eprintid: 10119146
rev_number: 20
eprint_status: archive
userid: 608
dir: disk0/10/11/91/46
datestamp: 2021-01-25 12:36:04
lastmod: 2021-12-10 01:09:07
status_changed: 2021-01-25 12:36:04
type: article
metadata_visibility: show
creators_name: Patchin, PM
title: For the sake of the child: The economisation of reproduction in the Zika public health emergency
ispublished: inpress
divisions: UCL
divisions: B03
divisions: C03
divisions: F21
divisions: K56
keywords: climate, empire (Puerto Rico), feminism, political economy of health, reproduction, Zika
note: © 2020 The Authors. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
abstract: Feminist work on population governance has tracked its racial dynamics, its varied attempts to expunge the poor from the future, and its violent wresting of control over reproduction away from women. Attention has recently turned to “economised” understandings of possible and proto‐life that take the aggregate reproductivity of certain groups of women and girls as a means of shaping economic futures, which emerged as the dominant form of population governance during the Cold War. Underexplored in this incisive body of work, however, is the relationship between the reproductive body and social reproduction. This paper advances feminist work on adjudications of life worth in government policy and scientific expertise, and critical political economic work on global health governance, by exploring experiments in family planning. I do this through a discussion of the Zika virus, the recent re‐emergence of which was framed as an economic problem: experts “priced” a single case of microcephaly at US$10 million or more across a lifetime. Specifically, I examine a programme of contraceptive provision to women in Puerto Rico as part of the public health emergency, which I show to have possible eugenic effects. I argue that in the global politics of public and reproductive health, relatively new neoliberal health metrics have joined up with eugenicist impulses to value life according to future economic contributions. Such valuations of life focalise the reproductive body while abandoning the social reproductive body. The relationship between reproductive labour and social reproduction warrants further scrutiny, for as we careen through uncertain ecological futures, and as discourses about limited Earth for humans amid environmental crisis and limited funding for future children thicken, the reproductivity of certain women and girls is being tinkered with by experts, governments, and private institutions in new ways.
date: 2020-10-04
publisher: WILEY
official_url: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12384
oa_status: green
full_text_type: pub
language: eng
primo: open
primo_central: open_green
verified: verified_manual
elements_id: 1842146
doi: 10.1111/tran.12384
lyricists_name: Patchin, Paige
lyricists_id: PPATC58
actors_name: Patchin, Paige
actors_id: PPATC58
actors_role: owner
full_text_status: public
publication: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
pages: 13
citation:        Patchin, PM;      (2020)    For the sake of the child: The economisation of reproduction in the Zika public health emergency.                   Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers        10.1111/tran.12384 <https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12384>.    (In press).    Green open access   
 
document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10119146/1/tran.12384.pdf