Existing research on ethics of care contains many contentions regarding the distinction between ethics of justice and ethics of care, often placing the two at opposite ends of a spectrum. In this paper, I look at the tensions between ethics of justice and care and ask if both can be applied without contradiction in the context of personal narratives of reproductive trauma. In contemporary campaigns and activism for social change and social justice, personal narratives are often used as a key mode of engagement. During the Age of Reproductive Repeal (Repeal the Eighth in Ireland and the reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US), copious personal narratives were offered to the public by women sharing their experiences of reproductive trauma as a means to push dialogue and subsequently change legislation. It can be argued that these narrative demands placed on individual women were necessary in the absence of both care and justice. In this paper, I examine the confluence of these two often inimical concepts (care and justice) in the discussion of women’s struggle for reproductive rights. As the vagueness of the term “care” is rarely contested among care ethicists, this paper also examines what exactly is meant by care in the context of women’s self-narratives of reproductive trauma.
