Coerced Contraception and Indonesian Migrant Workers in Asia: Implications for Reproductive Justice and Global Health

Indonesia is a major sending country of migrant domestic workers in the Asia-Pacific region where numerous destination countries require or expect migrant domestic workers—regardless of age, marital status or sexual orientation—to receive contraceptive injections as a condition of working abroad or taking leave. Coerced contraception—the medical practice of forcibly or coercively ensuring that (primarily) women are temporarily unable to procreate—is a form of sexual and reproductive violence. The primary goal of this project is to conduct a study of coerced contraception of Indonesian women migrant domestic workers who are or have been employed in Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. To address our goal, we will:
(1) conduct focus group discussions with Indonesian migrant domestic workers who currently or formerly worked in these four countries and provide opportunities for the use of arts-based methods to convey their stories;
(2) hold key informant interviews with migrant advocates, recruitment agency, government, and health personnel;
(3) examine country-specific policies and practices;
(4) use these findings to develop and conduct surveys to reach a wider sample of Indonesian migrant domestic workers, and
(5) develop and share policy and practice recommendations, and produce knowledge-to-action outputs targeted to various public, policy, scholarly, and practitioner audiences.