Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State: Cultural Transformations in Childbearing / Edition 1

by Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Overview

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845450441
Publisher:	Berghahn Books
Publication date:	11/01/2005
Series:	Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality: Social and Cultural Perspectives , #3
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State
Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Chapter 1. Attitudes to Genetic Diagnosis and to the use of Medical Technologies in Pregnancy: Some British Pakistani Perspectives
Alison Shaw

Chapter 2. Localising a Brave New World: New Reproductive Technologies and the Politics of Fertility in Contemporary Sri Lanka
Bob Simpson

Chapter 3. Conception Technologies, Local Healers and Negotiations around Childbearing in Rajasthan
Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Chapter 4. Programmes of Gamete Donation: Strategies in (Private) Clinics of Assisted Conception
Monica M. E. Bonaccorso

Chapter 5. Women, Doctors and Pain
William Stones

Chapter 6. Labour, Privatisation, and Class: Middle-Class Women’s Experience of Changing Hospital Births in Calcutta
Henrike Donner

Chapter 7. In Search of Closure for Quinacrine: Science and Politics in Contexts of Uncertainty and Inequality
Asha George

Chapter 8. ‘She Has a Tender Body’: Postpartum Morbidity and Care during Bananthana in Rural South India
Asha Kilaru, Zoe Matthews, Jayashree Ramakrishna, Shanti Mahendra and Saraswathy Ganapathy

Chapter 9. ‘And Never the Twain Shall Meet’: Reproductive Health Policies in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Soraya Tremayne

Chapter 10. Women in Fertility Studies and In Situ
Tulsi Patel

Chapter 11. Heteronomous Women? Hidden Assumptions in the Demography of Women
Sumi Madhok

Notes on Contributors
Index