Studies in Comparative International Development - Call for Papers for Special Issue: Critical Global North and South Perspectives on Post-ICPD Reproductive Health

The 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) defined reproductive health as a human right for the first time. This paradigm shift aimed to put an end to population control goals and targets, while placing women’s reproductive autonomy at the center of population and development policies. The widespread adoption of the ICPD around the world has been hailed as a victory for reproductive rights, yet some have argued that because it represents a necessary compromise between competing interests, it fails to live up to this designation.¹ For example, while the ICPD called for quality post-abortion care in countries with restrictive abortion laws, it stopped short of obligating governments to legalize abortion as a reproductive right. Additionally, it omitted critiques from feminists in the global South of policies such as structural adjustment, privatization, and neoliberal health reform, which limited access to the social and economic resources required to exercise reproductive autonomy.²

Almost thirty years after Cairo, it is time to critically evaluate the impact of the ICPD on reproductive health throughout the global North and South. Development theory and practice, commonly portrayed as neutral, objective, and scientific, has been revealed as deeply Eurocentric and grounded in market-driven logics of capitalist accumulation that disadvantage the most marginalized groups in both the global South. In the last decade, scholars have challenged the notion that development pertains only to Southern countries and advanced the idea of global development³. This is particularly the case within the field of reproductive health. A review of reproductive health statistics reveals persistent disparities in health outcomes throughout most countries of the world, raising questions not only about the effectiveness of reproductive health interventions, but also the circumstances under which they have been implemented in the first place. For example, while the rate of unintended pregnancy has declined worldwide since the early 1990s, the rate of unintended pregnancy ending in abortion has increased.⁴ Despite increasing access to medication abortion worldwide, the risk of death or injury related to unsafe abortion remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa. Although maternal mortality has decreased by 35% since 2000, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for more than half (66%) of all global maternal mortality.⁵ Meanwhile, in the US, where people pay more for health care than any other wealthy country, maternal mortality is on the rise, and Black women are nearly three times more likely than White women to die during pregnancy and childbirth.⁶

Critical feminist scholarship on reproductive health highlights the gaps that remain between the ICPD’s language of reproductive rights and women’s everyday reproductive realities. Far from being dismantled, Malthusian ideas of population control persist, emboldened by narratives of environmental degradation, while donors and NGOs continue to promote magic-bullet solutions that ignore the service provision challenges faced by national health systems depleted by decades of structural adjustment.⁷ For example, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the Family Planning 2020 Initiative has promoted clinical testing and distribution of long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARC) not only as a form of reproductive rights, but also a “Green Revolution” tool for combating climate change.⁸ Hidden from these instrumentalist, neoliberal narratives of customer choice and rights are the coercive practices experienced by women in public health facilities as they encounter health workers under pressure to meet national targets for increasing contraceptive uptake.⁹ Despite renewed global interest in fertility control, safe abortion remains out of reach for many women in the global South. Every year, nearly 7 million women worldwide are hospitalized following unsafe abortion and require post-abortion care.¹⁰ Alarmingly, ethnographic research on post-abortion care in public hospitals indicates that these services are often costly, lower in quality, and carry an increased risk of criminalization.¹¹ Throughout the global North, abortion access is stratified according to interlocking forms of social subordination such as class, racial/ethnic status, and citizenship. In the US, the 2022 reversal of Roe versus Wade highlighted a much longer history of dwindling access to safe abortion among the poorest American women, who are disproportionately of color.¹²

At the same time, feminist movements have appropriated the ICPD’s language of reproductive rights as human rights and are pushing for real change centering reproductive bodies and their needs within their demands for policy change. The abortion rights movement spreading throughout Latin America has succeeded in legalizing abortion in numerous countries while also working to destigmatize the practice and empower those that can get pregnant to take pride in making decisions over their own bodies.¹³ Despite these political advances, some countries still maintain total bans on abortion, the consequences of which present the greatest burden to vulnerable populations, including those multiply marginalized along axes of class, race, and ethnicity. These same groups are also disproportionately vulnerable to obstetric violence during delivery care, family planning, and post-abortion care.¹⁴

This special issue seeks to move beyond widely accepted discourses of reproductive rights to critically assess how reproductive health technologies, metrics, funding streams, programs, services, professions, activism, practices, and policies have advanced, stalled, or foreclosed reproductive well-being in the decades following the 1994 ICPD. Through careful attention to race, ethnicity, gender, class, and geography, the issue aims to disrupt conventional biomedical, demographic, and ethnological accounts of and explanations for reproductive health outcomes and experiences in both the global South and North. To this end, the issue traces global reproductive health politics along the following themes:

1. The emergence of new or exacerbation of pre-existing reproductive inequalities. Examples include (but are not limited to)
   a. legal obstacles to reproductive health care;
   b. coercive practices in reproductive health care targeting women who are racial/ethnic minorities, low-income, immigrants, or refugees;
   c. and the impact of infectious and chronic diseases (such as HIV/AIDS, Zika, COVID-19, hypertension, or diabetes) on reproductive health.
2. Possibilities for change through feminist, lay, or professional activism in advancing abortion law reform, improving clinical protocols for obstetric care, increasing women’s access to midwifery or doula care; and/or3. The ambiguous impact of increasingly neoliberal, pharmaceutical, surgical, and/or quantifiable forms of reproductive health as part of the complex and contradictory legacy of the ICPD. Examples include (but are not limited to):
   a. self-managed reproductive health technologies such as misoprostol and Sayana Press;
   b. the increasing dominance of Cesarean-section as the gold-standard for safe delivery care;
   c. and global/national imperatives to improve reproductive health indicators.

We are particularly interested in 1) submissions that do diasporic, cross-national, or cross regional comparisons; 2) submissions centered on activism in the global South and North; 3) submissions grounded in empirical methods such as archival review, ethnography, surveys, and content analysis; and 4) submissions that draw on cases, theories, perspectives, and populations that have not historically received large attention in the fields of development, demography, and global health.

Submissions in French, Spanish, and Portuguese can be translated into English by the journal if accepted for publication. Submissions in additional languages may be considered on a case-by-case basis. Word count for all submissions should not exceed 13,000 words including notes, references, tables and figures, not including the abstract. Additional material can be included in an online appendix.

If you are considering a submission to this special issue, please send an abstract by March 31st, 2023 to SCID.journal@gmail.com (this opens in a new tab). Authors will be notified by April 15 if their abstracts are accepted, with a deadline for manuscript submissions of June 30, 2023. Manuscript submissions should be made through the portal at https://www.editorialmanager.com/scid (this opens in a new tab). Substantive questions about the special issue may be directed to co-editors Siri Suh (jssuh@brandeis.edu (this opens in a new tab)) and Cora Fernandez Anderson (canderso@mtholyoke.edu (this opens in a new tab)). Questions about formatting and the submission process should be directed to SCID.journal@gmail.com (this opens in a new tab).