Lurking white probes: Migrant women & obstetric violence in France

After my first birth in a French hospital, a long sheet of paper was placed in my hands. Names of medications, a column of instructions I could not absorb. I remember that sharp white light drilling down above my head, and the smell of disinfectant that had colonized every corner of the room. I was suspended between pain and stupor, hadn’t yet metabolized the fact that I had given birth. Everything was happening at a velocity faster than my capacity to understand.

I skimmed the paper hastily. What stopped me was the presence of a contraceptive method listed among the items; as though it were a routine procedure. I lifted my head slightly toward the nurse, still drowning in my own exhausted, leaden body. She didn’t even glance at me. She was busy writing in the file. Nobody explained why contraception had been included. Nobody asked whether I wanted it at all. And so the decision passed through my body in silence, without my voice having any part in it.

Uninformed consent

This moment does not read as an isolated incident. A study on informed consent in medical contexts notes that this principle is not always applied equitably; particularly in obstetric settings where medical decisions are made at speed without guaranteeing the patient’s full comprehension.

Later, I began to ask questions. I spoke with migrant women friends about the proposition of contraceptives in the immediate postpartum. Their answers were near-uniform.

“They told me after the birth that the IUD was a suitable option for me,” Nisrine Al-Alawi, a 24-year-old Moroccan migrant recounted. “But it wasn’t framed as a question. It was as though my role was simply to agree.”

Sawsan Ben Omar, a 31-year-old Tunisian migrant, also found contraceptive pills waiting for her after each birth: “They knew I was educated, but they explained nothing to me.”

Women migrants face compounded difficulty in accessing clear information about their reproductive health.

Yasmin Hani, a 29-year-old Egyptian migrant, found herself using hormonal contraceptives she had not wanted: “I used them because I didn’t understand what they were saying to me — if they said anything at all.”

These testimonies converge with what was documented in a 2025 doctoral thesis in humanistic medicine and pathology, titled “Patients Classified as Migrants in General Medical Consultations.” It argues that migrants — and particularly migrant women in France — face compounded barriers to clear information, including around reproductive health, due to language and the structural asymmetry of their relationship to medical staff.

Whose body is it, anyway?

In my second birth at a different hospital, the same scene repeated itself. Then, sometime later, during a medical consultation, I opened a conversation with my doctor about contraception. He knows me well — he occasionally reads what has been translated for me into French or English. Yet suddenly he said: “Contraception is a women’s matter.”

The phrase arrested me. I asked what he meant. He added: “I’m speaking specifically about the Arab mentality — and about Tunisians.”

That sentence cracked open a conversation in which I mentioned that Tunisia had in fact preceded France in legalizing abortion by a decade, and that abortion rights in France itself had also been won in 1973 partly through struggles that crossed the Mediterranean, in which Tunisian-French lawyer Gisèle Halimi played a pivotal role.

What was exposed in that moment was an entire architecture of gendered presuppositions — one that redefines women, and particularly those of us who are migrants, by reducing us to an assumed mentality, invoked to justify medical guardianship over our bodies and delegitimize our decisions.

Medicine becomes an instrument for the regulation of life itself: who gives birth, and when.

These are not legible as individual cases. They constitute a broader structure of power in which immigrant women’s right to make decisions about their bodies is systematically extracted — a structure where gender intersects with migration, race, and class until our bodies are treated as migrant bodies: presumed to know less, presumed to be more directable.

The phrase “contraception is a women’s matter” loads women with the burden of reproduction while withholding from them its authority — legitimizing the medical institution’s intervention in the very act of appearing to cede control.

When that phrase is aimed at an immigrant woman like me, it is not produced inside a semantic vacuum. It arrives already weighted with additional strata of presumption, crystallized in the doctor’s addendum: “I’m speaking specifically about the Arab mentality — and about Tunisians.” This collides directly with what Yasmin from Egypt reveals: that during prenatal appointments, the question of high birth rates was raised repeatedly. “Because of the language, I didn’t understand all the details clearly — but I remember they kept returning to the figure of ‘one hundred million inhabitants’ more than once.”

This shift from care into guardianship can be understood through Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, wherein medicine becomes an instrument for the regulation of life itself — who gives birth, and when. The routine procedure thus conceals a system that redistributes power asymmetrically, to the point where Sawsan describes what happened to her as “the seizure of the decision to reproduce”: “Any choice about giving birth or not giving birth was predetermined by them.”

There is, after all, no real need to explain things adequately — as the midwife/doula who accompanied both my pregnancies observes. She makes it her practice to explain to every pregnant woman what is being offered to her: “Many colleagues do not explain things properly. So I always want to clarify what is said — and especially what is left unsaid — so that the woman feels her right to understand before making any decision.”

Eugenic sequence

These practices do not exist in disconnection from the history of eugenics policies — those that sought to determine who deserved to reproduce. Despite the retreat of their official rhetoric, their logic has continued to be transmitted through the language of care and public interest, while the fertility of populations deemed burdensome remains subject to control.

Studies document how forced sterilization was used in the United States to control Black women’s bodies. This inheritance is not confined to history: comparable practices have been exposed in immigration detention centers. The same logic has surfaced elsewhere — as in what was revealed in Israel regarding the imposition of long-acting contraceptives on women of Ethiopian descent.

All focus on the woman’s body, while nothing is mentioned about contraception for men.

This does not mean that the European context reproduces these policies identically — but it remains governed by a structurally proximate logic. For immigrant women arriving from Arab countries, certain representational schemas are retrieved in more covert forms: the body is read through an implicit demographic discourse that links fertility to social burden.

In this context, the midwife/doula who accompanied my pregnancies points to Seine-Saint-Denis — the department known for its dense migrant population — as a site where certain hospital practices she describes as “borderline” can be observed: “I won’t say it’s written policy, but it exists in the mentalities. There is sometimes an urgency in proposing permanent contraception, especially with women assumed to have had enough children. In some cases, the decision is passed quickly, in a moment when the woman is in no condition to discuss.”

This observation reverberates through the testimonies of other women. Nisrine says: “All the focus is on the woman’s body, while nothing is said about contraception for men. They assume — on the basis of our Arab origin — that reproductive responsibility falls on us alone. And they also assume — because we are women — that we will accept whatever is decided for us, while men are preemptively excluded, because men might object.”

Power in the theater, no witnesses

The moment of birth is among the most acutely vulnerable moments in a woman’s life — one where the physical and the psychological are entangled, and where the margin of control over what is happening narrows to almost nothing. In this context, the question of consent becomes substantially more fraught. Can silence be read as consent? Can one speak of free decision-making in the absence of explanation, in a condition of informational destitution?

For immigrant women, this problematic is compounded. Language barriers, for instance, produce a condition in which “consent” resembles silent compliance far more than it does informed choice.

Dr. Mona, a Tunisian physician working in a French hospital, witnesses these practices daily on the ground: “I see women pass through moments in which no space is given for questions or explanation. I always try to translate and clarify every step. I say, and I repeat: you have the right to understand before you decide.”

Episiotomies are sometimes performed without prior explanation. In some cases, injections are given or IUDs placed immediately postpartum without discussion. According to Dr. Mona: “The assumption is that the immigrant woman will agree to whatever is proposed to her — while any responsibility or choice for men is excluded from the outset.”

What makes these practices so difficult to document is their silence. No direct violence. No declared coercion. Only daily acts that appear ordinary — which conceal within themselves fine-grained forms of control that reshape immigrant women’s relationship to their own bodies according to an external gaze.

This logic extends in more concealed forms along immigration pathways, where economic precarity intersects with Arab identity and informational dispossession, so that certain interventions are presented as choices while being experienced as near-imposed trajectories. Upon arrival in Europe, care is already inflected by pre-formed assumptions about fertility as a property specific to Arab women — and the withholding of explanation becomes an instrument for reshaping the decision itself.

The Tunisian context, by contrast, reveals that these practices cannot be contained within Europe’s borders, nor attributed exclusively to a structure tied to “the white man.” The cases that have recently surfaced around the imposition of sterilization or contraception on sub-Saharan immigrant women in Tunisia demonstrate that this logic finds resonance in other contexts too — where it is reproduced in different forms.

Beyond the Symptom

This cannot, therefore, be reduced to a malfunction within any single system. It must be understood as a structure that crosses borders — formed at the intersection of medicine, politics, and economy — and which reproduces itself through our bodies, we women, whenever there exist populations classified as surplus, as problem.

The question today is not only: why did this happen? It reaches further: how do we reclaim sovereignty over this body, when it is continuously being reshaped in the name of care? And how do we expose this logic when it disguises itself — and dismantle it when it shows its face?