Bodies that Pay the Price: Institutional Ahistoricity and PersistentGendered Marginality in Indian Medical Education

Despite obstetric violence inflicted upon marginal female bodies by the Indian medical system being well-documented through the decades, the exploration of the historical production of this attitude has received limited attention. However, the present modes of violences are deeply rooted in a history of culturally-transmitted medicolegal anxiety about unwanted bodies on a shared planet, and their unwanted medicosocial behavior - in particular their reproductive choices. This history of anxiety, unwritten but encoded in multiple implicit and explicit ways, has shaped contemporary medical institutions' perception of reproductive-aged cisgendered Indian women as a source of multifaceted risk-a medicolegal risk to the medical institution, an economic risk to the nation's development, a biosecurity risk to the global stability-that can only be mitigated by clinically intervening in their bodies.