Abstract
The chapter describes a young couple attempting to start a family during the Ebola crisis in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The chapter demonstrates the ways that the onerous rules and regulations of the state of emergency—that seemingly relied on an underlying assumption that life could be put ‘on hold’ until the virus was defeated—made the processes of biological and social reproduction especially challenging to perform. For Freetown residents, however, family formation and social continuity remained a priority, and it is suggested that such responses were both central to surviving the crisis, yet were also reflective of the ongoing difficulties and dangers surrounding reproduction in a context with a weak formal health infrastructure and widespread material scarcity. The chapter is based upon 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork, immediately before and during the Ebola crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
All names are pseudonyms.
- 2.
The Beti people are a Bantu people residing mostly in central Cameroon. They speak a dialect of the Fang language, termed Banti or Edwondo, that belongs to the Niger-Congo family of languages. The Beti people practice double exogamy.
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Acknowledgements
The research for this chapter was generously supported by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, the Halperin Memorial Fund, the Alfred Gell Memorial Studentship, and the ESRC Centre for Public Authority and International Development grant: ES/P008038/1.
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Lipton, J. (2019). Taking Life ‘Off Hold’: Pregnancy and Family Formation During the Ebola Crisis in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In: Schwartz, D., Anoko, J., Abramowitz, S. (eds) Pregnant in the Time of Ebola. Global Maternal and Child Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97637-2_22
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