Atomic Wombs
This article was first written for my “Personal Is Political Response” assignment for GWS444 at UW-Madison, lectured by Dr. Katherine Phelp.When you are asked where the United States dropped atomic bombs, the answer is almost always Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When you are asked what “reproductive politics” in the U.S. recalls, the answer is likely the familiar yet still dramatic overturn of Roe v. Wade (1973) by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). However, as an anti-nuclear activist from Taiwan, my answer is the Republic of the Marshall Islands—a place that has suffered from nuclear contamination and neo-colonial exploitation since 1946. I first learned of it only when my professor, Dr. Pei-Yi Kuo, handed me Bravo for the Marshallese. I was shocked that I had graduated from college without knowing that the U.S. had once detonated sixty-seven atomic and thermonuclear bombs on an island under its own trusteeship.
After World War II, the United Nations established eleven trust territories to ensure the health, well-being, and protection of their peoples and lands. Yet the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), which included the Marshall Islands, was the only one designated “strategic” (Barker 2013: 22). Under this “protection,” the U.S. government detonated sixty-seven atomic and thermonuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958, six of which completely vaporized entire coral islands that no longer exist. Preserving lands and resources by vaporizing them—perhaps that’s how empires do protection.
What the U.S. government did remember to bring were photographers, journalists, and Hollywood crews to Bikini Atoll to film the islanders’ supposed “consent” of the very first test in 1946 (Barker 2013: 20). What they didn’t “remember” to bring was an evacuation warning for the Rongelapese, who lived downwind of the Bikini atoll, when they wanted to conduct the most powerful test, the Bravo test, in 1954. Even though meteorologists had already predicted lethal fallout for Rongelap, the residents were never evacuated before the Bravo test on March 1, 1954. That bomb—sarcastically named—was roughly a thousand times stronger than Hiroshima’s (Barker 2013: xi, 40–41). Soon after, the U.S. launched Project 4.1: A Study of the Medical Effects of Accidental Radiation Exposure on Human Beings, which theoretically should have been done “before” they dropped that bomb. Accidental? It was an after-the-fact “study” of people who had never been given a chance to refuse exposure. Thanks to the U.S.’s promise of “health and well-being.”
Dorothy Roberts (2015) argued that when discussing reproductive issues, the language of choice—aligned with neoliberal market logics—has proved useless for claiming public resources. Hence, instead of focusing on reproductive rights, we should shift to reproductive justice. This human right encompasses maintaining personal bodily autonomy, having children, not having children, and parenting the children we have in safe and sustainable communities, as defined by the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective (1997). The term itself was coined earlier by a group of Black feminists at the 1994 Chicago meeting; SisterSong later organized around and amplified this framework nationally.
We can also hear this emphasis in our course texts. In The Sisters’ Reply (1968), Black sisters answered black activist brothers who deemed the pill a way of genocide by emphasizing, first, that women must be the ones who decide. Second, that contraception can lessen the burdens of housework and care and may be a source of freedom. Additionally, the Black Women’s Manifesto (1970) further stated how the pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, underscoring that U.S. reproductive policy has always been racialized as well as gendered. Read together, these texts teach two lessons: reproduction is a site of gendered and racialized oppression in the U.S., and the U.S. government has repeatedly treated the bodies of its “lesser citizens” as expendable—Puerto Rican women used for birth-control trials, Marshallese used for nuclear testing. Based on these discussions, I argue we must situate the U.S. in a global and historical context to identify the most vulnerable populations, such as Marshallese women.
Nuclear contamination has gendered impacts (UNIDIR 2014). Ethnographic research shows that Marshallese women have faced stigma and shame for giving birth to grossly deformed infants (Barker 2013: 102). When an anthropologist asked the doctor in charge of monitoring the islanders’ health about these abnormalities, she answered that they were caused by incest and inbreeding, since the population was “too small to make any statistically significant conclusions” linking radiation to birth defects (Barker 2013: 104). Too small for science—but large enough for sixty-seven bombs. This logic of “statistical insignificance” conceals a moral catastrophe: how many Marshallese must die before the results become significant? Shamed into silence, women buried their newborns, internalizing guilt for what was done to them (Barker 2013: 103). There is no justice in such reproductive experience—no real choice, no bodily autonomy, no child raised in a safe place, and often, no life.
What, then, would reproductive justice look like in the Marshall Islands? How can we face the grief of women who lost their health, their babies, and their lands when the U.S. keeps narrowing the era and scale of responsibility? As outsiders, the least we can do is continue telling their stories—not only of grievance but of the persistence of islanders who have negotiated compensation through Section 177 of the Compact of Free Association (COFA). Reproductive justice requires that we place the experiences of Marshallese women at the center and situate U.S. policies in a global and historical context. Through COFA, many Marshallese migrated to the United States, especially to Arkansas. Yet, research shows that both women and infants suffer higher rates of adverse perinatal outcomes than their white counterparts (Nembhard et al. 2019). This pattern reflects not just a “fear of medicine” alone, but also systemic inaccessibility, including language and transportation barriers, as well as exclusion from Medicaid between 1996 and 2020 (Nembhard et al. 2019; Robinson 2022). Their struggle is a continuation of the same empire that once tested bombs on their islands—now testing their endurance in unequal healthcare systems.
Marshallese women’s experiences reveal the limits of confining U.S. debates to pro-life versus pro-choice. More than a right to choose, this is a matter of human rights and social justice—of who has the material capacity to avoid pregnancy, to carry safely, and to raise children in non-toxic, well-resourced communities. Reproductive justice seeks to overturn this racialized, gendered, and historical regime. It cannot succeed without an intersectional, historical, and transnational analysis that includes the Pacific—the space where America’s empire still rehearses what lives are worth protecting.
Epilogue: The Pacific always reminds me of Taiwan—not only through our Austronesian echoes, but through the shared condition of forced dependence. When Dr. Pei-Yi Kuo handed me Bravo for the Marshallese, I didn’t know it would return to me here, across the ocean. In the United States, where few care about small islands on the Pacific Rim, I thought of its subtitle: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World. We are small, yet our strength lies in linking across waters. As an islander and a feminist, I believe that telling and writing stories is how we fight back—that the Pacific, fragmented by militarization and neo-colonialism, still carries the answer to justice.
Reference:
Barker, Holly M. 2013. Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial World. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Black Women’s Alliance. 1970. “Black Women’s Manifesto; Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Third World Women’s Alliance. Reprinted in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by C. R. McCann and S. Kim. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Nembhard, Wendy N., Blythe L. Ayers, Richard T. Collins, et al. 2019. “Adverse Pregnancy and Neonatal Outcomes Among Marshallese Women Living in the United States.” Maternal and Child Health Journal 23:1525–1535. doi:10.1007/s10995-019-02775-8.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2015. “Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights.” Dissent Magazine, Fall 2015. Retrieved October 2025 (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/reproductive-justice-not-just-rights/).
Robinson, Misty P. 2022. “NIH Funds UAMS Study Addressing Urgent Health Needs of Pregnant Marshallese Women.” UAMS News, November 9, 2022. Retrieved October 2025 (https://news.uams.edu/2022/11/09/nih-funds-uams-study-addressing-urgent-health-needs-of-pregnant-marshallese-women/).
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. 1997. “About Reproductive Justice.” Atlanta, GA: SisterSong. Retrieved October 2025 (https://www.sistersong.net/about-x2).
“The Sisters’ Reply.” 1968. In Poor Black Women: A Pamphlet by the Black Women’s Liberation Committee of SNCC and the Third World Women’s Alliance, pp. 3–5.
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). 2014. Gendered Impacts of Nuclear Weapons: Summary Report. Geneva: UNIDIR.
