Activist allyship, unspoken dilemma: Deconstructing the tension between reproductive autonomy and disability justice
Journal
International Journal of Human Rights
Start Page
1-23
ISSN
1364-2987
1744-053X
Date Issued
2025-11-19
Author(s)
Su, Chong-Min
Abstract
This article analyses Taiwan’s human rights treaty review process (2009–2022), examining an underexplored dilemma: the presumed tension between reproductive autonomy and disability justice. Since incorporating most core international human rights conventions into domestic law, Taiwan has created a distinctive monitoring arena that brings governmental agencies, advocacy groups, and international experts into dialogue. Drawing on documentary and discourse analysis, we show how abortion debates involving foetal impairment have been negotiated, obscured, or strategically silenced in these fora. Although treaties such as CEDAW and CRPD enshrine both reproductive and disability rights, legal and medical narratives continue to frame abortion in ways that affirm autonomy while also reinforcing ableist assumptions. Civil society organisations have advanced the reproductive health and rights of women with disabilities but largely avoided their underlying tensions. We consider this avoidance a strategic omission reflecting the difficulty of reconciling competing claims without a shared interpretive framework. To move beyond the false opposition between abortion rights and disability existence, we propose a harmonising approach centred on the notion of a liveable life as a common foundation, on which the agency of all persons, disabled or not, is enabled across infrastructural, institutional, symbolic, and interpersonal dimensions of reproductive decision-making.
Funding(s)
National Science and Technology Council
Population Health and Well-being Research Center from Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education
Subjects
abortion
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
sexual and reproductive health
women with disabilities
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Type
journal article
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