Reproductive Violence and Genocide

This chapter discusses the potentials to prosecute different manifestations of reproductive violence as the crime of genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention. In the light of the historical background, most notably the “genocidal rape” debate of the 1990s, it explores the somewhat paradoxical conceptualization of pregnancy-related crimes, namely the forcible impregnation or continuation of a pregnancy, as genocide. The implications of this debate for the children born as a result are also addressed, most importantly the danger of marginalization. In this context, it is argued that an assessment of the perpetrator’s criminal responsibility should be conducted with a view to the violation of the individual’s reproductive autonomy, meaning an interference with the right to reproduce in a self-determined manner, and not on the basis of exclusionary conceptualizations of ethnicity. The chapter further examines the elements of the reproductive crime of “imposing measures intended to prevent births” under Article II(d) of the Genocide Convention and argues that acts of reproductive violence such as forced impregnation, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, forced abortion, and forced contraception may be prosecuted as genocide.