Risky Bodies, Toxic Futures: Reproductive Decision-Making and Environmental Risk in Colombia

• In Event: Sociology of Reproduction

Abstract

This article offers a temporal theory to understand the intersection between environmental risk and reproductive politics by examining how water contamination transforms women’s relationship to reproduction and motherhood in rural Colombia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast and in-depth interviews with women living near contaminated water sources, I analyze how environmental harm and gendered meanings of reproduction become entangled through three temporal processes: bodily documentation of pollution, anticipatory reproductive decision-making, and navigation of conflicting temporal demands between immediate survival and long-term wellbeing. Women’s experiences of infections in their reproductive organs, miscarriages, and reproductive health problems not only create collective knowledge about contamination that challenges state and medical narratives about environmental safety but also reconfigure motherhood and reproduction as inherently risky endeavors. Their reproductive decisions—whether to avoid pregnancy, seek abortions, or attempt to mother under toxic conditions—become strategic responses to environmental risk that extend beyond individual health concerns to encompass broader forms of reproductive precarity. This study demonstrates how women’s bodies become sites where environmental risk is perceived, interpreted, and managed through reproductive practices. By examining the temporal dimensions of environmental reproductive harm, this analysis extends theories of reproductive knowledge and embodiment while revealing how toxic environments create sophisticated forms of gendered knowledge and risk navigation.

Author

• Maria Ximena Davila, University of Texas-Austin