Outliers and Rogue Doctors: Manufacturing “Anxiety” Around Older Mothers in India

In this article I focus on media narratives on older women bearing and birthing infants through the intervention of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) in rural north India. I suggest that their portrayal as “outliers” within popular media narratives is gendered, and connected in particular to: the fear of older women past their reproductive prime becoming pregnant and birthing children through ART; the figure of the “rogue doctor,” or the emergence of counter narratives around ART and its practitioners; and, the effort to quell anxieties around ART use amongst older women through the use of legitimating tropes such as conjugality. © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC