at the same time failing to offer basic reproductive healthcare. Trump pardoned anti-abortion extremists convicted of terrorizing clinics, sending a clear message of state-approved intimidation. A Georgia hospital used Adriana Smith’s brain-dead body to gestate a fetus for four months against her family’s wishes. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
The UN’s new framework holds a mirror up to America, forcing us to confront the structural violence written into our own laws, policies, and practices. We must now call on the United Nations to investigate the people perpetrating reproductive violence in the United States, including state and federal lawmakers passing harmful laws, state officials using these laws to coerce and abuse pregnant women, and the people running state-funded private organizations, including crisis pregnancy centers, that are violating our human right to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies.
Carrie N. Baker is a professor in the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Smith College and a regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.