Studying Absence: An Analysis of the Literature and Lack Thereof on the Intersection of HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Rights

Note: In lieu of an abstract, this is the article's first paragraph. "There is much that academics have taken it upon themselves to study, and also much that they have not. To the extent that the attempt to learn is an attempt to elucidate the truth, it seems unfathomable for our truth-seeking capacities to encompass the entirety of human experience, present and past. And yet, what the academy fails to study is often indicative of more than the inherent catch-22 in which we find ourselves. Factors of identity, and of the hierarchy of important or less important truths, inevitably make themselves evident when one attempts to examine those which have never had the chance to gain a justified worth to academic study. In this paper, I will examine the literature and lack thereof on the matter of reproductive rights and its fraught relationship to HIV/AIDS. I will look both to that research which demonstrates an absence of sufficient literature into this topic, while also historiographically examining two articles within that quantitatively lacking literature. From an examination of this epistemological gap and those worthy attempts to fill it, I will hypothesize that the gap is produced by factors of vulnerability pertaining to the demographics of that group which falls at this intersection, as well as definitional inadequacies in the language of rights."