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.
(In press).
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | For the sake of the child: The economisation of reproduction in the Zika public health emergency |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/tran.12384 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12384 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 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/). |
| Keywords: | climate, empire (Puerto Rico), feminism, political economy of health, reproduction, Zika |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office > UCL Institute for Advanced Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10119146 |
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