The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism ed. by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism ed. by Modhumita Roy and Mary Thompson Deanna MacNeil (bio) Rev. of The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism, edited by MODHUMITA ROY and MARY THOMPSON, Series: Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture, The Ohio State University Press, 2019 270 pp. $34.95 (paper) ISBN: 9780814255582 [Disclaimer: Adoption & Culture is also published by The Ohio State University Press, and its editor, Emily Hipchen, is one of the editors of the series to which this book belongs.] How are women's lives simultaneously connected yet divided through differences based on power, privilege, and geography? At first glance, abortion, adoption, and surrogacy appear as separate issues impacting women's lives in different ways. Yet, women's lives and experiences are shaped and interconnected by various degrees of privilege and precarity, desperation and choice. The Politics of Reproduction: Adoption, Abortion, and Surrogacy in the Age of Neoliberalism uncovers how profit is put before people, not only in local communities but on a global scale and in the name of family making. The lasting effects of capitalism and patriarchy, entangled with neoliberalism's ideologies and practices, sell a story of autonomous choices for women. In effect, the tangled relations and inequities that shape and constrict women's lives are more complex than they seem. This volume describes how neoliberalism's policies began taking shape during the 1970s in the United States. Government spending on education and child welfare programs decreased while corporate profits and interest increased (6). Both Democrats and Republicans dismantled the social safety nets once in place, with Bill Clinton in 1996 ending welfare for the American people (6). Debates following policy changes demonized BIPOC. Discourses on welfare demonized poor women and women of color, feeding into and maintaining the regulation of proper family forms and aligning with religious views that discriminated against gay people (6). Such powerful ideologies shifted policies and protections in the United States, benefiting the economy while forcing self-sufficiency and individual responsibility (6), the editors observe. Neoliberalism's policies affect families and households the most, with women responsible for raising children, caring for the elderly, and completing household tasks (7). The editors continue: neoliberalism requires a "double shift" for women working outside and inside the home, providing the social reproduction required to sustain their lives and families (7). Women who can afford to work outside the home while having and raising children often require help from undocumented women or immigrants without the ability to care for their own families (7). Women's intimate lives, relations and decisions are connected to the lives of other women, shaping access to abortion, adoption, and surrogacy. Inequities shape whether a woman has access to abortion based on age, class, race, ability, geography, and [End Page 124] immigration (10). Conservative goals impeding white middle-class women's access to abortion affect poor women of color most drastically, locally and globally (10). Restrictions of abortion both in the United States and globally are shaped by pronatalism, a hegemonic belief in the instinctual desire to have families that must be biologically related (14). The introduction is valuable for its overview of these structures and changes and their effect on especially women's lives. The essays in this volume debunk long-standing beliefs in pronatalism, the "naturalness" of motherhood, and the discourse of choice, to uncover the inequalities shaping women's lives, relationships, and means of survival. For example, in Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago's "'Masters of Their Own Destiny': Women's Rights and Forced Sterilizations in Peru," the intersections of race, gender, and class that shape women's lives in Peru are examined to reveal how the Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program implemented between 1996–2000 did not provide reproductive choice or bodily autonomy to all women. The author's research shows how gendered racism created precarious conditions for Peruvian women, making them vulnerable to medical coercion through sterilization. A campaign of universal health care for women, advocating progressive means for reproductive choice, deemed poor Indigenous women irresponsible mothers and bad choice makers simply for "having children while poor" (140). Neoliberalism produces a rhetoric...