“We can only fully understand any one of three contested sites
of reproduction (abortion, adoption, and surrogacy) by considering
all three in conversation with each other. By addressing all three
activities as parts of a collective whole, the editors illuminate
important ways that reproduction operates in today’s global world.”
—Abigail L. Palko
“This volume
works together wonderfully to show us how the notion of ‘choice’
works in the context of the transnational force of neoliberalism and
other inequalities to make some people’s reproduction less free, to
produce reproduction that is more, not less, stratified.” —Laura
Briggs
The
Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion and Surrogacy in the Age
of Neoliberalism uniquely
brings together three sites of reproduction and reproductive politics
to demonstrate their entanglement in creating or restricting options
for family-making. The original essays in this collection—which
draw from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical
perspectives—are attentive to neoliberalism’s reshaping of
economies and intimacies to better understand the
politics of reproduction. By
looking at particular instances (surrogacy in Mexico, forced
sterilization in Peru, and racialized biopolitics in post-Katrina
Mississippi, among other sites), The
Politics of Reproduction
focuses on the effects of a radically altered economic landscape on
individual choice-making. As a whole, the volume critically engages
the question of choice to better understand the costs of a political
and ideological climate that encourages, even demands, individual
solutions to intractable social problems. Whose choices are amplified
in the use of new biomedical technologies and assisted reproduction?
Why and how are we discouraged from understanding the economic
motivations behind the “choice” to surrender a baby for adoption
or to become a surrogate or to seek an abortion? Attentive to the
historical, cultural, and ideological conjunctures of reproductive
politics, The Politics of
Reproduction makes a
distinctive contribution to feminist analyses of the specific
challenges posed by neoliberalism to reproductive possibilities,
politics, and justice in the contemporary moment.
