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The linkage between the descriptive representation and substantive representation of underrepresented groups has been a long-standing concern for scholars, particularly those interested in the gendered nature of state legislative institutions. However, there is much scholarly ambivalence about how and when gender and partisanship interact in the substantive representation of women's health issues. How can infertility--a broadly appealing issue that is not aligned with political ideologies, unlike more commonly debated issues of abortion--inform and clarify the theoretical connection between descriptive and substantive representation by gender? Employing a novel research design that analyzes the role of time in gendered representation of women's health interests in state legislative institutions between 1985 and 2003, this paper argues that time plays a dynamic and multifaceted role in the relationship between partisan female legislators and the representation of women's health issues beyond abortion and contraception. The author acknowledges Lee Ann Banaszak, Kelly Dittmar, Mark Major, Michael Nelson, The Women and Politics Reading Group at Penn State University, and participants in the Center for American Political Responsiveness at Penn State University for their comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Souther Political Science Association, San Juan, Perto Rico, January 6-10, 2016. Please do not cite without permission from author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), defined as biological technologies that assist reproduction, such as in-vitro fertilization, complicate our understanding of reproductive public policy in the United States. On one hand, ARTs give us new ways to understand reproduction and gender, challenging American debates that focus on abortion in lieu of other reproductive issues. ARTs are distinct from well-understood and disseminated reproductive choices of delaying family formation, as they have the power to create families while utilizing technology developed from abortion practices. On the other hand, ARTs are an important moneymaking private enterprise for the US's biotechnology industry. Thus far, there is little consensus as to how to regulate technologies that intersect with reproduction outside of cloning). How then do we examine this public policy issue that lies at the nexus of reproduction and science, which is simultaneously moral and economic at the same time? My project responds to this quandary of how the American states regulate these unique and challenging technologies as either moral policies or economic policies. To do so, I examine the effect of state-level political and demographic variables on a sample of ART legislative outcomes in the 50 states, between the years 1990 and 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates the idea of ‘gender eugenics’ through an examination of the marketing practices of the sperm and egg banking industries in the U.S. It compares the biological and social traits of more than 1,700 sperm and egg donors to national averages for typical American males and females, assessing the ways donors reflect hierarchies of race, gender and class. This paper argues that the lack of regulatory restrictions on sperm and egg donation in the U.S. is a major source of the perpetuation of these eugenic practices. It explores the tensions that exist within reproductive politics between the concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘bodily integrity’ in the context of assisted reproduction. While the current free-market commodification of sperm and egg donation in the U.S. has helped a diverse population of women and men reproduce, these practices also perpetuate a hierarchy of human traits and human value. Finally, this paper proposes a new theory of feminist reproductive ethics, with an implementation of regulatory policy, to combat the potentially eugenic nature of sperm and egg donation in the United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can women at the margins organize, lobby, and influence government? This paper investigates how two interest groups in the American reproductive rights movement, Planned Parenthood of America and the National Abortion Rights League, have systematically neglected the interests of disadvantaged women. Given the failure of formal institutions to proportionally represent women at the intersections of race, gender, and class, rights groups are one of the only avenues for the disadvantaged and marginalized to achieve representation. From the broad empirical data on representation and interest groups, this paper more narrowly focuses on representation of politically underrepresented women within the reproductive rights movement. Through a content analysis of issue framing by organizational literature, this paper argues that although Planned Parenthood of America and the National Abortion Rights League gain political legitimacy from representing women from all sectors of society, these groups fail to articulate marginalized women’s interests at the national level. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]