Recent years have seen many changes in human reproduction resulting from state and medical interventions in childbearing processes. Based on empirical work in a variety of societies and countries, this volume considers the relationship between reproductive processes (of fertility, pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period) on the one hand and attitudes, medical technologies and state health policies in diverse cultural contexts on the other.
Maya Unnithan-Kumar is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her research in the early 1990s focused on kinship and gender relations in northwest India and appeared as Identity, Gender and Poverty (Berghahn Books 1997).
List of Figures and TablesPreface and AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the StateMaya Unnithan-KumarChapter 1. Attitudes to Genetic Diagnosis and to the use of Medical Technologies in Pregnancy: Some British Pakistani PerspectivesAlison ShawChapter 2. Localising a Brave New World: New Reproductive Technologies and the Politics of Fertility in Contemporary Sri LankaBob SimpsonChapter 3. Conception Technologies, Local Healers and Negotiations around Childbearing in RajasthanMaya Unnithan-KumarChapter 4. Programmes of Gamete Donation: Strategies in (Private) Clinics of Assisted ConceptionMonica M. E. BonaccorsoChapter 5. Women, Doctors and PainWilliam StonesChapter 6. Labour, Privatisation, and Class: Middle-Class Women’s Experience of Changing Hospital Births in CalcuttaHenrike DonnerChapter 7. In Search of Closure for Quinacrine: Science and Politics in Contexts of Uncertainty and InequalityAsha GeorgeChapter 8. ‘She Has a Tender Body’: Postpartum Morbidity and Care during Bananthana in Rural South IndiaAsha Kilaru, Zoe Matthews, Jayashree Ramakrishna, Shanti Mahendra and Saraswathy GanapathyChapter 9. ‘And Never the Twain Shall Meet’: Reproductive Health Policies in the Islamic Republic of IranSoraya TremayneChapter 10. Women in Fertility Studies and In SituTulsi PatelChapter 11. Heteronomous Women? Hidden Assumptions in the Demography of WomenSumi MadhokNotes on ContributorsIndex