Infertility, Pooled Reproduction and Distributed Agency Among the Big Nambas of Malakula, Vanuatu

Women's infertility is an invisible problem in Vanuatu. Assisted reproductive technologies are non-existent. State, medical and NGO actors all promote small families, reflecting global anxieties about population growth and climate change, making infertility conveniently forgettable. Narratives about Vanuatu as a fertile paradise' make infertility seem uncommon. Anthropological emphasis on flexible kinship suggests that difficulty bearing biological children does not matter. Infertility appears natural or biological but is locally viewed as supernatural or sociocultural. These varied 'abandonments' erase the struggles of infertility among ni-Vanuatu women. Here I explore them among Big Nambas communities on Malakula, where reproduction is 'pooled', but infertility is individualised. Literal abandonment looms if women cannot contribute sons to the patriline. This creates reproductive interdependencies-where women cannot reproduce, others may postpone or abandon their own pregnancies-highlighting distributed agency over and internal politics of reproduction. Thus, in these 'remote' islands, with histories of flexible child-rearing, biological fertility matters.