Editor’s Note: FII’s #MoodOfTheMonth for September, 2021 is Parenthood. We invite submissions on the many layers of being parents, having parents and navigating the social norms of parenting throughout the month. If you’d like to contribute, kindly email your articles to sukanya@feminisminindia.com
Motherhood is painted as a blissful, intriguing and fascinating experience in media narratives. The narrative of motherhood is implanted in larger patriarchal structures that results in the naturalised association of women with mothering. Despite a myriad of cultural and social changes in desires of women in the 20th century, reproduction and motherhood have retained their priority over other assigned roles for women.
Anthropologist and author Marcia C. Inhorn in her edited volume, Infertility Around the Globe, notes that “Making babies is how women are expected to form adult identities the world over, and in non-Western “developing” societies the gendered consequences of infertility can be grave”. This is also true of the Indian socio-cultural fabric, in which motherhood is raised to such statures that a woman is considered “fragmented” without it.
These ideologies of motherhood have ramifications on the gender performances of mothering. Dominant ideologies of motherhood become problematic in the context of infertile women in the society. The presence of infertility is signaled, not by the presence of pathological symptoms, but by the absence of a desired state, since it involves an inability to achieve a desired social role. In many societies past and present, the value of women’s lives is dependent on their ability to bear children. Childlessness in India is highly engendered.
The social construction of health and illness is perhaps even more noticeable in the case of infertility than it is in other conditions. This critical perspective throws light to the ways that a diagnosis of infertility is heavily encumbered with negative meanings and qualifies as a disability. This ‘invisible disability’ within the culture construction of gendered reproduction led to the burgeoning of fertility clinics in India. The medicalisation of infertility brings into question a serious socio-cultural discourse on gender roles, motherhood, body politics and the changing landscape of the fertility industry in India.
India is a champion in providing commercial Assisted Reproductive Technology. Procreative technologies have become a dominant part of culture, as well as the scientific and healthcare industry in India. Popular culture, print and electronic media and the flourishing of IVF (in vitro fertilisation) clinics in the topography of India has normalised the idea of ‘test-tube’ babies.
In the 1990s, with the advent of globalisation and other liberal economic policies, India emerged as a market for Assisted Reproductive Technology. The medicalisation of infertility in the nineteenth century turned sufferers into patients, and with the diabolical combination of neoliberalism, globalisation, free market capitalism and the growth of new reproductive technologies in the twenty first century, the same patients turned into consumers.
People often fail to recognise the marketing strategy adopted by the fertility industries in creating a sense of reproductive desire among the sufferers turned patients. They give paramount importance to the consumption pattern and this results in the exploitation and subjugation of women
Assisted Reproductive Technologies themselves are gendered technologies, with highly specific and differentiated applications on men’s and women’s bodies (Konrad 1998). From a cultural-economic viewpoint, the linking of social or medical priorities with uncertain outcomes provides a market space for the commodification of human desires. Desire plays a key role in endorsing the societal norms of fertility behavior through the ‘microphysics of power’ (Foucault’s idiom).
Capitalism operates at its maximum in observing individuals’ cherished desires and customising this information to keep the wheels of consumerism rolling. The Assisted Reproductive Technology market engages dynamic advertising strategies through the use of wall advertisements, delightfully designed posters, wonderful websites, street hoardings, and media, print and institutional advertisements.
The advertisements focusing infertility often use the images of smiling babies, confusing statistics and positive pregnancy test results which emphasise the commercial nature of reproductive technologies in persuading patients to choose their clinics over their industrial competitors.
Advertisement is an ideological arm of fertility markets in creating a sense of reproductive desire among infertile women. Reproductive desire is at once a profoundly personal emotion and a social construct. Culture, economy, religion, gender and technology process and shape different forms of reproductive desires.
The reinforcement of maternal images by the global capital industries influences stigmatised women to undergo experimental treatment procedures. Institutional advertisements illustrating the advancements in procreative technologies have played a vital role in normalising assisted conception in India. The pervasive access to the health- related information on the Internet is altering the way Indians access their healthcare.
It is the woman’s body which is most often subjected to the medical gaze. The fertility industry includes diverse treatment options, the most popular of which