Amanda Heffernan: “‘Una mujer embarazada necesita el sol‘: Pregnant Migrant Women’s Encounter with Immigration Enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico Border”
Abstract: President Trump’s harsh, exclusionary anti-immigrant policies were bolstered by rhetoric that demonized migrant pregnancy and motherhood. including tropes like “birth tourism,” “anchor baby,” “chain migration,” and “public charge.” The Obama and Biden administrations, in contrast, enacted and publicized policies excepting pregnant women from otherwise intensive immigration enforcement regimes, projecting an image of humanitarian concern. This paper uses critical feminist ethnography to study the impact of pregnancy-related immigration policies on the lived experiences of pregnant migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border from 2017-2022. It documents the impacts of a shifting landscape of exclusion, expulsion, deportation, detention, and release during an era of rapid migration policy change. The findings are clear: under every policy regime, pregnant women are negatively impacted. During periods characterized by increased detention, detention conditions are poor. During periods characterized by exclusion and expulsion, pregnant women are forced to wait in dangerous, precarious conditions in Northern Mexico, increasing the likelihood that they will attempt a perilous desert crossing into the United States. And during periods characterized by a greater chance of receiving humanitarian parole due to pregnancy, parole is seldom granted to partners and family members, making family separation inseparable from a supposedly humanitarian exception.
Amanda Heffernan is a nurse midwife and Assistant Professor at Seattle University College of Nursing, where she is also Clinical Placement Coordinator for the Midwifery Program. In addition, she is a Seattle University PACE (Partnership for Advancing Community Engagement) Fellow and a faculty fellow at the Seattle University Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. Her research interests sit at the intersection of migration and reproductive justice, including the impact of detention on families and the experiences of pregnant migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. She is author of “Pregnancy in United States Immigration Detention: The Gendered Necropolitics of Reproductive Oppression” in International Feminist Journal of Politics. She received a Ph.D. in Nursing from the University of New Mexico, an MSN in Nurse-Midwifery from Frontier Nursing University, a B.S. in Nursing from the University of Washington, and a B.A. in History from Whitman College.