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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.
on what Shellee Colen ( 1995 ) has called stratified reproduction; that is, a system in which labour and social rights are granted or denied based on gender, class, race, and legal status. This is sustained by a border regime (Fassin 2011 ) – both in geo-political and conceptual terms – that reinforces, through the legal system, a model of care that is feminised, precarious, and stratified (Pérez-Orozco 2006 , see also Pine and Haukanes, Chapter 1 , this volume). Drawing on recent literature on citizenship and border regulation (Fassin 2011
, teachers, or parents, are not ‘masculine’ soldiers but women. It exposes not just the deficiencies of the market and state systems but affirms that these deficient systems have been limping along because of the unpaid and unrecognised labour of women. The pandemic is being written down in history as a crisis in capitalism and production, but in all its true colours, it is ultimately a crisis of social reproduction (Fraser, 2017). Unarguably, the burden of the pandemic is gendered. How does the pandemic affect our world of (stratified) reproduction? As
accordance to hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity and migration status, creating an international division of reproductive labour (Vora, 2008, 2012 ; Sangari, 2015 ; Twine, 2015 ). Indeed, reproduction is in itself stratified, that is, the reproductive choices of privileged women and men are made through the bodies of less privileged women (Gupta, 2006 ). While previous research on surrogacy has addressed the ‘stratified reproduction’ (Colen, 1995 ) of Indian women in terms of class and economic status (Deomampo, 2016 ; Pande, 2014b ; Rudrappa 2015 ; Vora 2015
Gena Corea (as described in Roberts, 2009 ) spoke of dystopias in which white women's reproduction was of a higher value in perception than that of women of colour. Corea discussed the idea in her work The Mother Machine , predicting that women of colour would be hired as surrogates for white women at low costs. The opposing relationship of white women and women of colour to ARTs has been critiqued by feminist scholars and has been termed “‘stratified reproduction’” by anthropologists such as Rayna Rapp (as described
countries trying to access ART are, first, to have legal access to ART (sometimes only possible when one is in a legal partnership) in their home country. If this is impossible, ‘fertility travel’ is required. However, this results in the challenge of how to get the legal documentation (birth certificate, citizenship, parenthood recognition) for the home country. This is also a class issue that leads to stratified reproduction, since only queer and trans people with enough money and flexible time can afford to try to escape their reproductive bioprecarity in their home
College, Dublin (5 February). Chavkin, W. and J. M. Maher (eds) (2010). The Globalization of Motherhood: Deconstructions and Reconstructions of Biology and Care. New York: Routledge. Cohen, L. (2005). ‘Operability, bioavailability and exception’, in Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (eds), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 79–90. Colen, S. (1995). ‘ “Like a mother to them”: Stratified reproduction and West Indian childcare workers and employers in New York’, in F. D. Ginsburg and R. Rapp
women access to assisted reproduction without the consent of a partner would rank the Czech Republic in the group of European countries that … have issued a positive signal in support of fertility’ (authors’ translation). 8 The issue of people travelling from abroad to Czech clinics for AR, contributing to stratified reproduction, did not appear in the debate. While the strategy proposed expanding access to AR as one road to increasing fertility, the following statements illustrate opinions that
stratified reproduction (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995 ): for lesbians, the birth of a child may or may not translate into kin feeling akin with the couple, or their child. To conclude, I want to offer some reflections on how biostability and bioprecarity structures the making of kin in lesbians’ parental projects, as well as some thoughts on the multiple kin meanings embedded in childbirth. My data show that within the context of lesbians suffering a lack of recognition and support from their own parents, the birth of a child may rekindle broken ties. However, the data
discouraged or prevented from reproducing (see Stanworth 1987 , Edwards 2018 ). As Rayna Rapp argues in her account of stratified reproduction (Rapp 2011 : 703), the question is ‘why, how and with what consequences the reproductive aspirations, practices and outcomes of one group of people are valorised, while the parenthood of another is despised or unsupported’. The role of nationalist, religious, and state ideologies in shaping policy is critical here; people whose sexuality is viewed as transgressive or whose ethnicity is unwelcome may not be allowed access to