Family Planning And The Politics Of Reproduction In India 

Family planning practices have both implicitly and explicitly played a role in defining the construct of the 'modern woman,' and how women are represented, regulated, and monitored through their reproductive and sexual capacities.

by Abirami M   
Feb 14, 2025 

In India, a woman’s body is not entirely her own—it is a site of social politics, of state intervention, and of deeply entrenched class and gender hierarchies. Family planning practices have both implicitly and explicitly played a role in defining the construct of the ‘modern woman,’ and how women are represented, regulated, and monitored through their reproductive and sexual capacities. From colonial-era anxieties about Indian fertility to post-independence sterilisation campaigns disproportionately targeting Dalit and Adivasi women, reproductive policies have long been a means of controlling marginalised communities rather than empowering them. 

Colonial legacies of family planning 
To truly grasp the complexities of reproductive rights and sexualities in India, mapping its history is a good place to start. Taking its roots in the colonial era, British administrators argued that Indian marital, sexual, and familial practices were responsible for Indian impoverishment. Among some Indian intellectuals and reformers, anxieties about overpopulation and focus on numbers as a mode of governance produced a new reproductive politics that linked reproductive rights to the economy.

Continued: https://feminisminindia.com/2025/02/14/family-planning-and-the-politics-of-reproduction-in-india/


USA – Anti-Abortion Activists See Their Moon-Shot Goal Within Reach

And we’re already experiencing the consequences.

By Mary Ziegler
Feb 14, 2025

In 2022 the Louisiana Legislature became the first to advance a bill to criminalize abortion seekers. While conservative states often punish women for pregnancy-related conduct, as the group Pregnancy Justice documents, jurisdictions that ban abortion have been careful to stress that they don’t punish women for abortion itself. And when Louisiana came close to doing that, the most powerful national anti-abortion organizations moved to kill the bill, arguing that the movement was united in viewing women as victims, not perpetrators, of abortion.

That might have been it: The movement’s powers that be had spoken, and the case was closed. But this legislative session has already seen a wave of bills authorizing the punishment of abortion patients, proposed by so-called abortion abolitionists, who argue that their bills are the only way for the anti-abortion movement to be logically consistent, as well as morally (and biblically) justified.

Continued; https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/anti-abortion-legislation-fetal-personhood.html


Republican States Claim Zero Abortions. A Red-State Doctor Calls That ‘Ludicrous.’

By Sarah Varney
February 13, 2025

In Arkansas, state health officials announced a stunning statistic for 2023: The total number of abortions in the state, where some 1.5 million women live, was zero.  In South Dakota, too, official records show zero abortions that year. And in Idaho, home to abortion battles that have recently made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the official number of recorded abortions was just five.

In nearly a dozen states with total or near-total abortion bans, government officials claimed that zero or very few abortions occurred in 2023, the first full year after the Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion rights.

Those statistics, the most recent available and published in government records, have been celebrated by anti-abortion activists. Medical professionals say such accounts are not only untrue but fundamentally dishonest.

Continued: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/zero-abortion-counts-republican-states-challenged/


How Trump and Musk’s War on Government Will Lead to More Abortions

There would be 1.3 million unsafe abortions.”

David Corn, Washington, DC, Bureau Chief. Mother Jones
Feb 12, 2025

In 2023, during a speech at a Washington, DC, gala for the far-right Faith & Freedom Coalition, Donald Trump declared that he was proud to be “the most pro-life president” in US history. Yet with the war on the federal government that he and his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk are now waging, one probable result will likely not please his conservative Christian allies: an increase in the number of abortions, perhaps by over 1 million.

The first target of the Trump-Musk crusade has been the US Agency for International Development, the federal agency that distributes foreign aid through programs that help millions of people defend against deadly diseases (such as malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, Covid, and ebola), obtain clean water, gain access to health care, bolster democratic institutions, and build more productive local economies. Of its $23.4 billion budget for 2024, the agency earmarked $2.2 billion for health initiatives. About one-quarter of that was to be spent on clean-water programs. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven million dollars was committed to maternal and child health. Programs for family planning and reproductive health received $191 million. (Including other government programs, Congress in recent years has annually appropriated about $600 million in total for overseas family planning.)

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/donald-trump-elon-musk-usaid-abortions/


USA – People are paying for state abortion bans with their lives

Women are dying preventable deaths due to denied or delayed care, and doctors have started avoiding states with bans—restricting health care access for all

by Mina Manchester
February 11th, 2025

I had an ectopic pregnancy in 2014 while on the birth control pill. In an ectopic pregnancy, a fertilized egg develops in the fallopian tube. These pregnancies are never viable, and in every case, the condition is life-threatening to the pregnant person.

When this happened to me 11 years ago, I was 29, newly married, and privileged in many ways: white, educated, housed, and employed with health insurance. I was in rough shape when I was admitted to the hospital via the emergency room, where an ultrasound detected that my right fallopian tube had burst. I’d been bleeding internally for a week and was on the brink of turning septic. I was rushed into emergency surgery, where tissue and my fallopian tube were removed.

Continued: https://prismreports.org/2025/02/11/abortion-bans-deaths-health-care/


Kenya – Health experts warn restrictive policy will drive more women toward unsafe abortions

Unsafe abortions, driven by restrictive laws and pervasive stigma, continue to claim lives and destroy futures.

Monday, February 10, 2025
By Angeline Ochieng

A few hours after leaving a herbalist's house, Mercy* started experiencing strong abdominal pains. A sudden, hot rush of a warm liquid running down Mercy's inner thighs startled her. To her shock, she noticed blood flow.

The 16-year-old felt a little relieved. Hours earlier, she had been a guest of the herbalist, and she knew for certain these were after-effects of the unsafe abortion procedure she had undergone in the company of a friend at her rural home in Bungoma.

Continued: https://nation.africa/kenya/health/health-experts-warn-restrictive-policy-will-drive-more-women-toward-unsafe-abortions--4921212


Right wing policies threaten gender equality and health security

Young people call for all sexual and reproductive health services including safe abortion rights

SHOBHA SHUKLA – CNS
08 Feb 2025

Donald Trump’s presidency is likely to have far-reaching consequences for sexual and reproductive health, bodily autonomy and human rights worldwide. He has already withdrawn USA’s financial support to the UN health agency World Health Organization (WHO), and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will no longer share its invaluable expertise with the WHO.

Also all ongoing (as well as future) projects funded by US Agency for International Development (USAID) have been put on immediate hold. Many of these are lifesaving health programmes, including those directly related to sexual and reproductive health services.

Continued: https://kashmirtimes.com/opinion/comment-articles/right-wing-policies-threaten-gender-equality-and-health-security


The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill

Mifepristone took longer to get approved than most drugs—but not because it was unsafe.

Nina Martin,  Mother Jones
Feb 7, 2025

At his Senate confirmation hearings to head the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surprised no one by admitting that he planned to order a new review of the safety of abortion pills. While Kennedy claimed that President Donald Trump has not taken a position—yet—on medication abortion, “he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll ask [agencies] to do that.”

This, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion groups have been pushing for. Since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, abortion opponents have been ramping up unfounded claims that mifepristone and misoprostol are dangerous. Their efforts have included a flurry of letters to the new administration, explicit directives in the far right’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, and a barrage of ever-more-extreme lawsuits and state bills.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/abortion-pill-forgotten-history-attacks-mifepristone-ru486-anti-abortion-extremists-new-book/


India – How Getting An Abortion Is Linked To Contraceptive Use

Many women seeking abortion are disbelieved or discriminated against based on the contraception choices they make or do not make. Some were even denied abortion unless they use a long-acting contraceptive or undergo sterilisation. These systemic denials and attitudes have classist, casteist implications.

By Menaka Rao
7 Feb, 2025

New Delhi: In 2021, 30-year-old Radhika (name changed) got pregnant. She is a Delhi resident and has two children, and did not want another baby. She was taking 21-day contraceptive pills at the time, but admittedly missed a day, before she got pregnant. She said that she went to a private doctor to seek abortion, and he was disparaging in his attitude.

“The doctor said, ‘Women like you come to us only when you are pregnant. Why aren’t you careful?’” Radhika recounted. “When I told him that I missed having my pill for a day, he asked, ‘How can you forget? Do you forget to have your food?’”

Continued: https://www.indiaspend.com/gendercheck/how-getting-an-abortion-is-linked-to-contraceptive-use-941291


USAID’s reproductive health funding has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.

For decades, USAID’s family planning program was the main source for contraception and HIV treatment in some countries. Experts say without it, women and LGBTQ+ people will die.

Jessica Kutz
February 7, 2025

On Sunday, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, boasted that he was gutting the federal agency tasked with providing foreign aid to its poorest.  “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk, the tech billionaire head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, posted on his social media platform, X.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established in 1961 to provide foreign assistance to impoverished countries around the world through food aid and humanitarian and economic development work. It is also one of the world’s largest providers of contraception through its family planning program. According to the Congressional Research Service, the agency’s funding in 2023 was about $40 billion, which represented less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/02/usaid-women-lgbtq-reproductive-health-funding-pause/