ABSTRACT
Infertility and Other Reproductive Anxieties: An ontological challenge to reproductive health focuses on reproductive negotiation and claims-making in the context of infertility and child loss. It examines the connections and disconnections between indigenous ways of claiming body ownership and the ways in which sexual and reproductive ‘rights’ are conceptualised at a more universal, legal and national level. Drawing on local aetiologies of the body and illness causation within faith healing, it examines the politics, dilemmas and moralities of kinship and gender at play in the context of reproductive decision-making in the family and household. Reproductive decision-making and outcomes are further examined in terms of the exercise and simultaneous erasure of choice and agency in terms of place of birth, choice of attendants, desire (or not) for contraception and the strategic or involuntary recourse to government programmes.
