‘Forced Is When They Tie You Down’: Curated Consent and Reproductive Decision-Making among Women with Intellectual Disabilities in Spain

Women with intellectual disabilities face persistent reproductive restriction despite the expansion of formal rights frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic interviews conducted in Spain between 2024 and 2025, this article examines how reproductive decision-making unfolds within care relationships that quietly organise which futures appear possible before any formal reckoning occurs. I introduce the concept of curated consent: the social organisation of agreement within networks of care, authority and moral responsibility, such that certain reproductive futures are rendered thinkable, and others are not. Three cases involving sterilisation, spanning before, during and after Spain’s landmark legal reforms of 2020 and 2021, demonstrate that the mechanism sustaining reproductive control is relational and cultural rather than juridical. This article complicates celebratory framings of supported decision-making and argues that protecting reproductive rights requires scrutiny not only of whether consent is obtained but of how the terms of reproductive choice are set.