Rojas – Dying to Count

Having read “Introduction: PAC as Reproductive Governance” and Chapter 3 “‘We Wear White Coats, Not Uniforms’: Abortion Surveillance in Hospitals” in Siri Suh’s (2021) Dying to Count: Post-abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal I find myself very appreciative of the concepts of “obstetric violence,” “necropower,” and “population control” as situated in her research. Additionally, Suh states: “Since the early 1990s, women of color activists and scholars have understood reproductive justice as a framework for research, theory, and practice that highlights how inequalities related to gender, race, class, and ability constrain people’s capacity to lead healthy reproductive lives (Luna and Luker, 2013; Ross and Solinger, 2017). Feminist scholars have a responsibility to critique mechanisms of global reproductive governance when they harm women.” I also briefly read Chapter 1 “A ‘Transformative’ Intervention” and Suh (2021) positions herself as a Black American woman, PhD student (at time of fieldwork), and public health official with experience working for and continued ties to the Senegal office of Management Sciences for Health (MSH). How does Suh explicitly and implicitly situate her work in relation to her own positionality? How does she contributed to a larger global dialogue (and recurring themes in these well-renowned ethnographies we are reading for class) of maternal/women’s healthcare, violence, and policing/government intervention ? Moreover, how does Suh establish her ethics and reliability as a social scientist interviewing numerous healthcare workers and associated individuals while also taking her own activist stand regarding the matter?

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