Regulating Reproduction: Morality, Politics and (In)justice

3 units

This course centers on the burgeoning corpus of anthropological scholarship on reproduction, with special attention to the regulation of reproductive behaviors and population management in cross-cultural perspective. Anthropologists and feminist scholars have shown how reproduction-which links individual bodies to the body politic-is a privileged site for processes of governance. Scholars have also shown how seemingly personal reproductive choices made in the micro units of families, are always bound up with broader, if obscured, economic, national, and political projects. In this course, we will cover how diverse entities, including the state, the Church, NGO's and feminist groups, seek to manage reproductive behaviors and politics across the world. We will discuss population control campaigns (such as China's notorious one-child policy) and pronatalist population policies (like those seen in Israel) in order to underscore how the management of fertility becomes a crucial site for nationalist and state-building projects. In this course we examine processes of reproductive governance around topics including pregnancy and birth, family planning, abortion, and adoption. We also examine how the global proliferation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (such as in vitro, sonogram, abortifacient pills, amniocentesis) intersects with efforts to govern reproduction. Crucially, we take class and race as key axes through which reproduction is experienced and stratified in diverse contexts. At the end of this course students should have a solid grasp of key topics and themes in the anthropology of reproductive governance, as well as more in-depth knowledge of a particular controversial reproductive issue that they choose to focus on for their final research paper.