Charting the experiences of internally or externally migrant communities, the volume examines social transformation through the dynamic relationship between movement, reproduction, and health. The chapters examine how healthcare experiences of migrants are not only embedded in their own unique health worldviews, but also influenced by the history, policy, and politics of the wider state systems. The research among migrant communities an understanding of how ideas of reproduction and “cultures of health” travel, how healing, birth and care practices become a result of movement, and how health-related perceptions and reproductive experiences can define migrant belonging and identity.

In the fertility and cosmetics industries, women’s body products – such as urine, eggs, and placentas – have moved from being seen as waste to becoming valuable ingredients. Taking a sociological and anthropological perspective, the author focuses in particular on the role that countries like Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan play in the reproductive products industry, and discusses the moral limits of the cultural and rhetorical trajectories that turn women’s body products into internationally mobile substances.

Original essays bring together the entangled reproductive politics of abortion, adoption, and commercial surrogacy in a global context and neoliberal age.

"At the center of the 'war on women' lies the fact that women in the contemporary United States are facing increased surveillance of their reproductive health. In recent years states have passed a record number of laws restricting abortion and reproductive rights. Physicians continue to sterilize some women against their will, especially those in prison; in other cases, women seeking medical interventions to prevent pregnancies encounter resistance from the medical community. While these trends seem to undermine women's decision-making authority, experts and state actors often defend such policies and actions as actually promoting women's autonomy. In Governed through Choice, Jennifer M. Denbow analyzes recent reproductive measures, such as 'informed consent' to abortion laws and the regulation of sterilization, in order to expose how the notion of autonomy allows for such a striking contradiction in how reproductive policies affect women. Yet, Denbow also offers an understanding of autonomy as critique and transformation of oppressive norms. Denbow shows how developments in reproductive technology, which would seem to increase women's options and autonomy, provide increased opportunities for state management of women's bodies. However, she also argues that reproductive technologies can disrupt oppressive norms about reproduction and gender and ultimately enable social transformation. A critically important analysis, Governed through Choice is a trailblazing look at how the law regulates women's bodies as reproductive sites and what can be done about it"--Unedited summary from paperback book cover.

This volume provides an investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. Using reproduction as an entry point the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.

This volume provides an investigation of the dynamics of reproduction. Using reproduction as an entry point the authors examine how cultures are produced, contested, and transformed as people imagine their collective future in the creation of the next generation.

Many British politicians, planters, and doctors attempted to exploit the fertility of Afro-Caribbean women's bodies in order to ensure the economic success of the British Empire during the age of abolition. Abolitionist reformers hoped that a homegrown labor force would end the need for the Atlantic slave trade. By establishing the ubiquity of visions of fertility and subsequent economic growth during this time, The Politics of Reproduction sheds fresh light on the oft-debated question of whether abolitionism was understood by contemporaries as economically beneficial to the plantation colonies. At the same time, Katherine Paugh makes novel assertions about the importance of Britain's Caribbean colonies in the emergence of population as a political problem. The need to manipulate the labor market on Caribbean plantations led to the creation of new governmental strategies for managing sex and childbearing, such as centralized nurseries, discouragement of extended breastfeeding, and financial incentives for childbearing, that have become commonplace in our modern world. While assessing the politics of reproduction in the British Empire and its Caribbean colonies in relationship to major political events such as the Haitian Revolution, the study also focuses in on the island of Barbados. The remarkable story of an enslaved midwife and her family illustrates how plantation management policies designed to promote fertility affected Afro-Caribbean women during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Politics of Reproduction draws on a wide variety of sources, including debates in the British Parliament and the Barbados House of Assembly, the records of Barbadian plantations, tracts about plantation management published by doctors and plantation owners, and missionary records related to the island of Barbados.