This guest post by Luis Donaldo González responds to the book chapter by Karen Peterson-Iyer in Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition, which is available for free download thanks to the generous collaboration between Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church book series and Journal of Moral Theology. This post is part of a series hosted by Catholic Moral Theology blog. The introduction to the series by Simeiqi He can be found here. Taylor Ott’s response to the book’s introduction can be found here. Ann Mary Madavanakkad’s response to Virginia Saldanha’s chapter can be found here. Jacob Kohlhaas’s response to Hoon Choi’s chapter can be found here. Travis LaCouter’s response to Emily Reimer-Barry’s chapter can be found here.


When migrants arrive in a new society, they face personal, cultural, economic, and social difficulties. Such human integration processes are never easy. These processes become more complex when individuals are compelled to migrate due to violence, famine, natural disasters, or political instability—difficult situations that block their ability to live with dignity and thrive in their homeland. During the last few decades, millions of migrants have fled their countries despite the horrendous conditions that they will find along the way. They also flee despite the precarious human, social, and legal conditions they will face in the destination or host country. Indeed, these inhuman conditions make undocumented migrants more vulnerable, since they do not have legal status and most of them come from extreme poverty or lack of education. As a result, they do not have the means to defend themselves against abuses by other people, such as coyotes or smugglers, drug cartel networks, police, employers, and others. “Not only do they suffer poverty, but they must also endure all these forms of violence,” stated Pope Francis during his 2017 Apostolic Journey to the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez. Indeed, among undocumented migrants, women and unaccompanied children are the most vulnerable.

In “Reproductive Justice and Agricultural Labor Migrants,” a chapter in the new edited volume Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition, ethicist Karen Peterson-Iyer carefully analyzes the social injustice suffered by women, mostly immigrants, working in agricultural contexts on California’s Central Valley farms. She argues that many of these women are of childbearing age, making them vulnerable “not just individually but also on a structural level” (258). They are vulnerable due to the effects of poverty, lack of education, lack of knowledge of their legal rights, gender-based violence, and immigration status. In addition, “sexual harassment and abuse are perpetrated by foremen, supervisors, owners, and even other laborers.” Consequently, these women face serious problems such as “injury, sexually transmitted infections, unplanned pregnancies, substance use, mental health deterioration, and PTSD” (274). This chapter also shows additional challenges for women farmworkers, such as low wages, direct exposure to extreme weather, and lack of primary health care and facilities. Among them, it is essential to recognize the challenging difficulty of being a mother and a farmworker simultaneously. That reality directly affects their children, who must stay with their mothers during work hours or are forced to start work from an early age. Undoubtedly, these particularlychallenging socioeconomic and cultural situations of social injustice threaten these women’s human flourishing and reproductive rights.

While social injustice is an urgent issue for the government and legal justice entities that should prevent and punish abuses of any kind—because every woman has the right to live and work in a safe environment—the arguments presented by Peterson-Iyer are primarily intended to open the conversation with Catholic teaching and awaken a holistic understanding of working women’s reproductive rights. “Catholic ethics must widen its reproductive lens to incorporate the components of reproductive justice” such as “sexuality education, health care access, safe housing, and freedom from poverty, gendered violence, and the fear created by unjust immigration policies,” Peterson-Iyer argues (282).

A Catholic theological anthropology aims for each individual to be able to reach a holistic human development, regardless of their legal status or location. From Pope John Paul II’s perspective, by claiming “proper support for families and motherhood,” the Catholic tradition on reproductive justice goes beyond abortion to focus on the urgency to eliminate “the underlying causes of attacks on life,” as he states in the 1995 Encyclical Evangelium Vitae. Indeed, as Peterson-Iyer proposes, it is necessary to reflect deeply on the most current causes. It would be the authentic way to take the side of the poor, claim social justice, and reject the elimination of human life.

Peterson-Iyer’s piece is an excellent beginning to open a deeper dialogue between Catholic magisterial teachings with more specific and current situations of social injustice. Indeed, the magisterium and theologians should listen to the cry of the poor and dialogue with them. It is necessary to develop an understanding of justice that confronts the problems of the poor and avoids the assumption that one knows the situations of vulnerable groups, including women migrant farm workers. That approach should be developed by both theologians and legislators. The data, personal stories, and voices that Peterson-Iyer expertly puts together demonstrate the urgency of the task of combating the roots of social injustices that systematically assail human life and dignity.


Luis Donaldo González holds a Baccalaureate in Sacred Theology from the Comillas Pontifical University in Spain and is currently a theology graduate student at Boston College. As a Mexican-American originally from the Tex-Mex border, his publications and research are related to theology, migration, Catholic social teaching, and pastoral care and ministry.