Siri Suh thoroughly documents what she calls “reproductive governance” in three different hospitals in Senegal. She links this phenomenon and PAC (Post-Abortion-Care) practices to the Foucauldian concept of biopower that is to say, the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”. But in that very case, it happens to be the subjugation of the female body. On page 14, she links PAC practices to capitalistic and neocolonial dynamics by demonstrating how PAC actually contributes to the reification and commodification of women bodies so as to further the enrichment of pharmaceutical companies. And this isn’t all. She adds an intersectional lens to the mistreatement of women in PAC by pointing out that the “ranking of bodies” is orchestrated according to “a gendered, racialized, and classed spectrum of normative reproductive behavior.” (p.15)
I was very shocked by the abuse women seeking PAC are suffering through and was particularly struck by the demands made of women to conform (once again) to certain expectations of womanhood: in order to seek a “respectable” status at the hospital and hope to be treated decently, a woman needs to be virtuous and married (sex outside of marriage being deeply frowned upon), appropriate (arrive on time or at a specific non-suspect time of the day), proper (not convey their physical pain too loudly) but paradoxically convey deep pain at the idea of losing the fetus. This demonstrates a need for the performance of specific standards of womanhood which shed light on the inequitous power and gender dynamic in Senegalese society. Indeed, not once does the author mention the point of view of a man accompanying a woman in need of PAC.