- Convenors:
-
Adi Moreno
Hedva Eyal
Merav Amir (Queen's University Belfast)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Examining reproduction in times of crisis. This interdisciplinary panel explores how reproductive politics and practices shape and are shaped by contemporary polarizations, while revealing possibilities for solidarity amid global upheaval.
Long Abstract
In our contemporary crisis-laden world, reproduction has emerged as both a volatile site of polarizing politics and a mechanism for reproducing social divisions. As Ginsburg and Rapp (1995) argued, reproduction sits at the intersection of global and local politics, revealing how power operates through intimate life. Building on this, Briggs (2017) demonstrates that "all politics became reproductive politics"—reproduction underlies seemingly disparate struggles from welfare to immigration. As reproductive capacities are increasingly targeted in armed conflicts and systematic violence globally, we witness how what Mbembe (2003) termed necropolitics, and the creation of “death worlds”, does not only dictate who may live and who must die, but also determine who may reproduce. Morgan's (2019) concept of reproductive governance illuminates how diverse actors including states, religious institutions, NGOs and social movements, deploy controls, inducements, and injunctions to manage reproduction during upheavals.
From genocidal acts in Gaza targeting current and future populations through the destruction of the conditions of reproduction and, more directly, by targeting maternity wards and fertility centers, to systemic and widespread reproductive violence by Russian forces in the Ukraine, to neo-conservative abortion bans and closures of family planning support in the US, to rising migration barriers in Europe, contemporary crises reveal reproduction as a key battleground where competing visions of human futures collide. This panel will bring together papers examining diverse reproductive struggles across global contexts, exploring how reproductive experiences both reflect existing polarizations and forge unexpected solidarities transcending binary logics of inclusion/exclusion.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnography, this paper examines how abortion politics shaped Poland’s 2023 elections and enabled contingent alliances between the women’s movement and the liberal opposition, while revealing the instrumentalization of reproductive struggles in times of democratic uncertainty.
Paper long abstract
Since the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party returned to power in 2015, reproductive rights have become a central site of political polarization in Poland, opposing supporters of a liberal, pro-European vision of democracy to those of a nationalist, Catholic order. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted among pro- and anti-abortion activists from the 2020 de facto abortion ban to the 2023 parliamentary elections, this paper examines how abortion politics shaped the ballot against a backdrop of converging feminist and "democratic" agendas.
The paper proceeds in three steps. First, it analyzes how political polarization both manifests itself through and configures reproductive governance, within the broader context of anti-gender politics. Second, it focuses on the 2023 electoral campaign, showing how abortion emerged as a key issue through which new alliances were forged between the women’s movement and the liberal opposition, resulting in the fall of the PiS government. Third, the paper discusses the limits of this political reconfiguration. Despite the central role played by women's mobilization in the opposition’s victory, electoral promises regarding abortion law reform have largely been abandoned. I trace these constraints to both structural and conjunctural factors: a patriarchal political culture, a fragmented governing coalition, and the PiS-controlled presidency.
Thus, the Polish case highlights how reproduction operates simultaneously as a terrain of conflict and a catalyst for contingent political alliances in times of democratic uncertainty. It further underscores the instrumentalization of reproductive struggles, which limits the translation of feminist claims into substantive rights.
Paper short abstract
India's impending delimitation project reveals a nationalist, communal, and caste-bound demographic crisis, where the electoral demarcation of body-territories enacts restrictive and divisive zones of reproduction that define how, when, and with whom one must reproduce babies, families, and futures.
Paper long abstract
Longstanding overpopulation narratives in India now coexist with a demographic crisis around fertility and reproductive decline. The impending “delimitation” project tied to India’s population census, i.e. redrawing parliamentary constituencies based on population size to ensure fair electoral representation, has brought to the fore communal nationalism, caste hierarchies, and regional disparities as key sites of contestation in the state regulation of reproductive bodies. While delimitation has been framed as a threat to regional sovereignty in low-fertility southern India, triggering pronotalist appeals for larger families (Biswas 2024), declining fertility rates in northern India have animated unfounded fears of a dying Hindu race against the perceived rapid population growth of Muslims (Rao 2022).
Taking seriously the population-reproduction nexus within the context of far-right reproductive politics (Solinger and Nakachi 2015; Wilson 2018), I analyse delimitation through a decolonial feminist and reproductive justice lens. This electoral exercise of demarcating territorial boundaries, I argue, further enacts a political demarcation of body-territories (Chaparro-Buitrago 2024). Delimitation produces nationalist, communal, and caste-bound zones of reproduction that define how, when, and with whom one must reproduce babies, families, and futures.
Empirically, I offer case studies of four Indian states where population policies and demographic shifts have faced increased political and electoral scrutiny over the past decade. Through a critical reconceptualisation of delimitation, I demonstrate how an emergent demographic crisis in India engenders restrictive and divisive reproductive futures, marking body-territories as either excessive and threatening (the other), or depleting and threatened (by the other).
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how war and regulatory uncertainty reshape transnational surrogacy and egg donation in Georgia and Kazakhstan after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, focusing on infrastructural disruption, adaptive practices, and the redistribution of risk in reproductive governance.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how war and regulatory uncertainty reconfigure transnational practices of commercial surrogacy and egg donation in the post-Soviet space, focusing on Georgia and Kazakhstan after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Rather than treating these countries as emerging reproductive hubs, I analyze how reproductive arrangements are disrupted, reorganized, and governed under conditions of crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, cryoshipping companies, and agencies, as well as interviews with medical professionals, intermediaries, surrogate mothers, and egg providers, the paper traces how the war destabilized reproductive infrastructures previously centered in Ukraine. In response, clinics and intermediaries adapt by decentralizing operations, rerouting embryos and gametes, and reorganizing legal and logistical arrangements in anticipation of regulatory closures, including proposed bans on commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals in Georgia. These adaptive strategies shift reproductive mobilities from the movement of bodies to the circulation of reproductive materials, redistributing risk and responsibility across states, markets, and reproductive workers.
Crisis-driven reorganization also intensifies existing inequalities. As reproductive processes are fragmented across countries, women from Central Asia are recruited to provide reproductive labor in Georgia and positioned as the flexible element within these adaptive systems. Their bodies, time, and compliance absorb the consequences of infrastructural disruption, while clinics and states maintain continuity through logistical and legal maneuvering. Situating these dynamics within debates on reproductive governance and crisis politics, the paper shows how reproductive futures are shaped not only through prohibition or violence, but through adaptive market practices that normalize uneven exposure to risk.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the destruction of Palestinian reproductive futures and intensifying domestic pronatalism through reproductive violence, highlighting how religious-nationalist fusion and Biblical references—from Amalek to female purity—reshape the politics of life and death in Israel/Palestine.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines Israel's war on Gaza alongside heightened pronatalist pressures within Israel through the lens of reproductive violence—violence operating on and through women's bodies (Chadwick & Mavuso, 2021). On one side, we analyse the systematic destruction of Palestinian reproductive futures: the decimation of maternity wards and neonatal units and Gaza's main fertility clinic, alongside the obstruction of infant sustenance through siege and starvation (UN COI, 2025). On the other, we document intensifying pronatalist pressures within Israel, manifest through state-sanctioned posthumous sperm retrieval from fallen soldiers and parliamentary initiatives promoting religious discourses of feminine purity.
Together, these movements constitute a reformed mode of reproductive governance (Morgan & Roberts, 2012; Morgan, 2019), interweaving racism, patriarchy, and Jewish-national supremacy. Yet we take these claims further, addressing the underlying religious-nationalist fusion (Rothschild, 2023) that justifies them, drawing from Jewish and Christian-Evangelical sources. We highlight the undertheorized role of religion—as institution and ideology—in contemporary polarisation of reproductive terrains, intensifying colonial logics of difference and uneven distributions of the right to live versus the imperative to kill, now dressed in theological terms of redemption and eschatological glory.
By analysing media coverage, Knesset proceedings, and policy documents, we examine how Biblical references fuel these reproductive struggles: how the imperative to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek" (Deuteronomy 25:19) underwrites genocidal logics, while injunctions that women be "all glorious within" (Psalms 45:14) underpin neo-conservative Orthodox campaigns—revealing how theological interpretation reshapes the politics of life and death in Israel/Palestine.