Dr. Yolinliztli Pérez-Hernández

Visiting Scholar at Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge, under the subversion of Sarah Franklin

 PostDoc Cultural and Social Geography University of Bern, SNSF Project 'Reproductive Geopolitics'

Governing the fertility of racialized women in Mexico: (Old) Family planning policies and new forms of populationism

The history of Mexican birth control policies reflects complex intersections of gender, race, class, and colonial dynamics. Before 1973, the government promoted population growth with racial and national ideals. The 1994 UN Conference on Population and Development marked a shift towards sexual and reproductive rights. Yet, Mexico pursued a Malthusian demographic policy, employing aggressive sterilization campaigns and intrusive family planning programs.

These practices disproportionately affected low-income, rural, peasant, and indigenous women. Statistics reveal the gendered and racialized nature of these policies, with ongoing disparities in sterilization rates among indigenous women. Qualitative research on this topic.

This project aims to explore the experiences of sterilized women, shedding light on the entanglements of reproductive and racial policies and the effects of population control on women’s lives. The methodology includes interviews, archival research, direct observation, and body mapping.

Preliminary fieldwork highlights ongoing sterilization campaigns in state-subsidized hospitals and women’s positive experiences of sterilization taken in challenging economic, living, and working conditions.

This research is part of the SNF-funded project “Reproductive Geopolitics: Governing and Contesting In/Fertility in the Global Intimate,” led by Dr. Prof. Carolin Schurr. This project aims to understand how the differential access to reproductive technologies reflects the differential valuation of certain bodies based on gender, race, class, and other social markers.

Medicalising uncertainty. An Ethno-sociological Research on Egg Freezing in France

Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT, Mexico) and Agence de la Biomédicine (ABM, France)

This dissertation studies France's complex social, medical, legal, bodily, technical, and kinship relations that shape egg freezing (oocyte vitrification for autologous purposes). The study focuses both on the normative dimension that structures access to this biomedical technology and on the practices and experiences of those directly involved (the women having theirs eggs frozen, as well as the practitioners and laboratory technicians who make it medically and technically possible), and on the technical dimension of oocyte freezing. Drawing on 20-month fieldwork (2018 - 2019), this research presents an Ethno-sociological study combining semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research. Direct observation took place in three French centers for assisted reproductive techniques (centres d’assistance médicale à la procréation-Centre d’Étude et de Conservation des Œufs et du sperme, AMP-CECOS) and, in particular, in their in vitro fertilization (IVF) laboratories. On the one hand, this work proposes deconstructing the three legal-medico categories of access to oocyte freezing in France: medical egg freezing or “fertility preservation,” egg-sharing (ESH), and so-called social egg freezing (SEF). On the other hand, it questions the link between oocyte vitrification, procreation, and motherhood. Contrary to what one might think, my study suggests that egg freezing is not necessarily a biotechnology for procreation. My analysis allows me to argue that egg freezing is a kind of medicalization of uncertainty from an institutional, subjective, and technical point of view.

Lecture. “Autoconservación de óvulos para diferir la maternidad. ¿Un nuevo combate feminista?”, Mexico City. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYEMlxDmzTs