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In this article I focus on the connections between poor women's migration to a basti in Jaipur city in north-west India and their reproductive anxieties, agency and outcomes. I suggest that, in terms of their reproductive choice and freedom, women's experience of migration is highly ambivalent. Three main consequences of women's migration account for this ambivalence: (a) a shift in gender roles, conjugal relationships and related expectations of childbearing; (b) an enhanced recourse to spiritual healers via friendship with women across castes; and (c) a greater resort to private, professional, gynaecological care, complementing the negative experiences of public health sector attitudes, provisions and programmes. While women have a greater role in reproductive decision-making as a result of a shift in gender roles and relationships, they experience greater constraints in bodily terms as reflected in the medicalisation of their bodies. Nevertheless, basti women are constantly negotiating better reproductive outcomes for themselves. Their resort to private health care enables them to avoid state services, allowing them direct access to health care, often without the knowledge of their husbands or relatives.

New modes of neoliberal and rights-based reproductive governance are emerging across the world which either paradoxically foreclose access to universal health services or promote legislative reform without providing a continuum of services on the ground. These shifts present new opportunities for the expansion but also the limitation of abortion provision conceptually and 'on-the-ground', both in the Global North and South. The collection of papers in this special issue examine current abortion governance discourse and practice in historical, socio-political contexts to analyse the threat posed to women's sexual and reproductive health and rights globally. Focusing on abortion politics in the context of key intersectional themes of morality, law, religion and technology, the papers conceptually 're-situate' the analysis of abortion with reference to a changing global landscape where new modes of consumption, rapid flows of knowledge and information, increasingly routinised recourse to reproductive technologies and related forms of bio-sociality and solidarity amongst recipients and practitioners coalesce.

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered 'natural'. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as 'risky' anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health