Residents of Haiti face a grim reality of starvation, violence, lack of economic opportunity, and minimal health care. For years, aid organizations have unsuccessfully attempted to alleviate the problems by creating health and family planning centers, including one modern (and by local standards, luxurious) clinic in Cité Soleil.
In Reproducing Inequities, Catherine Maternowska argues that we too easily overlook the political dynamics that shape choices about family planning. Through a detailed study of the attempt to provide modern contraception in the community of Cité Soleil, Maternowska demonstrates the complex interplay between local and global politics that so often thwarts well-intended policy initiatives.
M. Catherine Maternowska is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences and Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“No book better explores the painful intersection of [poverty and social inequalities] with ethnographic depth and theoretical rigor than Catherine Maternowksa’s new study of family planning in one of the poorest slums in the world–Haiti’s Cité Soleil.
... a painful and harrowing exploration of how aid programs purporting to reduce fertility come to fail their poorest.”
– Paul Farmer, from the foreward
“Welcome to Cité Soleil, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where women and men are desperately poor, inventive, and resistant to family planning initiatives, despite their deep desires to control their own lives. Catherine Maternowska uses a compelling political economy of fertility perspective to argue convincingly why their resistance ‘makes sense.’ This is an important and sobering book, one whose lessons will resonate far beyond the boundaries of Haiti.”
– Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis In America
Order Reproducing Inequities
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Reproducing Inequities
