This chapter explores the complex, dynamic, and often contested process of pursuing reproductive healthcare among individuals of Ghanaian and Afro-Surinamese backgrounds in the Netherlands. It highlights how participants navigate multiple, overlapping geographical, medical, cultural, institutional, and epistemic borders. Rather than passively accepting biomedical interventions, individuals engage in active negotiations among Western and non-Western healing practices, among various restrictions and lived realities, and among structural constraints and personal agency. The chapter critically explores the limits of medical pluralism, challenging binary frameworks that position ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ healing systems as opposing categories and instead foregrounding the asymmetrical power relations that structure their interaction. Through lifestories, this chapter demonstrates that blending different medical traditions is not always a seamless integration, but a fraught process shaped by racialised exclusions, gendered inequalities, and colonial legacies that continue to privilege biomedical epistemologies. By engaging with these tensions, the chapter calls for an in-depth understanding of reproductive health-seeking as a process embedded in broader structures of power and engagement with various contested landscapes of healing, legitimacy, and care.

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Power, Pluralism, and Reproductive Health: Diasporic Experiences in the Dutch Context

  • Amisah Bakuri

摘要

This chapter explores the complex, dynamic, and often contested process of pursuing reproductive healthcare among individuals of Ghanaian and Afro-Surinamese backgrounds in the Netherlands. It highlights how participants navigate multiple, overlapping geographical, medical, cultural, institutional, and epistemic borders. Rather than passively accepting biomedical interventions, individuals engage in active negotiations among Western and non-Western healing practices, among various restrictions and lived realities, and among structural constraints and personal agency. The chapter critically explores the limits of medical pluralism, challenging binary frameworks that position ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ healing systems as opposing categories and instead foregrounding the asymmetrical power relations that structure their interaction. Through lifestories, this chapter demonstrates that blending different medical traditions is not always a seamless integration, but a fraught process shaped by racialised exclusions, gendered inequalities, and colonial legacies that continue to privilege biomedical epistemologies. By engaging with these tensions, the chapter calls for an in-depth understanding of reproductive health-seeking as a process embedded in broader structures of power and engagement with various contested landscapes of healing, legitimacy, and care.