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In 2010, the National Mediation Board (NMB) decided to base Railway Labor Act representation election outcomes on a simple majority of those voting, rather than on the majority of all eligible voters, as had been required earlier. This was widely expected to make it easier for unions to win rights to recognition in the railway and airline industries. We demonstrate that investors expected that this change would favor unions, just as they earlier had expected rule changes that made voting easier (in 2002 and 2007) to be favorable to unions, affecting stock prices of railway and airline corporations. After the 2010 change in election procedure, between 77% and 91% of all eligible employees returned ballots in NMB elections, demonstrating that a significant portion of nonvoters were not opposed to union representation, but simply were unwilling or were unable to vote. We conclude that the current voting process is fairer than the old one. However, it has not resulted in a tide of union success in these representation elections. Apparently scholars, the parties themselves, and investors all over-estimated the practical consequences of changing NMB representation election procedures.

In this chapter, I consider how voluntarily childless (VC) women can respond not just to master narratives of mandatory motherhood, but to their own internalised narratives of wantonness – of not desiring something they ought, or of being ambivalent about motherhood altogether. This chapter, then, is about the practices of choosing and endorsing one’s desires, however clear or ambiguous, about intentional childlessness, and in the process, of learning to hold oneself as a valued moral agent, as a dissident, but non-wanton, self. Secondarily, it is also about challenging Frankfurt’s claims that the formation and maintenance of moral identities require a kind of wholeheartedness that admits of no doubts. First, I begin with a personal story of my struggles with desiring my choices – of coming to endorse, however not-wholeheartedly, my non-wanting of motherhood, and thus rejecting the pronatalist narratives that marked my first-order desires as mistaken, and my second-order ones as deviant. Second, I offer an overview of voluntary childlessness as experienced by women most pressured to reproduce in the context of the bad moral luck of pronatalism. I note that my approach, grounded in philosophical feminist value theory, is focused on women who are not involuntarily childless or infertile, and who, because of social, economic and other privilege find themselves to be the targets of pronatalist narratives of ‘desirable’ motherhood. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the dissident practices of identity-creation through which women can embrace both their certainties and ambiguities about their VC status by offering counterstories in response to accusations of wanton-hood, or of improperly, unnaturally or heretically motivated wills.

Purpose: Fear of deportation and its relationship to healthcare access has been less studied among immigrant Latinx men who have sex with men (MSM), a population at risk for HIV and characterized by their multiple minority statuses. The first step is to accurately measure their fear of deportation.

Approach: We used an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. Eligibility criteria were that research participants be ages 18–34 years; Latinx; cisgender male; having had sex with another male; residing in the District of Columbia metro area; and not a US citizen or legal permanent resident. In Study 1, we used in-depth interviews and thematic analysis. Using participants' interview responses, we inductively generated 15 items for a fear of deportation scale. In Study 2, we used survey data to assess the scale's psychometric properties. We conducted independent samples t-test on the associations between scale scores and barriers to healthcare access.

Findings: For the 20 participants in Study 1, fear of deportation resulted in chronic anxiety. Participants managed their fear through vigilance, and behaviors restricting their movement and social network engagement. In Study 2, we used data from 86 mostly undocumented participants. The scale was internally consistent (α = 0.89) and had a single factor. Those with higher fear of deportation scores were significantly more likely to report avoiding healthcare because they were worried about their immigration status (p = 0.007).

Originality: We described how fear of deportation limits healthcare access for immigrant Latinx MSM.

Research implications: Future research should examine fear of deportation and HIV risk among immigrant Latinx MSM.