Trading in harms: COVID-19 and sexual and reproductive health disparities during the first surge in New York state.

In March 2020, New York City was the national epicenter of the novel coronavirus in the United States. This article draws on rapid qualitative research from July to October of 2020 with sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) providers who served low-income people from racial and ethnic minority groups in New York State to examine their perceptions of the effects of COVID-related adaptations to care on healthcare access and quality. We found that care delivery protocols during the early months of the pandemic compromised healthcare interactions and clinical experiences by limiting support persons, separating newborns from parents, and restricting care time in hospitals.

Figuring India and China in the Constitution of Globally Stratified Sex Selection.

The advent of techniques of sex selection that rely on assisted reproduction led to a questioning of whether sex selection should be deemed always and everywhere unethical. While China and India are normally associated with condemned practices, they are also implicated in processes that constitute globally stratified sex selection inclusive of its more valued form, often referred to as family balancing. Through an application of Ong and Collier's concept of global assemblage, I demonstrate how family balancing, which has taken on a "global form," is tied to an "assemblage" of factors related to the anti-natal, population control contexts that have been pervasive in Asia.

Doing and undoing nation through ART: a Franco-American comparison.

This article explores a Franco-American comparison of assisted reproductive technology (ART), specifically as it relates to sex selection and cross-border reproduction. As a basis for comparison, the nation can materialize in the form of state structure just as much as in cultural-economic assemblages or ideologies that breach geopolitical boundaries. By juxtaposing many contrasts between the French and US contexts - departure versus destination country, highly regulated versus deregulated governance, medical versus social applications, and access (or lack thereof) via public versus private health insurance sectors - it may be difficult to imagine how these extremes occupy a common continuum of globalized market channels.

Freezing fertility or freezing false hope? A content analysis of social egg freezing in U.S. print media.

In 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) lifted the experimental label on oocyte preservation, but cautioned against women using it to avoid age-related infertility, known as social egg freezing (SEF). In 2014, Facebook and Apple announced that they would offer SEF as a workplace benefit. Within the context of a rapidly growing market for SEF, we were interested in how these two decisions affected media discussions, given that such discourse can strongly influence public perceptions and behaviors.

A reproductive justice perspective on the Purvi Patel case.

In the spring of 2015, news media across the world displayed images of a young, South Asian American woman in handcuffs, her long, untied black hair flowing forward and shielding her face as a Caucasian male police officer led her into a US court room. In another image, mug shot frontal and profile views of her face as a criminal, dotted online press reports, blogs and the social media. Although criminalised people of colour occupy a permanent space in the US media, her image jars.