Symposium & book launch Reproductive Boundaries
Hosted by the URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded, University of Zurich
The objective of this event – both a book launch and a symposium – is to explore the analytic potential of the notion of « reproductive boundaries ».
Borders and boundaries have long been a focus of reproductive scholars. The language of borders, boundaries, and limits has been used to examine how reproduction is shaped by geopolitical, legal, ethical, and conceptual boundary-drawing. For example, the different ways in which pregnant and fetal subjects are conceptualized—Are they one? Are they two?—underlie legal, political, ethical, and cultural discussions of pregnancy, abortion, assisted reproduction, and contraception. Cross-culturally and historically, what grows in the womb has not necessarily or immediately been considered a person or a distinct individual (Duden 1999; Hanson 2004; Kukla 2005; Morgan 1997), underscoring the importance of identity boundaries. Geopolitical borders have been identified as sites of reproductive injustice (Franklin 2011; Inhorn and Gürtin 2011; Nahman 2013; Vertommen 2017; Vertommen, Parry, and Nahman 2022). People gain or lose reproductive and parental rights when crossing borders (Courduris 2018; Guerzoni 2020). Facilitating or prevenint the reproduction of some groups appears as “a tool for fortifying borders and consolidating territorial dominance, a means of social control and containment, and a practice of deterrence and punishment” (Chaparro-Buitrago 2024, 11). Boundary-drawing and boundary-shifting – be they moral, professional, epistemic, temporal, geographical or power boundaries—shape everyday reproductive experiences.
After an introduction to Edmée Ballif’s book Reproductive Boundaries : Psychosocial Care and Pregnancy in Switzerland, we will hear leading reproductive anthropologists and sociologists reflecting on the notion of reproductive boundaries in relation to their past and present research.