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draws on the concept of birth projects to demonstrate that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control birthing bodies, especially of low-income and Black women in the global south, does not dissipate. The twentieth-century top-down population control projects, embedded in state propaganda and policies, were easily identifiable because of their starkness and brutality. What we have today are birth projects that are diffuse and couched in the frame of individual choice, which absolve the state of its responsibility. These neo-eugenic birth projects are
This book analyses the world of selective reproduction – the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future – by a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of ‘controlling’ birth: contraception, reproductive violence, and repro-genetic technologies. The premise is that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies, for instance those that assist conception and/or allow genetic selection, may appear to be the antithesis of violent versions of population control, the book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. Much as all population control policies target and vilify (Black) women for their over-fertility, and coerce/induce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance, assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies have a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class, and caste. The book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations – South Africa and India – where the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets allow for some parallel moments of selecting who gets to legitimately reproduce the future. The book provides a critical interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly ‘post-population control’ era. The contributions range from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics, science and technology studies, to theology, public health, epidemiology and women’s health, with the aim of facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.
The book explores the relationship between violence against women on one hand, and the rights to health and reproductive health on the other. It argues that violation of the right to health is a consequence of violence, and that (state) health policies might be a cause of – or create the conditions for – violence against women. It significantly contributes to feminist and international human rights legal scholarship by conceptualising a new ground-breaking idea, violence against women’s health (VAWH), using the Hippocratic paradigm as the backbone of the analysis. The two dimensions of violence at the core of the book – the horizontal, ‘interpersonal’ dimension and the vertical ‘state policies’ dimension – are investigated through around 70 decisions of domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies (the anamnesis). The concept of VAWH, drawn from the anamnesis, enriches the traditional concept of violence against women with a human rights-based approach to autonomy and a reflection on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination (diagnosis). VAWH as theorised in the book allows the reconceptualisation of states’ obligations in an innovative way, by identifying for both dimensions obligations of result, due diligence obligations, and obligations to progressively take steps (treatment). The book eventually asks whether it is not international law itself that is the ultimate cause of VAWH (prognosis).
literature around population control and global governance is rich and interdisciplinary, the conversations have not made the necessary connections to other forms of interconnected birth projects that are shaped by global politics. The contributors bring their disciplinary foci, ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics, science and technology studies (STS), to theology, public health, epidemiology, women's health, and performance studies, with the aim of facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling
artists of colour in Vancouver to Conclusion exhibit and discuss their work in the 1970s and 1980s. Although too numerous to mention here, some of those listed in the 1980s include the exhibition Herotica: Women’s Erotic Art, which included over thirty women artists at two galleries in 1981; Festival ′82: A Celebration of Women in the Arts, which included dance, performance, video screenings, and visual art exhibits; Judy Chicago’s The Birth Project shown at the Vancouver Centennial Museum (1983); the women-juried Women Photographers of British Columbia exhibit
SR Rashida Manjoo stressed that despite the efforts and the existence of a Federal Bureau of Prisons’ policy on shackling, pregnant women have been reported to be routinely shackled on their way to and from hospital, and sometimes even during labour, delivery and after delivery.525 Even when laws prohibiting the use of shackles on women in labour have been adopted, they are seldom applied.526 A report published in May 2016 by the Prison Birth Project and Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts found that Massachusetts prisons and jails had violated their newly