Original essays bring together the entangled reproductive politics of abortion, adoption, and commercial surrogacy in a global context and neoliberal age.

Discusses the political implications of reproduction, examines feminist and traditional masculine theories, and suggests a reformed interpretation of Marxist principles

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.

"At the center of the 'war on women' lies the fact that women in the contemporary United States are facing increased surveillance of their reproductive health. In recent years states have passed a record number of laws restricting abortion and reproductive rights. Physicians continue to sterilize some women against their will, especially those in prison; in other cases, women seeking medical interventions to prevent pregnancies encounter resistance from the medical community. While these trends seem to undermine women's decision-making authority, experts and state actors often defend such policies and actions as actually promoting women's autonomy. In Governed through Choice, Jennifer M. Denbow analyzes recent reproductive measures, such as 'informed consent' to abortion laws and the regulation of sterilization, in order to expose how the notion of autonomy allows for such a striking contradiction in how reproductive policies affect women. Yet, Denbow also offers an understanding of autonomy as critique and transformation of oppressive norms. Denbow shows how developments in reproductive technology, which would seem to increase women's options and autonomy, provide increased opportunities for state management of women's bodies. However, she also argues that reproductive technologies can disrupt oppressive norms about reproduction and gender and ultimately enable social transformation. A critically important analysis, Governed through Choice is a trailblazing look at how the law regulates women's bodies as reproductive sites and what can be done about it"--Unedited summary from paperback book cover.

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.

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.

This volume provides an investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. Using reproduction as an entry point the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.