Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics

Fertility, Health and Reproductive Politics
Author: Maya Unnithan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-04-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429878761

Set in the context of the processes and practices of human reproduction and reproductive health in Northern India, this book examines the institutional exercise of power by the state, caste and kin groups. Drawing on ethnographic research over the past eighteen years among poor Hindu and Muslim communities in Rajasthan and among development and health actors in the state, this book contributes to developing analytic perspectives on reproductive practice, agency and the body-self as particular and novel sites of a vital power and politic. Rajasthan has been among the poorest states in the country with high levels of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity. The author closely examines how social and economic inequalities are produced and sustained in discursive and on the ground contexts of family-making, how authoritative knowledge and power in the domain of childbirth is exercised across a landscape of development institutions, how maternal health becomes a category of citizenship, how health-seeking is socially and emotionally determined and political in nature, how the health sector operates as a biopolitical system, and how diverse moral claims over the fertile, infertile and reproductive body-self are asserted, contested and often realised. A compelling analysis, this book offers both new empirical data and new theoretical insights. It draws together the practices, experiences and discourse on fertility and reproduction (childbirth, infertility, loss) in Northern India into an overarching analytical framework on power and gender politics. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, gender studies, human rights and sociolegal studies, and South Asian studies.

The Cultural Politics of Reproduction

The Cultural Politics of Reproduction
Author: Maya Unnithan-Kumar
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2014-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1782385452

Charting the experiences of internally or externally migrant communities, the volume examines social transformation through the dynamic relationship between movement, reproduction, and health. The chapters examine how healthcare experiences of migrants are not only embedded in their own unique health worldviews, but also influenced by the history, policy, and politics of the wider state systems. The research among migrant communities an understanding of how ideas of reproduction and “cultures of health” travel, how healing, birth and care practices become a result of movement, and how health-related perceptions and reproductive experiences can define migrant belonging and identity.

Fertility Policy in Israel

Fertility Policy in Israel
Author: Jacqueline Portugese
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1998-08-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

An examination, with feminist perspective, of Israel's fertility practices and policies surrounding abortion, family planning, in vitro fertilization and the welfare state. This book exposes the complex web of issues, actors, and power relations that shape the Israeli political agenda. At the same time, it contributes to ongoing feminist debates concerning the politics of reproduction and the role of the state in contributing to the oppression of women. Israel's commmitment to Zionist ideals and policies, its ambiguous relationship with Jewish Orthodoxy, and the intersection of the two at the level of gender relations have played a great role in determining the shape, scope,and direction of many government policies. This book explores the relationship between these three ideological and institutional forces in the context of development of fertility policy. In the process, it touches upon various points of interest, including the state's treatment of the Palestinian Arab minority and its relationship with the wider Palestinian national movement; the power relations and political agenda underlying policy-making in Israel; the development of Israeli social and political identity; and the use of gender to explain both the status of Israeli women and the overall unfolding of politics and policy-making.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India
Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295748850

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 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 demonized 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. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics

How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics
Author: Laura Briggs
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2018-08-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520299949

Today all politics are reproductive politics, argues esteemed feminist critic Laura Briggs. From longer work hours to the election of Donald Trump, our current political crisis is above all about reproduction. Households are where we face our 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, our 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.

Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (Volume 2)

Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (Volume 2)
Author: Robert Black
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2016-04-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1464803684

The evaluation of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH) by the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) focuses on maternal conditions, childhood illness, and malnutrition. Specifically, the chapters address acute illness and undernutrition in children, principally under age 5. It also covers maternal mortality, morbidity, stillbirth, and influences to pregnancy and pre-pregnancy. Volume 3 focuses on developments since the publication of DCP2 and will also include the transition to older childhood, in particular, the overlap and commonality with the child development volume. The DCP3 evaluation of these conditions produced three key findings: 1. There is significant difficulty in measuring the burden of key conditions such as unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, nonsexually transmitted infections, infertility, and violence against women. 2. Investments in the continuum of care can have significant returns for improved and equitable access, health, poverty, and health systems. 3. There is a large difference in how RMNCH conditions affect different income groups; investments in RMNCH can lessen the disparity in terms of both health and financial risk.

GUYnecology

GUYnecology
Author: Rene Almeling
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520963989

What is healthy sperm or the male biological clock? This book details why we don't talk about men's reproductive health and how this lack shapes reproductive politics today. For more than a century, the medical profession has made enormous efforts to understand and treat women’s reproductive bodies. But only recently have researchers begun to ask basic questions about how men’s health matters for reproductive outcomes, from miscarriage to childhood illness. What explains this gap in knowledge, and what are its consequences? Rene Almeling examines the production, circulation, and reception of biomedical knowledge about men’s reproductive health. From a failed nineteenth-century effort to launch a medical specialty called andrology to the contemporary science of paternal effects, there has been a lack of attention to the importance of men’s age, health, and exposures. Analyzing historical documents, media messages, and qualitative interviews, GUYnecology demonstrates how this non-knowledge shapes reproductive politics today.

Reproductive Geographies

Reproductive Geographies
Author: Marcia England
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Science
ISBN: 042977205X

The sites, spaces and subjects of reproduction are distinctly geographical. Reproductive geographies span different scales - body, home, local, national, global - and movements across space. This book expands our understanding of the socio-cultural and spatial aspects of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The chapters directly address global perspectives, the future of reproductive politics and state-focused approaches to the politicisation of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The book provides up-to-date explorations on the changing landscapes of reproduction, including the expansion of reproductive technologies, such as surrogacy and intrauterine insemination. Contributions in this book focus on phenomenologically-inspired accounts of women’s lived experience of pregnancy and birth, the biopolitics of birth and citizenship, the material histories of reproductive tissues as "scientific objects" and engagements with public health and development policy. This is an essential resource for upper-level undergraduates and graduates studying topics such as Sociology, Geographies of Gender, Women’s Studies and Anthropology of Health and Medicine.

Pregnancy and Power

Pregnancy and Power
Author: Rickie Solinger
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0814798284

Winner of the 2013 Bullough Award presented by the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality The term “intersex” evokes diverse images, typically of people who are both male and female or neither male nor female. Neither vision is accurate. The millions of people with an intersex condition, or DSD (disorder of sex development), are men or women whose sex chromosomes, gonads, or sex anatomy do not fit clearly into the male/female binary norm. Until recently, intersex conditions were shrouded in shame and secrecy: many adults were unaware that they had been born with an intersex condition and those who did know were advised to hide the truth. Current medical protocols and societal treatment of people with an intersex condition are based upon false stereotypes about sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, which create unique challenges to framing effective legal claims and building a strong cohesive movement. InIntersexuality and the Law, Julie A. Greenberg examines the role that legal institutions can play in protecting the rights of people with an intersex condition. She also explores the relationship between the intersex movement and other social justice movements that have effectively utilized legal strategies to challenge similar discriminatory practices. She discusses the feasibility of forming effective alliances and developing mutually beneficial legal arguments with feminists, LGBT organizations, and disability rights advocates to eradicate the discrimination suffered by these marginalized groups.

Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction

Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction
Author: Susan Markens
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2007-09-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520940970

Susan Markens takes on one of the hottest issues on the fertility front—surrogate motherhood—in a book that illuminates the culture wars that have erupted over new reproductive technologies in the United States. In an innovative analysis of legislative responses to surrogacy in the bellwether states of New York and California, Markens explores how discourses about gender, family, race, genetics, rights, and choice have shaped policies aimed at this issue. She examines the views of key players, including legislators, women's organizations, religious groups, the media, and others. In a study that finds surprising ideological agreement among those with opposing views of surrogate motherhood, Markens challenges common assumptions about our responses to reproductive technologies and at the same time offers a fascinating picture of how reproductive politics shape social policy.