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‘I Feel Like Some Kind of Namoona’: Examining Sterilisation in Women's Abortion Trajectories in India

Rishita Nandagiri (London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)

Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse

ISBN: 978-1-80071-734-3, eISBN: 978-1-80071-733-6

Publication date: 15 September 2022

Abstract

Sterilisation in India (and globally) has a contentious and deeply politicised history. Despite this troubling legacy, India continues to rely on female sterilisation as the main form of contraception and family planning. Abortion, which has been legal under broad grounds since 1971, intersects with sterilisation at different points over women's reproductive lifecourse. Drawing on three case studies exploring women's abortion trajectories in Karnataka, India (2017), this chapter examines sterilisation as a reproductive technology (RT) in women's abortion narratives. These include experiences of failed sterilisation necessitating abortion, as well as narratives around pre- and post-abortion counselling with sterilisation conditionalities. Women report healthcare workers shaming or scolding them for not being sterilised after their last pregnancy – demonstrating the prominence of sterilisation as an enforced social norm using ‘health’ frames. Using reproductive justice (RJ) as a lens, I analyse how sterilisation interacts with abortion and the narratives of shame and stigma that surround the two technologies and make visible the ways in which it results in the denial and restriction of women's reproductive freedoms.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

I remain indebted to the women who trusted me with their abortion narratives- I hope I continue to hold true to them. I am grateful to the KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research for supporting my data collection in India (2016–2017). Thanks to Geetanjali Mungarwadi for her invaluable research assistance and Rashmi Rao for her support with translation and transcription.

Many thanks to Vicky Boydell, Katie Dow, Susan Pickard, Ben Kasstan and all the participants of the Integrating Reproductive Technologies workshop, December 2020, for their comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Professor Ernestina Coast, Dr Flora Cornish, Dr Tiziana Leone, Dr Lucía Berro Pizzarossa and Joe Strong for their critical insights.

Data I reflect on here were collected during my PhD, funded by the LSE PhD studentship (2015–2019). My work on this chapter was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/V006282/1] as part of my ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2020–2021).

Citation

Nandagiri, R. (2022), "‘I Feel Like Some Kind of Namoona’: Examining Sterilisation in Women's Abortion Trajectories in India", Boydell, V. and Dow, K. (Ed.) Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse (Emerald Studies in Reproduction, Culture and Society), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-733-620221005

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022 Rishita Nandagiri. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited