Conflicted Reproductive Governance: The Co-existence of Rights-Based Approaches and Coercion in India’s Family Planning Policies

Abstract

India’s current population policy is situated between two conflicting discourses of population management, one that is governed by a demographic rationale advocating strict State regulation of fertility, and the other that is delineated by a rights-based framework that promotes individual reproductive choice and bodily autonomy. In this chapter, I show how this conflicted policy discourse becomes supportive of processes that empower the State, rather than facilitate reproductive autonomy among claimants on the ground. The chapter draws on textual analysis of policy and programme documents and discussions with health providers, users and policy makers during long-term fieldwork in the state of Rajasthan. I show that, in their role in promoting regional state directives on reproductive health policies, health workers are at once agents and subjects of State policy processes and of their community’s ideologies, preferences and practices related to childbirth and reproductive care. It is in their work and embodied practice of family planning that we most clearly evidence the implications of ‘conflicted reproductive governance’. When health workers struggle for their own remuneration and recognition, the State’s rights-based health policy objectives will remain unreachable.