On Not Being Born: Contraceptive Experiments in the Era of Demopower

Abstract

“On Not Being Born: Contraceptive Experiments in Bangladesh in the Era of Demopower” traces the development of two abortion technologies created by lay abortionist Harvey Karman, their travel from America before Roe v. Wade to Bangladesh in the infancy of its postcolonial statehood, and their remarkable afterlives. One is celebrated as a technique of the contemporary global development apparatus, and the other is reviled as a debunked medical atrocity. Menstrual regulation, a lay abortion procedure for which Karman is known, is today the fourth most common form of contraception in the developing world. The other, the super coil method, which Karman tested on Black women in Philadelphia, was responsible for catastrophic injury. Read together, the lives of these two technologies offer an account of how experiments on women’s bodies in Bangladesh, as part of a humanitarian mission, justified catastrophic experimentation on Black women in America and became packaged into a narrative about the struggle for abortion as a singular right of American womanhood. This essay argues that menstrual regulation and its repudiated kin are techniques of what I call “demopolitics,” produced by demographic surveillance, monitoring, and abstraction that are financialized through an American foreign aid apparatus of debt. Not being born, in Bangladesh, is the goal of a global futurism that invests itself not in reproduction and the management of life but in contraception and the prevention of birth.