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Reproductive Health and Wellness

Reproductive Justice and the History of Prenatal Supplementation: Ethics, Birth Spacing, and the “Priority Infant” Model in The Gambia: Winner of the 2019 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

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In the 1980s, British researchers gave pregnant and nursing women in a rural community in The Gambia supplemental food in order to increase the size and health of their infants. While the supplement led to modest gains in birth weight during the rainy season, it did not enhance breast milk volume or quality. It did, however, cause women to feel healthier and to conceive again more quickly than expected, with unforeseen consequences: the new, unsupplemented pregnancy posed significant health risks to mother, nursing infant, and fetus. Subsequent prenatal supplementation studies in The Gambia and elsewhere focused—and continue to focus—on potential benefits to infants to the exclusion of consequences for women. This essay, working with the framework of reproductive justice, contributes to transnational feminist science studies by showing how a well-intentioned intervention instrumentalizes the bodies of poor women and women of color, modeling them as passive yet suspect vessels for infant growth, comprehensible only in relation to the types of interventions made by public health organizations. Just as the population control movement coercively foreclosed possibilities for and devalued minority women’s reproduction, so prenatal supplementation, undertaken with an exclusive focus on the infant, impedes women’s abilities to make free and informed choices about childbearing. Reproductive justice enables an alternative vision in which women’s reproductive capacities need not compete with their personhood.

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: University of Chicago Press Journals.,
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English
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Gambia
Prenatal supplementation
Birth
Reproductive justice
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Article
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