'Stratified Contraception': Emergency Contraceptive Pills and Women's Differential Experiences in Contemporary India

Available without prescriptions in India since 2005, emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) and their advertisements have provided women with increased contraceptive options and a vocabulary to talk about their reproductive lives. I draw on long-term fieldwork with women in urban India about ECPs, demonstrating a new form of stratified contraception' enabled by these pills and their advertisements. I posit that there are within India spaces that replicate the luxuries and privileges of the global North. These material conditions, I suggest, are replicated when it comes to contraception as there are hubs of women consumers of contraception and contraceptive advertising that participate in an imagined cosmopolitanism' within the global South in close proximity to contraceptive ghettos.' Moving beyond simplistic binaries, I outline three major stratifications along which women experience this medical technology and outline the implications for women and their contraceptive choices when notions of northern privilege exist in the South.'