Reproductive governance in Latin America

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of reproductive governance as an analytic tool for tracing the shifting political rationalities of population and reproduction. As advanced here, the concept of reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors - such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements - use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices. Examples are drawn from Latin America, where reproductive governance is undergoing a dramatic transformation as public policy conversations are coalescing around new moral regimes and rights-based actors through debates about abortion, emergency contraception, sterilisation, migration, and assisted reproductive technologies. Reproductive discourses are increasingly framed through morality and contestations over 'rights', where rights-bearing citizens are pitted against each other in claiming reproductive, sexual, indigenous, and natural rights, as well as the 'right to life' of the unborn. The concept of reproductive governance can be applied to other settings in order to understand shifting political rationalities within the domain of reproduction.

Abortion in legal, social, and healthcare contexts

“…Medical technologies such as increasingly sophisticated prenatal screening, advanced foetal surgery techniques, and neonatal intensive care procedures have transformed an embryo/foetus into a ''patient'', that is a new bio-political subject that is entitled to health care (Morgan, 2009;Morgan & Roberts, 2012). Stephenson, Mills and McLeod (2017, this issue) discuss one of these technologies, obstetric ultrasound, and its capacity to identify actual or potential foetal anomalies.…”

‘Homework’ and transnational adoption screening in Spain: the co‐production of home and family

“…McDonough et al 1998:931-2); between 1978 and 1988 Spain legalized contraception, abortion, divorce, voluntary sterilization and assisted reproduction (compare Morgan and Roberts 2012:241 on ‘reproductive governance’). …”

Accounting for abortion: Accomplishing transnational reproductive governance through post-abortion care in Senegal

“…Anthropologists Morgan and Roberts define reproductive governance as the ‘mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors—such as state institutions, churches, donor agencies, and NGOs—use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviors and practices (p. 243)’ (Morgan & Roberts, 2012). Their definition draws on Foucault’s concept of biopower as a form of governance, in which population management occurs through the surveillance and regulation of individual behavior by public health institutions and professions such as medicine, demography, and epidemiology (Foucault, 1978).…”

“…Reproductive policies control behavior not only by regulating access to services, but also by establishing and assigning moral value to particular reproductive subjectivities such as ‘the unborn fetus.’ Reproductive governance operates through the forging of identities that reflect dominant reproductive goals and logics, which in turn are connected to the state’s political imaginary of the body politic (Ginsburg & Rapp, 1995; Morgan & Roberts, 2012). In the US, the simultaneous inclusion of preconception care—a constellation of services designed to prepare women for potential pregnancies—and rejection of abortion in the 2010 Affordable Care Act conveys the state’s desire to establish motherhood as the ideal reproductive status for women (Waggoner, 2013).…”

“…Scholars have referred to such attempts as ‘reproductive governance’ (Morgan & Roberts, 2012). While reproductive governance takes many legal, clinical, and discursive forms, it is often accomplished and enforced through the production and deployment of demographic statistics that permit the state to monitor reproductive matters such as birth rates, maternal mortality, and abortion.…”