Scholarship and Biography
Siri Suh is a medical sociologist with research interests in global maternal and reproductive health, population and development, and feminist and postcolonial studies of science, medicine, and technology. Her research has been funded by the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She has conducted research on maternal and reproductive health with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the Guttmacher Institute, and Management Sciences for Health (MSH).
Suh's interest in post-abortion care (the treatment of complications of incomplete or unsafe abortion) was kindled during her work as a public health professional during the mid-2000s with an NGO in Senegal, a West African country where induced abortion is highly restricted and the US government has supported family planning since the early 1980s. Her forthcoming book, titled "Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal" (Rutgers University Press, 2021), draws on an ethnography of post-abortion care conducted between 2010 and 2011. "Dying to Count" traces how national and global population politics collide in Senegal as health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate PAC’s effectiveness in the absence of rigorous statistical evidence that the intervention reduces maternal mortality. Suh argues that pragmatically assembled PAC data convey commitments to maternal mortality reduction goals while obscuring the frequency of unsafe abortion and the inadequate care women with complications are likely to receive if they manage to reach a hospital. At a moment when African women face the highest risk worldwide of death from complications related to pregnancy, birth, or abortion, Suh’s ethnography of PAC in Senegal makes a critical contribution to studies of global health, population and development, African studies, and reproductive justice.
Siri’s current project, titled "Into Women's Hands," explores how misoprostol, a uterotonic medication, is transforming the technological, clinical, professional, and political landscape of reproduction in Francophone West Africa. She received funding from the Hewlett Foundation to conduct comparative, multi-sited ethnography on the availability, circulation, procurement, quantification and use of misoprostol by women, health professionals, and national and international NGOs in Burkina Faso and Senegal. She is collaborating with faculty and graduate students at Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo in Burkina Faso and Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal to investigate approved and off-label use of misoprostol in public and private health care sectors. Learn more about the Into Women's Hands project here!