Toward a Politics of (In)Fertility: Reproductive Debility in Africa

ABSTRACT

Sub‐Saharan Africa has some of the highest estimated rates of infertility or involuntary childlessness in the world, leading epidemiologists to refer to parts of the region as the “infertility belt.” The medicalization of infertility and the situating of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) as the treatment for infertility have siphoned involuntary childlessness to the interiority of the body. In this article, I suggest a conceptual rethink of infertility drawing from the epidemiology of infertility in African contexts. Thinking with the legacies of colonialism, extractive mining economies, austerity‐produced health care infrastructures, and environmental racism, I suggest a framework of reproductive debility. Reproductive debility emphasizes how (in)fertility is managed, eroded, or differentially distributed through divergent regimes of debilitation and capacitation. Situating infertility as debility resists the medicalized and individualized framing that treats reproductive capacity as a natural, private function, and instead invites us to examine how the (in)ability to reproduce—the various practices and labors that make and sustain kin—is regulated, stratified, and politicized as well as tied to broader social worlds, structures, and relations.