On Not Being Born
Contraceptive Experiments in the Era of Demopower
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2228438 |
|---|---|
| Authors | P Saha (0000-0002-9463-464X, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 167-189 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/715419 |
| OpenAlex | W3200432654 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
“On Not Being Born: Contraceptive Experiments in Bangladesh in the Era of Demopower” traces the development of two abortion technologies created by lay abortionist Harvey Karman, their travel from America before Roe v. Wade to Bangladesh in the infancy of its postcolonial statehood, and their remarkable afterlives. One is celebrated as a technique of the contemporary global development apparatus, and the other is reviled as a debunked medical atrocity. Menstrual regulation, a lay abortion procedure for which Karman is known, is today the fourth most common form of contraception in the developing world. The other, the super coil method, which Karman tested on Black women in Philadelphia, was responsible for catastrophic injury. Read together, the lives of these two technologies offer an account of how experiments on women’s bodies in Bangladesh, as part of a humanitarian mission, justified catastrophic experimentation on Black women in America and became packaged into a narrative about the struggle for abortion as a singular right of American womanhood. This essay argues that menstrual regulation and its repudiated kin are techniques of what I call “demopolitics,” produced by demographic surveillance, monitoring, and abstraction that are financialized through an American foreign aid apparatus of debt. Not being born, in Bangladesh, is the goal of a global futurism that invests itself not in reproduction and the management of life but in contraception and the prevention of birth
Abortion · Art · Birth control · Family planning · Narrative · Population · Pregnancy · Research methodology · Sociology · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Demography · Gender Studies · Reproductive Health and Contraception
Against our will
Induced abortion
Foucault's Futures
Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion
Blind Spots and Failed Performance
Women’s experiences with medication for menstrual regulation in Bangladesh
Marriage means having children and forming your family, so what is the need of discussion?’ Communication and negotiation of childbearing preferences among Bangladeshi couples
Locating Security in the Womb
Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You
Population Policy
The Menstrual Regulation Procedure
No Future
A feminist exploration of 'populationism
Available Motherhood
Pushing in Silence
| Highly cited | No |
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