Cervical cancer narratives: invoking ‘God's will’ to re-appropriate reproductive rights in present-day Romania

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Southern Romania, this paper scrutinises local moralities governing some women's refusal to enrol in free reproductive healthcare initiatives targeting cervical cancer through primary and secondary prevention (human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccination and Papanicolaou [Pap] testing, respectively). Women backed up their rejection of participation in official reproductive care programmes by mentioning ‘God's will’ as the ultimate trigger of cervical cancer. They withheld their own and their daughters' bodies from biomedical intervention and used discursive references to divine logic to imbue their refusal with moral legitimacy. However, ‘God's will’ is not a mere rhetorical device, since it has a correlate in many of these women's embodied reproductive experiences. As this paper argues, religious narratives, far from stripping ordinary citizens of their reproductive choices, constitute the medium through which they display individual agency. In fact, invoking ‘God's will’ empowers Romanian women to challenge state control and it enables them to re-appropriate their bodies by making a counter-intuitive, yet bold, choice.