speakers:
Dr. Kalindi Vora, Anthropology
Dr. Fouzieyha Towghi, Women & Gender Studies
The Center was proud to inaugurate the Fall 2008 Thursday Afternoon Forum Series with a panel entitled, “Reproductive Technologies in South Asia: Transnational Medico-technical Mediations, the Commodification of Wombs, and (Re)productive Labor,” an examination of the complex intersection between human reproduction, and the ethics and influence of medical technology in South Asia.
Dr. Kalindi Vora began by describing her fieldwork at the Akanksha Clinic in Anand, Gujarat, India, which has attracted world-wide attention in the media for its practice of arranging local surrogate-birth mothers for foreign couples. Her research suggests that such practices serve both to open up surrogacy as an employment opportunity for women who have few other options, as well as to alienate surrogate women from their bodies in the gestation process.
The technologies used in in vitro fertilization provide a framework for an understanding of wombs as vacant spaces that can be rented out for the gestation of a guest fetus who has no ties to the gestating mother. The birthing process is reconstituted as a new form of contracted, feminized labor. Because transnational surrogacy is largely unregulated in India, and because of the co-existence of medical, non-medical, and non-Western concepts of kinship, the relations between surrogate mothers, intended parents, and the embryo itself remain in flux.
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The talk continued with Dr. Fouzieyha Towghi describing a dilemma facing health officials in the Panjgurati region of Pakistan created by the intersection of tradition and technology. On the one hand, public health officials are convinced that infant and maternal mortality can best be prevented in hospitals. However, home births under the care of traditional midwives remain one of the most enduring and widely practiced birthing methods throughout the region and country.
These opposing convictions have resulted in further questions concerning what constitutes appropriate medical practice. Under what conditions should non-licensed birthing attendants be allowed to administer drugs? What drugs should they be provided legal access to? Should drugs such as the anti-inflammatory Misoprostol be used to prevent bleeding—the leading cause of maternal mortality—when the full clinical effects of the drug remain unknown?
Dr. Towghi feels these debates surrounding female birthing practice further underscore a broader ethical concern regarding the availability and applications of medical technology. She cites the widespread, poorly regulated use in underdeveloped countries of drugs for off-label applications such as pregnancy or abortion, as further evidence of a latent sense of international relativism in regard to the distribution of biomedical technology across the globe.
