Birthing across borders: ‘Contracting’ reproductive geographies

Abstract

Within a context of intensifying global displacement, the experience of birthing across borders is becoming a reality for many. We catch incomplete glimpses of these realities through countless media snapshots of pregnant bodies in dinghies crossing seas or slung with metallic emergency-blankets. Despite their prevalence, these birthing experiences have not been adequately accounted for in the scholarship on reproductive geographies. In this article, we argue that this relative absence is not a mishap but reflects a deeper geographical bias. The present article seeks to address this gap and has three main aims: first, to provide a deeper understanding of heterogenous reproductive lives, especially as they relate to questions of displacement and precarious citizenship. Second, to offer new participatory and creative methods for understanding these reproductive lives in contexts of acute but also protracted violence. Third, to develop a conceptual language of ‘contraction’ to help grapple with some of the inequities but also mobilities and solidarities across diverse geographies. Finally, foregrounding questions of displacement, this article brings into sharp relief the geopolitics of reproduction and how biopolitical governance is being both experienced and resisted through what Katz calls the ‘messy fleshy stuff of everyday life’ in too-often invisibilised liminal spaces.