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Paper short abstract

In western Kenya, women weighed COVID-19 vaccination against fears vaccines could "close the womb." This paper examines how vaccine skepticism emerged as reproductive reasoning, showing how doubt enabled navigation of competing truth claims about fertility, authority, and knowledge.

Paper long abstract

In Khwisero, western Kenya, women encountered COVID-19 vaccination not as a simple choice between science and belief, but as a struggle over reproductive truth. As fears circulated that vaccines could "close the womb," communities weighed biomedical assurances against embodied experience, spiritual interpretations, and memories of earlier medical interventions that failed to protect reproductive life. Decisions to delay, refuse, or selectively accept vaccination reflected careful moral reasoning rather than ignorance or conspiracy. These uncertainties unfolded alongside disrupted burial practices, changing hospital infrastructures, and donor-driven health programs that reshaped relations between community, state, and medicine. Fertility, already experienced as fragile, became the primary lens through which the community evaluated competing claims to authority. Skepticism emerged as vigilance, a form of care oriented toward safeguarding future fertilities in a landscape marked by loss, uncertainty, and uneven trust. Women did not reject science. Instead, they tested it by watching what vaccines did to other bodies, listening to stories of injury or recovery, and interpreting reproductive outcomes over time. Truth was not settled through evidence alone, but through anticipation, comparison, and collective reflection. Doubt functioned as a social and moral practice, enabling women to navigate polarized debates without fully committing to any single epistemic regime. By tracing how reproductive futures anchor struggles over truth, this paper shows how skepticism and belief are embedded in everyday practices of care, responsibility, and survival. It argues that vaccine polarization cannot be understood without attending to the reproductive stakes through which authority, certainty, and trust are lived and contested