Reproduction is highly political.
Birth, pregnancy, contraception, fertility/infertility, health, sperm, eggs, surrogacy, and breastfeeding are often concepts overlooked as natural, biological, or a reality in itself but are all highly contested sites of politics, power, and resistance.
All of these concepts are highly interconnected into to the socio-historic construction of the female and what the female role is and what her body means. Women have often been subjected to unjust politics of blame, burden, and responsibility within these sites and have suffered through physical abuses by industries (Nestles targeting of women in third world countries with infant formula that was deleterious to women’s health and killed their babies, female hygiene/contraception industries marketing of “female hygiene products” in the 1930s that did not prevent pregnancy, caused reproductive and bodily damage and killed women, womens’ bodies as places of experimentation of various pharmaceutical drugs carelessly tested such as DES given to women in the 1970s to prevent miscarriages which created thousands of DES daughters with cervical cancer and removed uteruses and vaginas, and the high maternal death rate for the over-use of cesarean sections in hospitals), emotional and legal abuse (the incrimination of “drug-addicted mothers” for fetal abuse or murder for crack cocaine use while mens’ “life-style choices” merely affected victimized sperm and not the fetus, women disembodied from the fetus in fetal iconography and in labor portrayed as machines, women disempowered from breastfeeding because of industry marketing of formula and women as the only gender responsible for contraception and reproduction with the formulation of the female pill) and have been particularly subjected to Michel Foucaults’ concept of biopower and anatamo-politics where the body is surveyed and managed by the state (as in Romania where women were subjected to mandatory gynecological exams to make sure they maintained their pregnancy to provide workers for a pro-natalist, Communist regime). Despite this long history of power struggles where the woman usually lost, women have shown great resistance in re-asserting their own power that has often been taken away from them or used against them.
The midwifery movements’ resistance against obstetrics and biomedical births is a great example of this resistance. The midwifery movement has attempted to assert Habermas’s lifeworld into the hospital and into the experience of giving birth, an experience that is now predominantly “colonized by an over-extended technocratic rationality” (Hird & Rashreed, 2618). Women in mainstream hospitals all over the United States are often treated like machines set on a staged time schedule. Birth is assumed to be abnormal, a disease-state that needs to be managed and fixed by the “mechanic” or “supervisor”, ie the doctor. Women have no immediate role as decision-makers and are often subjected to the technical rationalization of medicines and technologies, often not necessary, and often damaging to mother and infant. Caesearan sections are performed for 30 percent of births in the United States whereas the World Health Organization recommends up to only an average of 15 percent. Anything that exceeds 15 percent entails higher rates of maternal deaths. Studies show that caesarean sections are most often performed at 5 PM and 12 midnight, the hours when doctors and hospital staff consider their day over. Power and money is always at play within a privatized health system where the more babies “produced” each day, the more money made!
Klassen does an excellent job at speaking about the resistance of the home birth movement.
“Pragmatically transforming the culture of birth in which they live, home-birthing women enact strategies of resistance and reinterpret history, the body, and the process of birth itself. As part of a wider, often feminsit-led critique of twenieth-century birthing practices, home-birthing women point out the historical disjuncture of hospital birth within the span of women’s birthing history. They reclaim what one woman called the “century-old woman” within their own bodies, as an embodied birthing guide. They reinterpert the pathologized female body as a body of specifically female power and ability— a power and ability that are deemed “natural”, but with a creitical dimension. And they construct birth as a bodily process that, in addition to bringina baby, can bring revelation, healing, and strength” (Klassen, 802).l
A far too brief discussion of the politics of reproduction, but I found it better to say something on this unspoken subject than nothing at all.
Your site was extremely interesting, especially since I was searching for thoughts on this subject last Thursday. 🙂