Reproductive politics – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Mythheli Sreenivas

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonised some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions-about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.

Read the book here.

By Laura Briggs

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, the US’ current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where Americans face economic realities as social safety nets get cut and wages decline. Briggs brilliantly outlines how politicians’ racist accounts of reproduction – stories of Black “welfare queens” and Latina “breeding machines”- were the leading wedge in the government and business disinvestment in families. With decreasing wages, rising McJobs, and no resources for family care, American households have grown ever more precarious over the past forty years in sharply race-and class-stratified ways. This crisis, argues Briggs, fuels all others – from immigration to gay marriage, anti-feminism to the rise of the Tea Party.

Read the book here.

By Silvia De Zordo, Diana Marre and Marcin Smietana

This double special issue sheds light on the “demographic anxieties” provoked by the articulations of major social and political-economic processes that have affected reproductive politics (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991) and practices over the last decades around the world, in particular: fertility decline, the simultaneous development of sophisticated prenatal and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), and the austerity policies adopted after the 2008 economic crisis on a global scale, in a context of rising nationalism. The authors explore demographic anxieties concerning, on the one hand, fertility decline, the postponement of motherhood and population aging, and, on the other hand, the reproductive behavior of specific social groups (e.g., religious/ethnic minorities and low-income populations). They illustrate how these anxieties emerge and are mobilized as mechanisms of reproductive governance across the global North and South (Fonseca et al. 2021; Morgan and Roberts 2012), in contexts marked by growing social inequalities resulting from the application of neo-liberal policies and austerity measures, which make reproductive choices, and futures, increasingly difficult and precarious.

Read the full article here.