Politics Of Reproduction Research Articles

Fiona Bloomer , Claire Pierson and Sylvia Estrada Claudio (2020), Reimagining Global Abortion Politics: A Social Justice Perspective, Bristol: Policy Press, £24.99, pp. 176, pbk.

Through the lens of medical abortion, the authors demonstrate how such technology and science – framed as holding immense potential for women’s reproductive freedoms – are politicised, influencing State’s political positions and priorities (e.g. appeasing an anti-abortion lobby), commercial motivations, and knowledge production, all affecting the creation of laws, policies and guidelines. Greater engagement with race, class, ethnicity, age, and colonialism – amongst other factors – and their interactions with the politics of abortion, safety, reproduction and activism would have more fully demonstrated the potential of Reproductive Justice as both theory and praxis, lending further weight to the arguments of Bloomer etal. A recent example of this is in the UK context, where women report that the “two-child benefit cap” influenced their decision to terminate a pregnancy;particularly heightened by job insecurity and precarity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Women’s perspectives on long-acting reversible contraception: a critical scoping review of qualitative research

ABSTRACT Long-acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) has significant promise both from a public health outlook and a social justice perspective. However, if women’s empowerment is to be supported, then perspectives and experiences of LARC must be considered. This scoping review assesses research about contraceptive users’ perspectives and experiences of contraceptive decision-making and practices. A content analysis was conducted to identify research trends in qualitative studies of contraceptive-user perspectives (n = 54), located by means of a systematic search. Interpreting findings through a reproductive justice lens, three main limitations in the scholarship were identified, viz., (1) an instrumentalist, individual-level focus; (2) a lack of consideration for diverse perspectives; and (3) an uncritical focus on young women. While the small body of qualitative research on LARC offers some valuable insights, when viewed from a sexual and reproductive justice perspective, it is not sufficiently user-centered or grounded within the reproductive politics surrounding contraceptive care and provision. Research is needed that draws on appropriate social theory; widens its focus beyond dominant groups; and is cognizant of the multi-level power relations surrounding LARC. Such work provides a nuanced picture of the complex social and contextual factors at play and inform person-centered approaches in sexual and reproductive health policy and programming.

Pro-Life or Pro-Choice? Humanistic Buddhists’ Voices Surrounding Abortion in Contemporary Taiwan

In Taiwan, abortion was legalized in 1984. This paper examines the voices surrounding abortion expressed by monasteries in Humanistic Buddhism, a prominent Buddhist philosophy practiced in modern Taiwan. Humanistic Buddhism emphasizes that it is a “religion of the people.” However, in addition to the law of karma and causality, the value of all life forms is prioritized based on the ethics of “non-harming (ahimsā).” When some monasteries insist that abortion is killing, resulting in karmic retribution, some express sympathy with a woman’s decision to abort. When some monasteries promote a newly popularized ritual to appease aborted fetuses, some are keenly critical of the exploitation of women and manipulation of scriptures. Through a discursive analysis, this paper demonstrates the wide spectrum of Buddhist narratives in response to reproductive politics embedded in the conflicts between modernity and tradition, as well as locality and globality.

An Open Secret: The History of Unwanted Pregnancy and Abortion in Modern Bolivia

In An Open Secret, historian Natalie Kimball “wrestles with an uncomfortable and slippery notion—that of unwanted pregnancy (embarazo no deseado)” (p. 113). The book's thesis—that the material and affective conditions that lead a person to regard their pregnancy as unwanted often elude conventional categorization—destabilizes several assumptions around reproductive behavior in urban Bolivia between 1952 and 2010. Kimball's oral histories with El Alto and La Paz residents in the early 2000s demonstrate how few women reflect on their pregnancies in such circumscribed terms. The causes of reproductive behavior are quickly revealed as too nuanced for frameworks of choice and rights as well as some of the structural observations on which feminist scholars have typically relied. Rather, in Bolivia, where abortion remains almost completely illegal, bearing a child is tied as closely to interpersonal and financial networks as to legal and political systems. More familiar is Kimball's argument that pregnant people have always looked for ways to negotiate their reproductive lives and have utilized political openings to achieve expanded, though limited, access to reproductive health care.According to state data from 2008, over one-third of pregnancies in contemporary Bolivia are unwanted, and most of these are carried to term. Yet the majority of Kimball's interlocutors described continuing their pregnancies not as an outcome of choosing to do so but as an obligation or necessity. Moreover, those who went on to have children expressed ambivalence but not complete regret. These layered responses guide the organization of An Open Secret. After tracing the history of reproductive policy in Bolivia, Kimball examines accounts of reproduction and abortion from medical personnel, police, and religious officials—many of whom have maintained public disapproval of abortion—before assessing women's own complex perceptions of their pregnancies. The following two chapters probe women's experiences with reproductive health care after the 1952 national revolution and into the military dictatorship and the democratic opening, respectively, which while markedly different were not entirely distinct. After the revolution, women “pushed the boundaries” of the state's pronatalist policies by continuing to terminate pregnancies (p. 149). Following the democratic opening in 1982, Bolivian women's groups organized for reproductive health-care access. Their activism and increased international support for abortion care were impetuses for the extension of public health insurance to cover pregnancy loss and expanded access to biomedical contraceptive support. Chapter 6 examines how legal mechanisms have failed both to prosecute people who have obtained illegal abortions and to facilitate access to legal abortions.Kimball's primary contributions come with their use of oral history as both a source and a lens through which to view the archive. Their conversations with 121 Bolivian women and men highlight the state's ongoing interest in reproduction and the role of structural forces on women's reproductive behavior, their “perceptions of what future was desired or possible” (p. 7). Even more, Kimball demonstrates the power of the social and affective on reproductive behavior. Their fieldwork never assumes the primacy of the individual woman; rather, each interlocutor represents a network of people, commitments, and judgments that make terminating a pregnancy possible or not. Kimball illustrates how the disruptions and especially the continuities of these interpersonal and systemic webs have influenced Bolivian women's experiences of their own pregnancies over the past half century.Beyond contributing to the growing number of country studies of reproductive politics and governance in Latin America, An Open Secret adds to examinations of the lives of urban Indigenous peoples and medical pluralism during neoliberalism. Particular moral frameworks abound in the adjacent and “inextricably linked” El Alto and La Paz; the majority Indigenous and poor populations encounter more pronounced antiabortion stigma amid the religious and patriarchal dynamics of urban Bolivia than in the surrounding rural areas (p. 18). Moreover, Bolivia's recent incorporation of some Indigenous health-care methods into the national health system and women's continual utilization of Andean birth control and abortifacients offer a unique context in which to trace the relationship between biomedical and Indigenous health systems.An Open Secret makes a case for narrative accounts as essential data for interpreting statistical and archival studies about how individuals navigate the complex avenues of reproduction. Moreover, Kimball's use of oral history elevates the intimate experiences of women as explicitly political. The book's lack of concise conclusions is not so much a problem of the text as it is reflective of the realities of this still forward-thinking task. Kimball must err on the side of subject anonymity in a climate in which abortion is stigmatized and piece together stories that often must necessarily remain secret. Rather than detracting from the argument, these impasses add weight to a main point of Kimball's argument, that “women's experiences matter simply because they occur” (p. 3).

Review of Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice

Reviewer: Rocío R. García, Arizona State University, USA In the introduction to her book, Zakiya Luna raises the question: “What happens when we center women of color’s organizing?” (p. 9). Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice demonstrates the ontological and epistemological importance of this question using an array of qualitative data, including interviews, participant observations, and archival documents. In an empirically rich text with implications across sociology, feminist studies, anthropology, public policy, and ethnic studies, Reproductive Rights as Human Rights joins a powerful body of scholarship that draws on the unique standpoints of feminists of color for making sense of reproductive politics and strategies for engaging intersecting grievances, motivations, and claims-making. Luna focuses on the intersectional movement for reproductive justice, in particular the social movement organization SisterSong that “grew to be the largest and most visible organizational coalition in the reproductive justice...

Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan

This short essay introduces the special issue, ‘Critical approaches to reproduction and population in post-war Japan’. It first explains that the issue came out of the two-year project entitled ‘Historicizing the Discourses of Declining Fertility and Ageing Population in East Asia, in which we reappraised Japan’s post-war history by identifying the demographic, discursive, social, scientific, and political factors that shaped the post-war population policies and reproductive practices. The essay then elaborates on the two interwoven threads of analysis we incorporated to reach the overall goal of the special issue, namely, to complicate understanding of Japanese post-war reproductive politics. The first thread is the politics of reproduction in modern Japanese history was inherently a politics of population. The second is that the medical and scientific knowledge on reproductive bodies and population statistics constituted a discursive register that allowed issues surrounding reproduction and population to be reformulated as concerns of the state. By locating the stories of everyday reproductive practices within a broader history of population politics embedded in the post-war Japan’s sovereignty and statecraft, the special issue clarifies hitherto understudied, yet critical, elements that shaped domestic reproductive experiences and the interpretation of the reproductive bodies in Japan’s post-war history.

The Seminar in Deconstruction

In this article the author explores how the problem of the seminar enters into the work of Jacques Derrida. He shows how it emerges not only within the context of the teaching institution but also as a conceptual thematic with a history far in excess of the educational institutions of France. As early as 1968 and as late as 2003, the word, concept, figure, and institution of “the seminar” was one that Derrida worked to define and problematize. The author thus asks how Derrida’s autobiographical relationship with the institution of the seminar both influenced and was influenced by what one might call the philosophical problem of the seminar. As Derrida points out on a number of occasions, the seminar is not a neutral space. Indeed, it is a particularly ambivalent one, as early discussions of it in “Plato’s Pharmacy” and Clang show. In appropriating the form, not only for his teaching but also as a problematic of the seminars that he gave, the author argues that Derrida precisely embraced the ambivalence of a space at once caught up in the politics of reproduction, hegemony, and tradition and, to that very extent, the site of a potential “event.”

The Reproduction of Caruso

AbstractFew figures loom larger in the early history of recorded sound than Enrico Caruso. Man and voice are ubiquitous in the making of gramophone markets, and conspicuous, too, as means of scholarly explanation by which a sound medium was born. In sound studies, Caruso has become a cipher for ‘audile technique’ (Jonathan Sterne's coinage), the bodily practices by which listeners came to engage musical media as something for their ears alone. This article inquires after what made Caruso a reproducible person. It portrays him as a singer celebrity deeply involved in his own reproduction through the media of caricature, sculpture, film and opera house. Through analysis of Caruso's productions for New York's Italian diaspora and farther afield, it argues that an ensemble of media meant he was reproduced beyond familiar, cosmopolitan circuits of operatic celebrity. Finally, it shows how politics of celebrity reproduction were transformed following Caruso's death, through the writing of history, into new imaginations and techniques for listening.

The politics of Danish IVF: reproducing the nation by making parents through selective reproductive technologies

In this article, we look at how the politics of reproduction take form in Denmark when people are denied access to IVF. Approaching IVF as a selective reproductive technology, we explore IVF’s selective potential in terms of reproductive governance and reproductive citizenship by analyzing decisions by the Danish State Administration about whether people get access to IVF or not. For that purpose, we had access to assessments of people’s inability to parent that are required by law in case doubts about a person’s ability to parent arise when they seek treatment with IVF in Denmark. Through this analysis, we identify three parenthood and citizenship ideals that characterize reproductive governance and the politics of reproduction in Denmark: (1) the medically sane/sober self whose parenting and societal decisions are not influenced by self-altering medical diagnoses and/or treatment, (2) the independent, capable, and productive self that pursues a meaningful life in societal terms, and (3) the responsible self that actively invests into reproductive futures. Based on this analysis, we argue that people are unduly excluded from reproduction if they are identified as not living up to these ideals because of the intersections of their gendered, bodily, social, and economic positioning.

'You are not Young Anymore!': Gender, Age and the Politics of Reproduction in Post-reform China.

Based on in-depth interview data and popular culture texts, the current study has explored the politics of reproduction revolving around women's age in contemporary China. Conceptualizing reproduction as a site of contestation and politics between different, and often contradictory, sets of discourses and power structures, I pursue a feminist and social constructivist analysis of the politics of reproduction in the lives of a group of urban professional women who are yet to enter motherhood at their late 20s and 30s. I engage with Inhorn's (2009) concept of 'disrupted reproduction' to highlight the politically, morally and emotionally charged contestations in the 'problematized' reproductive lives of these women. I unveil how Chinese professional women beyond their 'reproductive prime' are discursively constructed as 'disrupters', who fail their femininity test tied to a motherhood identity within the family context, challenge the 'natural' biological law regulating their reproductive bodies, and face a doomed reproductive future fraught with medical, physical and emotional traumas which ART cannot alleviate. Such a discourse renders invisible the structural causes of problems and challenges professional women face in negotiating parenthood, social norms and selfhood, which systematically put them under pervasive social surveillance and discipline.

Kasstan, Ben: Making Bodies Kosher. The Politics of Reproduction among Haredi Jews in England

Anthropos is the international journal of anthropology and linguistics, founded in 1906 by Wilhelm Schmidt, missonary and member of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD). Its main purpose is the study of human societies in their cultural dimension. In honor of Wilhelm Schmidt‘s legacy, the cultivation of anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, and religious studies remain an essential component oft he Anthropos Institute – the organizational carrier of the journal.

Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union by Mie Nakachi

Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union by Mie Nakachi

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History

Embodiment, Abstraction, and Hidden Reproductive History Mary McGlynn (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Promotional still, The 8th documentary film, 2021, directed and produced by Aideen Kane, Lucy Kennedy, Maeve O'Boyle, and Alan Maher. [End Page 130] Crowds dominate the publicity stills used to promote the 2020 documentary The 8th about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution (1983), which had essentially outlawed all abortions in Ireland.1 One vivid image from the celebration after the vote features a woman—Lysette Golden—elevated above the rest of those gathered; she sits on a man's shoulders, smiling and holding a banner from the "Together for Yes" movement. Golden wears a snug white crop top that has two rainbow-hued alien heads at roughly the level of her breasts, the iconic inverted-egg shape of the head repeated in the blank eyes. Although there is no evidence to suspect that this activist chose her shirt to link aliens to reproductive politics, the imagery is nevertheless fortuitous, educing a familiar trope of baby-as-alien-invader. In her essay collection Making Babies Anne Enright links pregnancy and abuse by priests with alien abduction to discuss reproductive rights in Ireland. Her elliptical chapter "Breeding" registers how clerical sexual abuse has often been dismissed as imagined—a fanciful idea on par with impregnation by a spaceman—as though aliens and priests were both races of "higher beings" who "gaze deep into our eyes and force us to have babies against our will" (15). Remarking that pregnancy is often an unwanted surprise ("We do not choose, sometimes, to be occupied by this other creature"), Enright juxtaposes this sense of invasive violation with the recovered memories of alien abductees: "What they remember, eventually, is a hidden reproductive history," a concept that she in [End Page 131] turn links to the suppressed or ignored narratives of sexual abuse at the hands of priests (21, 18). She also gestures toward the lack of access to contraceptives, an aspect of how the institution of the Catholic church forces Irish women to have babies. We might ask why Enright bothers with the aliens at all, given that the Irish sexual histories that she discusses already conjoin neatly, with priests and babies both imposing themselves, secretive and unasked. The answer would seem to lie in the ways that the figure of the alien activates the uncanny, something at once like us and unlike us, part of us and utterly different. Enright's analogy juxtaposes popular conceptions of aliens with photographs of a gestating fetus, with both rendered floating in space with nonreflective eyes: It drifts free, like an astronaut on his umbilical cable; glowing; weightless; with pads for fingers, and plum-like, radioactive eyes. The foetus sees nothing, knows everything. … It is a different life form. The foetus has no capacity for wonder. There is something blank and mean-spirited about it, perhaps. It lurks. It is all potential. (21) This description corresponds to Julie Roberts's observation that technologies for creating images of a fetus in utero frequently generate depictions that exclude the maternal body.2 Both Roberts and Enright recognize the power of the image of the fetus as isolated, different, and indifferent. In Enright's description we can see echoes of Donna Haraway's "god trick" as well as Yeats's rough beast, "its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" (line 15).3 More than mere animal, however, this creature is otherworldly, outside of human systems of knowing and of marking time. The collapse of time via Enright's reference to "potential" in the above passage is central to long-standing efforts to control female reproductive rights by patriarchal and religious authorities. These efforts transform a woman from a person with agency into a vehicle for a larger will, an imperative from God, [End Page 132] nature, or even the state to bring to fulfillment a new life. A pregnant woman becomes important primarily for her body's futurity.4 Judy Rohrer references this sort of potentiality in a U.S. context when she traces a history of concerns about "reproductive futurity—the way the iconic fetus or...

Embedding Mothering at the Heart of Politics: Mamsie, Ten Years On

Despite an ever-greater interest in mothering over the decade since 2009, it seems clear that accounts of maternal experiences today still routinely express fears of failure and chronic frustration. I connect this with time constraints arising from the long hours of paid work most mothers are now performing, alongside ongoing welfare cuts generally and the privatisation or outsourcing of public resources – especially since 2010. This tells me that caretaking generally, and mothering in particular, can never be decisively separated from the broader political arena. On the contrary, we need to place reproductive politics, and what is now recognised as a general ‘crisis of care’, at the very heart of politics. Thus, I conclude that the only way forward is to replace the long outdated, traditional notion of the male breadwinner, now superseded by the realities of the universal breadwinner, with genuine support for a notion of the universal caregiver. This would ensure policies attempting to provide everyone with the time and resources necessary to care for their own dependent children, if they are parents, or to support others who depend on them for care, alongside possibilities for maintaining community life and engaging in the preservation of the world itself.

Caring for Labor History

This essay charts how the author’s interest in labor history and the history of care work were inspired by her own family history of migrations from Puerto Rico to the United States. It considers how her grandmother’s stories about being a child needle worker in Puerto Rico and a migrant domestic worker in New York led her to think critically about the connections and overlap between the home and workplace in the lives of Puerto Rican women. As a student, investigating her personal history led her to discover a rich tradition of Puerto Rican feminist labor history that raised questions about reproductive politics and caring labor that remain pressing in our contemporary moment.

‘Your Womb, the Perfect Classroom’: Prenatal Sound Systems and Uterine Audiophilia

In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal ‘learning’ and cognitive development. Taking as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism’s elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as ‘the perfect classroom’, prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person’s body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics.

When abortion becomes public - Everyday politics of reproduction in rural Zambia.

This article takes the public reaction to the discovery of an aborted foetus in a rural Zambian community as the empirical starting point for exploring the everyday politics of reproduction. It builds on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork on abortion and abortion policy in Zambia in 2017 and 2018, including participant observation in the community where the episode took place and interviews with clinic staff and neighbours. The article explores local dynamics of abortion opposition in a country where abortion is legally permitted on broad grounds. By analysing this case as an anthropological event, it discusses how opposition to abortion is dynamic and changes depending on the situation at hand. While abortions that avoid public attention may be silently tolerated, abortions that become openly known are harshly condemned. Through scrutiny of a specific case of collective moral judgement of abortion, the article examines how values like responsible motherhood, sexual virtue and protection of life emerge and are shared, allowing participants to protect and accumulate their own integrity in a moral economy that forges stronger social ties within the community. The article argues that even the harshest expressions of opposition to abortion may not be as categorical as they first appear. It calls for increased attention to dynamics of moral and political opposition to abortion to understand what is socially at stake for those who engage in it.

‘New eugenics,’ gender and sexuality: a global perspective on reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe

ABSTRACT The article addresses reproductive politics and sex education in Cold War Europe in light of novel historical research. Integrating sex education into reproductive politics it delineates four hitherto little discussed conceptual and topical areas in the field, and points to possibilities for further research. Most importantly, the article places the globalized character of post-World War II reproductive politics at the center of historical investigation. It sheds light on the position of (state socialist) Europe in the global processes that shaped fertility- and sexuality-related discourses, policies and practices during the Cold War, and the role of transnational agencies. Secondly, the article highlights the postwar persistence of eugenic thought in reproductive politics, still largely missing especially from the historiography of state socialist countries. It points to the ways in which “new eugenics” is related to its earlier manifestations in Europe as well as how it adapted to state socialist contexts. Third, the article discusses the important contribution of gender and intersectional scholarship on the history of sex education and reproductive politics in Europe to the social and welfare history of the region. Finally, the article pays specific attention to the role of the Catholic Church in the former “Eastern bloc.” It underlines how reproductive issues enabled the Church to affect politics and engage with the state in heterogeneous ways beyond opposition. The article suggests that further historical analysis could importantly contribute to a better understanding of the present rise of populist right-wing discussion focused on the demise of the traditional family and the fall of birth rates.

An Intersectional Archaeology of Women’s Reproductive Rights in Early Twentieth-Century Easton, Maryland

The early 20th century laid much of the basis for today’s landscape of reproductive politics. This article evaluates the reproductive landscape of Easton, Maryland, in the early 20th century, where the appearance of a ca. 1903 advertising booklet for Chichester’s English Pennyroyal Pills and children’s toys on the site of a white middle-class home raises questions about the ways intersections of race, class, and gender constrained reproductive choices amid segregation and the rise of both the birth-control and eugenics movements. An intersectional lens facilitates the exploration of these intersections at the household, neighborhood, and national levels to compare the reproductive realities for white and African American women in this period and the particular local manifestations of these realities.

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci. Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan.

Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci. Contraceptive Diplomacy: Reproductive Politics and Imperial Ambitions in the United States and Japan.