Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health

The Reproductive Justice Faculty Working Group, a group of around 50 Tulane faculty, is dedicated to developing interdisciplinary collaboration, courses, and research relating to reproductive rights and reproductive health. Current members represent the Tulane School of Communications, Law, Public Health, Social Work, Science and Engineering, and Liberal Arts. The Reproductive Justice Faculty Working Group meets throughout the school year for reading group discussions and speaker series. Anyone interested in joining can email cdaniel5@tulane.edu

Dr. Clare Daniel, Newcomb Institute's Administrative Assistant Professor of Women's Leadership, leads the Institute's research and programming on reproductive rights and reproductive health. Dr. Daniel coordinates student programming related to reproductive politics, health, and justice, including the Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Health Internship program for undergraduates.

She advises the student organizations Students United for Reproductive Justice and Women and Youth Supporting Each Other and teaches courses in the Department of Communication, the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, the Honors Program, and the Spark Residential Learning Community. Dr. Daniel coordinates grants for Tulane students to attend Feminist Camp, Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, and other feminist and reproductive justice experiences. She is a member of the New Orleans Scholars Strategy Network, the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition (MCH), the Louisiana Coalition for Reproductive Freedom, and the Louisiana Adolescent Reproductive Health Coalition (LARHC).

Dr. Daniel also co-convenes, with Professor Saru Matambanadzo, Tulane’s Reproductive Justice Faculty Working Group,  a group dedicated to developing interdisciplinary collaboration, courses, and research relating to reproductive rights and reproductive health at Tulane. Subscribe to Dr. Daniel's monthly ReproNews email, read her full bio or view her CV.

Articles

• How Focusing on Teen Pregnancy as a Personal Moral Failing Deepens Social Inequality, SSN Key Findings, 2018.
• Taming the Media Monster: Teen Pregnancy and the Neoliberal Safety (Inter)Net, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2014.
• “Teen Sex, an Equal-Opportunity Menace: Multicultural Politics in 16 and Pregnant,” book chapter in MTV and Teen Pregnancy: Critical Essays on 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom, ed. Letizia Guglielmo (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013).
• Review of Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption, H-Ethnic, H-Net Reviews, 2013.

Books

Mediating Morality: The Politics of Teen Pregnancy in the Post-Welfare Era (University of Massachusetts Press, 2017)

The approach the United States has taken to addressing teen pregnancy—a ubiquitous concern in teen education and perennial topic in popular culture—has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Specifically since the radical overhaul of welfare policy in 1996, Clare Daniel argues, teen pregnancy, previously regarded as a social problem requiring public solutions, is seen as an individual failure on the part of the teens involved.

Daniel investigates coordinated teen pregnancy prevention efforts within federal political discourse, along with public policy, popular culture, national advocacy, and local initiatives, revealing the evidence of this transformation. In the 1970s and 1980s, political leaders from both parties used teen pregnancy to strengthen their attacks on racialized impoverished communities. With a new welfare policy in 1996 that rhetoric moved toward blaming teen pregnancy—seemingly in a race- and class-neutral way—on the teens who engaged in sex prematurely and irresponsibly. Daniel effectively illustrates that the construction of teen pregnancy as an individual’s problem has been a key component in a neoliberal agenda that frees the government from the responsibility of addressing systemic problems of poverty, lack of access to education, ongoing structural racism, and more.