Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State

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).

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