Clean your house and don’t get pregnant: reproduction and the state

Drawing on social reproduction, and stratified reproduction, this chapter demonstrates that there is a tension between the securitised approach of the Zika response and the lived reality of the women most affected. In doing so, it also reveals a struggle between the state and women. The securitised policy response at national levels placed the responsibility onto women to avoid being bitten by mosquitoes, to reduce mosquito breeding grounds, and ultimately to avoid bearing a child with CZS. This is problematic: women were not included in the decision-making to create suitable policy pathways to reduce their risks of infection, to the extent that the very population the response should have provided for, has been systematically excluded from the response. Women were instrumentalised, objectified, and responsibilised by the state. Thus, the chapter shows, global health security through a state-centric delivery of security is failing women.