‘Stratified Contraception’: Emergency Contraceptive Pills and Women’s Differential Experiences in Contemporary India

Abstract

Available without prescriptions in India since 2005, emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) and their advertisements have provided women with increased contraceptive options and a vocabulary to talk about their reproductive lives. I draw on long-term fieldwork with women in urban India about ECPs, demonstrating a new form of ‘stratified contraception’ enabled by these pills and their advertisements. I posit that there are within India spaces that replicate the luxuries and privileges of the global North. These material conditions, I suggest, are replicated when it comes to contraception as there are hubs of women consumers of contraception and contraceptive advertising that participate in an ‘imagined cosmopolitanism’ within the global South in close proximity to ‘contraceptive ghettos.’ Moving beyond simplistic binaries, I outline three major stratifications along which women experience this medical technology and outline the implications for women and their contraceptive choices when notions of northern privilege exist in the ‘South.’

Keywords:

• emergency contraceptive pills
• medical advertisements
• new medical technologies
• stratified contraception
• stratified reproduction

Notes

1. Names of all locations and respondents have been changed to maintain anonymity. However, the names of public spaces like the Saket Select City Mall or brand names, like i-pill or Unwanted-72, have not been changed.

2. Other narratives of scientific artifacts include publications by Oudshoorn (2003), Rapp (2000), and Tone (2001).

3. Progestin is the synthetic version (i.e., pharmaceutically produced and patented) of progesterone. Since progesterone is naturally ‘made’ in the female ovaries, it cannot be patented and so is not used by pharmaceutical companies in their contraceptive drugs.

4. Levonorgestrel is the active isomer of norgestrel and it a type of progesterone (and its synthetically produced progestin).

5. Cipla, a leading pharmaceutical company in India, was the first to launch the i-pill. While it has sold the production rights for i-pill to Piramal Healthcare, it is a still a leader in pharmaceutical production, marketing, and sales in India and now serves over 170 countries.

6. Respondents often used i-pill as a generic term for ECPs.

7. This is common particularly when the birth takes place in noninstitutional settings and parents do not register the birth. Sometime, registration occurs a few years later and the date, year, and time of the birth are approximate.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nayantara Sheoran

Nayantara Sheoran is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, on a European Research Council (ERC) grant. As a postdoctoral research fellow, she is extending her engagement with biomedicine and burgeoning biotechnologies in India. She is conducting extended fieldwork in India on the sociocultural and ethical implications of the emergence of stem cell biotechnologies (both embryonic and adult), while also elaborating on parts of her dissertation research, which critically analyzes pharmaceutical contraceptives.