Throughout the twentieth century, women in the United States experienced varying degrees of reproductive freedom due to several different factors. Those factors included traditional gender roles, access to contraception, and eugenics, all of which impacted a woman's ability to find and receive healthcare. Many of the laws and standards upheld during this time allowed male politicians and physicians to regulate the field of medicine and therefore, ethics within medicine. The effects of these policies and politics' role in medicine have had a lasting impact on what qualifies as medical ethics in this country as well as more current issues, such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In this thesis I examine two Afrofuturist, feminist pieces of speculative fiction: The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. I analyze the two novels together and separately using a Black feminist framework to extract sustainable solutions for environmental justice. In close readings of the novels, I utilize multiple frameworks in my analysis, including Afrofuturism, Black Feminism, Intersectionality, and Ecofeminism. Applying Afrofuturist theory shapes the examination of how the oppressive systems within each novel’s society resemble that of the past and how they inform the future. This oppression is seen in the mistreatment of marginalized groups in both novels, including women, racial minorities, and orogenes and sharers. I further explore how these groups are suppressed and how this influences their interactions with the environmental crisis using Back feminist theory. Then, an ecofeminist lens is used in conjunction with Black feminism to uncover sustainable solutions from the novels to solve and mitigate the environmental crisis. My proposed solutions taken from these novels include empathy and embracing change.