High-Risk Motherhood: War, Toxicity, and Reproduction in Colombia

My dissertation and book project, High-Risk Motherhood: War, Toxicity, and Reproduction in Colombia, reconstructs more than two decades (1998–2025) in the lives of families across Montes de María, a region in the Colombian Caribbean that has been shaped, in overlapping waves, by armed conflict and environmental harm. It follows women who have grown up, come of age, and become mothers as their region was transformed by the rule of armed actors and extractive industries. These two phenomena, though in different ways, turned the reproductive body into a terrain where power and control were exercised and contested. In the war years, paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and the state vied for territorial control through the direct regulation of women’s fertility: enforcing pregnancies, surveilling families through reproductive health services, and linking reproductive life to the logic of military domination. As armed conflict receded, large extractive industries moved in, contaminating the region’s water sources and generating rising rates of miscarriages, infections, and birth complications that communities attribute to pollution.

Based on six years of collaboration with grassroots organizations and local institutions, this book project weaves together 24 months of ethnographic immersion between 2021 and 2025, over 100 life story interviews with women, men, local officials, and health workers, an original survey, and archival research tracing the changing landscape of reproductive governance in this region. Informed by this long-term ethnographic engagement, High-Risk Motherhood asks what reproduction means, and what it demands, when the conditions for sustaining life are themselves under threat.

In this book project, I develop a theory of reproductive responsibilization: the process through which the burden of anticipating, absorbing, and managing collective harms—produced by armed actors, extractive industries, and a fragmented state—is transferred onto women and enacted through their reproductive bodies and decisions. Extending scholarship on risk, governmentality, and elusive forms of power, I show that when no institution answers for the violence of war or the toxicity of contaminated water, women are left to convert diffuse, structural threats into problems handled through pregnancies, children’s bodies, and family negotiations.

At the same time, this book project offers a more expansive and nuanced account of contemporary reproductive decision-making. By examining how both armed conflict and environmental degradation alter the reproductive lives of a community over time, this study compares two forms of risk that, while entangled, involve different actors, impacts, and temporalities. This allows me to discuss how different manifestations of risk impact reproductive choices and helps me explain why, at different points in their lives, women in my field site saw having children and becoming mothers in very contrasting ways.

This work contributes, intellectually and practically, to important debates about the challenges of reproduction in the contemporary world. It advances current discussions around why women decide to have children or not, the social, cultural, and institutional forces shaping those decisions, the meaning of reproductive autonomy today, and the dilemmas of becoming a mother in a decaying world.