A new book examines why rural women are undergoing sterilisation despite ambivalence about surgery
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While wider biomedical discourses focus on the laparoscope’s convenience, rural women often resist this simplistic understanding and draw on their everyday lives to develop an understanding of how this technology works. The way that the laparoscope enters everyday conversations of rural Rajasthani women – what it is, how it works and whether it is better than open surgery – uncovers women’s relationships with population control efforts, the fascination with technology, and power exercised by the state and biomedical institutions. The relationship between women and laparoscopes encapsulates the reasons why tubal ligation is seen by some people as a technologically sophisticated option that is implemented by “choice”, in contrast to the widespread concerns about the quality of care and numerous women’s deaths in sterilisation camps in a population control programme often described as a form of violence against women.
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