Medical Anthropology Research Talk!
Title: Secular Motherhood and the Criminalization of (Faith-Based) Care
Summary: The carceral tendency of obstetric care systems has been well-documented and state concern in reproductive matters in the form of surveillance, discipline, and criminalization is not new, dating at least as far back as the earliest missionary and colonial encounters. Yet new forms of reproductive governance linked to international development aid apparatuses continue to emerge in the postcolonial setting in ways that call for renewed thinking around secularization, aid, and the costs of modernization in Africa. Based on ethnographic research in the predominantly Christian state of Ondo in southwestern Nigeria, this talk examines the postcolonial legacies of this intertwining of religion, regulation, and reproduction with a focus on the criminalization of “mission homes” or faith-based birthing centers. While Ondo adopts anti-Black secular logics in endeavoring to make clear the distinction between religious and non-religious modes of care, the lived experience of Nigerian women defies these dichotomous logics. The state, thus, condemns birth practices that resist its secularizing mission while authorizing other modes of religious subjectivity, demonstrating how “secular motherhood” becomes more important than ensuring “safe motherhood.”
Bio: Adeola Oni-Orisan is a medical anthropologist, board-certified family physician, and assistant professor in Family & Community Medicine at University for California, Davis, where she holds a joint faculty appointment in the Department of African American and African Studies. Her research engages medical anthropology, critical race theory, Black feminist studies, and science and technology studies to examine how ideas about Blackness, gender, religion, and reproductive health are reinforced, deployed and resisted in struggles for health and well-being. Her book project, "To Be Delivered: Pregnant and Born Again in Nigeria" is an ethnographic exploration of the lived experiences of pregnant Nigerians as they navigate intersecting yet competing systems of care proposed by state, church, and international development organizations in search of successful deliveries. Dr. Oni-Orisan earned her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the joint program at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley and holds an MD from Harvard Medical School.