Seminar: Population, Eugenics, and Reproductive (In)Justice: Legalizing Abortion in India
13 SEP 2024 – 4pm-5pm
USyd, Vere Gordon Childe Centre Boardroom, Camperdown, NSW 2050
This event is co-hosted with School of Public Health, School of Humanities, University of Sydney
Synopsis
After the Dobbs decision, which ended the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, some supporters of abortion rights celebrated India’s more liberal law, which had recently been amended to allow abortion until 24 weeks of gestation. Beginning from this stark divergence in Indian and US histories of abortion, this talk takes a deeper look at the origins and implications of legalizing abortion in India. Tracing the historical roots of legal abortion in population control and eugenics, I situate abortion within a wider politics of reproduction in India—a politics that has not often centered the rights of women and pregnant persons but has instead asserted the government’s control over the reproductive capacities of marginalized women. I also consider how we might grapple with these difficult, sometimes painful histories, in order to envision more just reproductive futures.
Speaker
Mytheli Sreenivas is Designated Professor and Chair of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Professor of History at Ohio State University (USA). Her research and teaching center on reproductive politics, transnational feminisms, and South Asian history. She is the author of multiple articles and two books, Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (2008), which was awarded the Joseph Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences from the American Institute of Indian Studies, and Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India (2021), which was a finalist for the ACLS Open Access Book Prize.