For the sake of the child: The economisation of reproduction in the Zika public health emergency
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feminist work on population governance has tracked its racial dynamics, its varied attempts to expunge the poor from the future, and its violent wresting of control over reproduction away from women. Attention has recently turned to “economised” understandings of possible and proto‐life that take the aggregate reproductivity of certain groups of women and girls as a means of shaping economic futures, which emerged as the dominant form of population governance during the Cold War. Underexplored in this incisive body of work, however, is the relationship between the reproductive body and social reproduction. This paper advances feminist work on adjudications of life worth in government policy and scientific expertise, and critical political economic work on global health governance, by exploring experiments in family planning. I do this through a discussion of the Zika virus, the recent re‐emergence of which was framed as an economic problem: experts “priced” a single case of microcephaly at US$10 million or more across a lifetime. Specifically, I examine a programme of contraceptive provision to women in Puerto Rico as part of the public health emergency, which I show to have possible eugenic effects. I argue that in the global politics of public and reproductive health, relatively new neoliberal health metrics have joined up with eugenicist impulses to value life according to future economic contributions. Such valuations of life focalise the reproductive body while abandoning the social reproductive body. The relationship between reproductive labour and social reproduction warrants further scrutiny, for as we careen through uncertain ecological futures, and as discourses about limited Earth for humans amid environmental crisis and limited funding for future children thicken, the reproductivity of certain women and girls is being tinkered with by experts, governments, and private institutions in new ways.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it