‘People like you never agree to get it‗: an Indian family planning clinic

Abstract

Presented is a transcript of audiotaped interaction between patients and family planning providers at an urban hospital in India. Providers included a female physician an assistant female physician 2 male junior doctors and an ayah (helper). Striking is the irritable impatient non-empathic tone of the senior physicians interactions with both clients and assisting staff. Clients are repeatedly addressed with a Hindi term Rani used by parents for their daughters. Several young mothers were exhorted to obtain immediate sexual sterilization despite a lack of health indicators and with no regard to their personal feelings on this issue or obstacles to the hospitalization required (e.g. a lack of alternate child care). In one instance the physician expressed the seemingly delusional belief that a patient was purposively trying to cheat her out of her government incentive by declining immediate sterilization. Clients are told to shut up and shouted at for complaining about the long wait or asking too many questions. This clinic was observed by the author as part of field work for a dissertation on reproductive choice in South Asia.