Description
This paper analyses the growing anti-rights movements and politics of sexual and reproductive health data. It interrogates how these movements exploit and co-opt language and concepts and undermine notions of gender and reproductive justice. Drawing from interviews with global health and data experts (n=54), this paper uncovers the politics behind data structures, making visible how these politics are illustrative of the current tensions and conflicts in sexual and reproductive health. The legacies of population control and gendered biopolitics have remained nested in data collection. This has shaped how silences have been created in data and evidence as well as limited the capacity for data to capture realities of reproductive injustices faced by women. The resulting feminisation of sexual and reproductive health data has exacerbated the burden on women to change their everyday practices in alignment with global narratives of ‘good’ health, whilst simultaneously making patriarchy, power, and men invisible. The problematic, historic politics within data – and their interpretation – have been exploited for mis- and mal-information, in which scientific concepts are repackaged to justify anti-feminist, anti-queer, and anti-sexual and reproductive health and rights movements.
