Paper short abstract:

The absence of new reproductive technologies in West Papua raises questions about what counts as ART and what if anything is being disrupted. This paper looks to ‘old’ sociotechnical interventions that mediate Papuan experiences but fail to transform the racialized hierarchies of reproduction.

Paper long abstract:

In West Papua, medical technologies that could facilitate life, birth, and reproduction are largely absent. Fertility treatments are nonexistent, and technologies, laws, and mobilities are generally not providing new opportunities and options for reproduction. Ethnographic research and interviews with Papuan parents about hospital births shows that ‘old’ technologies like ultrasounds and c-sections are all that is on offer in this context. These sociotechnical interventions are centred in contentious hierarchies and advance racialized inequalities. Looking at the absence of new reproductive technologies, and what, therefore, counts as ART, can reinvigorate questions about the transformative potential of biomedicine and what if anything is being disrupted. In West Papua it is not specialists nor high tech skills and equipment that are required to advance reproduction – it is conditions that permit dignity and respect. Staying at home to birth, avoiding a big baby, arriving late in labour, or seeking a remote village birth are some of the transformations Papuans take up in the face of reproductive abandonment.