Abstract
Gaps in family planning, after 25 years of the Family Planning Law in Brazil, have promoted a resignification of fertility control. Difficulties in performing tubal ligation in the Unified Health System have allowed governmental stratified and racialized strategies of access to long-acting reversible contraceptive methods (LARC) to flourish. The ethnographic research relies on documentary sources on institutional initiatives for the inclusion of LARC in the public health system, taking the municipality of São Paulo as a paradigmatic empirical case. Apparently related to the ideology of citizenship, we argue that such technologies of government go into the opposite direction to the expansion of sexual and reproductive rights, reifying social stereotypes that subtract women’s reproductive autonomy. Using the concept of “contraceptive coercion” as a category of analysis, we demonstrate how such strategies injure the reproductive justice paradigm, by institutionalizing social exclusion through the uterus of “vulnerable” women in Brazil.
Keywords:
reproductive justice; fertility control; long-acting reversible contraception; biopolitics