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Abeyance

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Knowledge as Resistance

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Abstract

In this chapter, I will discuss how some of the fractures which appeared at the Bangladesh conference in 1989 continued to reverberate through the network’s cognitive praxis. I will examine the final international conference in Rio and the activities led by the Bangladesh chapter, UBINIG, as the international network’s geography and focus began to move from Europe to the global South, and look more closely at FINRRAGE’s impact in different parts of the world.

The international perspective I think is very important, and this is something which will stay with me…I mean the world was different than today, it was not as globalised, this was an open door for acting internationally that was really very interesting and eye opening for such young women as we were.

Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interview 1

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Transcript of strategy meeting “new countries”, Boldern, 11 October 1990: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.

  2. 2.

    The first Polish IVF baby was born in 1987 and the first in Hungary in 1989. Like many other ex-socialist countries, Hungary is now a major destination for cross-border reproductive services (Knoll 2012).

  3. 3.

    Lene Koch, Denmark . Transcript of strategy meeting “Clearinghouse” (sic), Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 2: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.

  4. 4.

    Maria Mies, Germany, interviewed in Cologne on 12 April 2011.

  5. 5.

    Patricia Spallone, Britain, interviewed via phone on 8 September 2011.

  6. 6.

    Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 10 April 2011 (interview 2 of 2).

  7. 7.

    Reis, “Clearinghouse” transcript, p. 6.

  8. 8.

    Reis, “Clearinghouse” transcript, pp. 4–5.

  9. 9.

    Various speakers, transcript of strategy meeting “alternative conference”, Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 2: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.

  10. 10.

    [Research Group for the Evaluation of Medical Practices].

  11. 11.

    Louise Vandelac, France/Francophone Canada, interviewed in Montreal on 22 October 2015.

  12. 12.

    Survey of national contacts circulated by ICG in 1990, ‘Who needs FINRRAGE and for what?’: FAN/FINDE 01/03.

  13. 13.

    Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.

  14. 14.

    Robyn Rowland , personal communication, 11 June 2017.

  15. 15.

    The name is a play on anstifter, so loosely translates to Women Troublemakers.

  16. 16.

    Erika Feyerabend, Germany, interviewed in Essen on 9 April 2011 (interview 1 of 2).

  17. 17.

    Ana Regina Gomes dos Reis, Brazil , interviewed in Sao Paulo on 7 March 2015.

  18. 18.

    Ibid.

  19. 19.

    Ibid.

  20. 20.

    Reis, personal communication , 4 July 2017. In English, the name is Network for Defence of the Human Species. After Rio, Corral changed REDEH to mean Rede de Desenvolvimento Humano [Human Development Network] and took the organisation in a direction more in line with mainstream population policy. See http://www.redeh.org.br/.

  21. 21.

    ICG, Letter to Ana Reis, Rita Arditti, Jalna Hanmer, Renate Klein and Janice Raymond, 2 June 1991: FAN/FINDE 02/02.

  22. 22.

    Formally, the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED).

  23. 23.

    Program, “Women, Procreation and Environment”, 30 Sep – 6 Oct: FAN/FINDE 02/02.

  24. 24.

    Reis, interview, ibid. The statement was signed by Rosiska Darcy de Oliveira (Brazil ), Corinne Kumar de Souza (India), Ute Winkler (Germany), Martha Rans (Canada), Christine Ewing (Australia) and Corral, Reis, Akhter and Mies.

  25. 25.

    ICG, letter to Linda Bullard and Francoise Laborie, 7 July 1991: FAN/FINDE 01/02.

  26. 26.

    Minutes, FINRRAGE strategy meeting, 7 October 1991, p. 5: FAN/FINDE 02/02. The term means ‘gobbles up’.

  27. 27.

    ICG, letter to all national contacts, undated, c. early July 1991, see also item VII of the document ‘Material for Working Meeting’, 30 September 1991: FAN/FINDE 02/02.

  28. 28.

    Minutes, FINRRAGE strategy meeting, 7 October 1991: FAN/FINDE 02/02.

  29. 29.

    Reis, interview, ibid.

  30. 30.

    Letter, ICG to REDEH, 29 February 1992: FAN/FINDE 02/01.

  31. 31.

    Vandelac, interview, ibid.

  32. 32.

    Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May 2010.

  33. 33.

    Robyn Rowland , Australia, interviewed in Geelong on 24 June 2010 (interview 1).

  34. 34.

    ICG, letter to NCs, 24 February 1994 : FAN/FINDE 02/01 (circulated with infopack on population policy).

  35. 35.

    A questionnaire about use of the infopacks sent in 1990 placed the cost of these at 120DM per year.

  36. 36.

    ICG, letter to NCs, 15 December 1997: FAN/FINDE 01/03.

  37. 37.

    And are no less dangerous or coercive. See http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/11/14/women-india-sterilization.html, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/12/india-sterilisation-deaths-women-forced-camps-relatives

  38. 38.

    Vibhuti Patel, India, interviewed via Skype on 12 April 2017.

  39. 39.

    In a later paper published in the Indian Council of Medical Research Bulletin, another ‘pioneer’ would write that the expenditure of public money on developing IVF was justified because it would make it easier to sterilise people if they thought they could still have more children if their existing ones died (Puri et al. 2000 in Srinivasan 2010).

  40. 40.

    Sama itself is now one of the most active women’s health research organisations worldwide, perhaps best known for their research into sex selection and Indian surrogacy services, regulations for which have been under development by the Indian Medical Research Council since 2008 (for discussion of this, see Palattiyil et al. 2010). A range of their reports can be found at http://www.samawomenshealth.in (accessed May 2017).

  41. 41.

    See also Maiguashca (2001) for an examination of the knowledge practices of that network.

  42. 42.

    FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional Meeting Khabar, Bulletin No 1, 10 May 1990, p. 2: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/09.

  43. 43.

    FINRRAGE-UBINIG Regional Meeting Khabar, Bulletin No 2, 11 May 1990, p. 2: FAN/JH/FIN 03/01/09.

  44. 44.

    Ibid, p. 9. Malini Karkal wrote a response for the same Khabar discussing the same research, which showed that in fact rural women already understood precisely how this worked in animals in terms of trying to breed them successfully, and therefore had very little trouble learning how to predict their own ovulation.

  45. 45.

    Reprinted in Depopulating Bangladesh (Akhter 2005, 89–100). See also her plenary speech to the 1989 FINRRAGE conference in the same volume, pp. 67–74.

  46. 46.

    ICG, letter to network 24 February, 1994: FAN/FINDE 01/02.

  47. 47.

    International Symposium participants list: FAN/FINDE 02/02.

  48. 48.

    ICG, letter to network 24 February, 1994: FAN/FINDE 01/02.

  49. 49.

    N. A. Khan (Agency for Integrated Development-Bangladesh ), letter to F. Duby (Overseas Development Administration), 29 July 1989: FAN/JH/FIN 07/07.

  50. 50.

    The eventual ‘pioneer’ in Bangladesh was a gynaecologist who invested all her money in opening the first private facility in 1999, related in press accounts as a triumph of local determination to master a technology she did not know how to use, in a country with so little interest and expertise that she had to draft her paediatrician husband into become her embryologist (Salahuddin 2003). The clinic’s first babies were triplets, born in 2001.

  51. 51.

    Janice Raymond, USA, interviewed by phone on 21 July 2011.

  52. 52.

    Annette Burfoot, Britain/Canada, interviewed via Skype on 19 May 2010.

  53. 53.

    Erika Feyerabend, Germany. Transcript of strategy meeting “Clearinghouse”, Boldern, 11 October 1990, p. 6: FAN/FINDE 03/G.1.

  54. 54.

    Robyn Rowland , interview 1 (24 June 2010).

  55. 55.

    Renate Klein, interview 3 (28 June 2010).

  56. 56.

    Sarah Ferber, Australia, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September 2010.

  57. 57.

    A well-known jurist, Scutt wrote a legal column for IRAGE and was editor of The Baby Machine (Scutt 1990).

  58. 58.

    Christine Crowe, Australia, interviewed in Sydney on 17 September 2010.

  59. 59.

    Marilyn Crawshaw, Britain, interviewed by phone on 12 September 2011. PROGAR has actively campaigned for the removal of donor anonymity, and from 2004 to 2012, until it was unfortunately de-funded by the UK government, Crawshaw was also an advisor to UK DonorLink, a programme which used DNA matching to help donor children find their siblings (see Crawshaw and Marshall 2008).

  60. 60.

    Sarah Franklin, Britain, interviewed in London on 15 December 2011.

  61. 61.

    Rebecca Albury, Australia, interviewed in Wollongong on 20 September 2010.

  62. 62.

    The legacy website of Hands Off Our Ovaries, a 2006 campaign of resistance to the call from scientists for women to donate eggs for stem cell research, is still available at http://www.handsoffourovaries.com/manifesto.htm. Stop Surrogacy Now is an ongoing (as of June 2017) international campaign against commercial surrogacy. See http://www.stopsurrogacynow.com/the-statement (2015). FINRRAGE Australia was part of the organising coalition for both campaigns, and Klein has recently published on the topic (Klein 2017).

  63. 63.

    A full list of all FINRRAGE-Australia submissions up to 2009 is available at http://www.finrrage.org (accessed 1 May 2017). In 2015 Klein took part in a Round Table on Surrogacy organised by the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, and made a formal submission as FINRRAGE to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Surrogacy in February 2016 (Unpublished documents, supplied to the author by Klein).

  64. 64.

    Aurelia Weikert, Austria, interviewed via Skype on 11 August 2010.

  65. 65.

    Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta, India, interviewed by phone on 13 September 2011.

  66. 66.

    Satoko Nagaoki, Soshiren/Japan, interviewed in Tokyo (with translation by Chiaki Hayashi) on 26 August 2010.

  67. 67.

    As of May 2017, an active group of 154 followers could be found at https://www.facebook.com/finrrage.

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    Stevienna de Saille

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de Saille, S. (2017). Abeyance. In: Knowledge as Resistance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52727-1_4

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