Paper short abstract:

The paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted among migrant women in two underserved neighbourhoods in India, and their experiences of the varying strategies of birth control and reproductive management that are targeted at them by state, non-state, and private agents.

Paper long abstract:

The central finding that I wish to speak of in this presentation is how participation in assisted reproduction – specifically commercial surrogacy and egg donation – is encouraged among the urban poor, interestingly, as a form of birth control, in order to incorporate working class bodies into an ever-expanding bioeconomy of what some sociologists have called clinical labour (Cooper and Waldby 2014). I am interested in examining how the bodies of these women are seen as productively fecund, but also as risky in its perceived excessiveness. The codes of self-fashioning that play out in these narratives of modernisation are complex, as women are encouraged to become commercial surrogates and egg donors as means of escaping familial and conjugal entrapments, while being persuaded in idioms of relationality and care. I am interested in the ways in which actors and institutions play out these scripts of embedding and disembedding (Biao 2007) as part of the strategies for governing the reproduction of marginalised women, and understanding their own relationship with the hierarchical systems they know they inhabit. Expanding on anthropologist Lawrence Cohen's conceptualisation of 'bioavailable' and ‘operable bodies' (2007), I assert that certain bodies, particularly those belonging to low-caste migrant women, do not become available at one particular clinical juncture but have always been bioavailable, from birth to death, based on the value that sovereign attaches to their lives. The paper further argues how the working-class family becomes a site of surveillance and control, under the guise of caring for marginalised women.