Breaking down the question
The question asks you to identify the emerging concerns on women's reproductive health. The word emerging is important — the examiner wants not only the long-standing problems of maternal health and contraception but the newer issues that have come to the fore, from assisted reproduction and surrogacy to the mental-health dimension and the shift towards a rights-based understanding.
Following the Cairo Programme of Action, reproductive health means complete physical, mental and social well-being in all matters relating to the reproductive system, not merely the absence of disease. The sociological task is to show that these concerns are shaped by gender, class and patriarchy rather than by biology alone. Our note on the components of population growth supplies the demographic backdrop.
How to approach it
Open with the Cairo definition and the shift from population control to reproductive rights. Then present the concerns as a structured list, moving from the established to the genuinely emerging: maternal health and anaemia, unmet contraceptive need and the female-centric family-planning burden, son preference and sex selection, and then the newer frontiers — the medicalisation and commercialisation of reproduction through surrogacy and assisted technologies, reproductive and menstrual health among adolescents, mental health, and the reproductive concerns of migrant and single women.
Keep a sociological thread throughout: reproductive health improves as women's autonomy expands. A short conclusion linking these concerns to gender justice completes the answer.
Model answer
Understood in the sense of the Cairo consensus, reproductive health denotes well-being across the reproductive life course and the freedom to decide the number and spacing of children. In India several concerns on women's reproductive health are now emerging, reflecting both old inequalities and new pressures.
Persisting maternal ill-health. Maternal mortality and morbidity remain high in poorer regions, driven by widespread anaemia, unsafe deliveries and weak referral systems. Anaemia among women of reproductive age reflects the low value placed on girls' nutrition — a social, not merely medical, deficit.
Reproductive autonomy and unmet need. A substantial unmet need for contraception persists, and family-planning effort remains female-centric and target-driven, concentrating the burden of sterilisation on women while male participation stagnates. Decisions about childbearing are often taken by husbands and elders rather than by women themselves.
Son preference and sex selection. Deep-rooted son preference, documented by Tulsi Patel, drives sex-selective practices and repeated pregnancies in pursuit of a son, subordinating women's health to the demand for male heirs and producing Amartya Sen's missing women.
Medicalisation and commercialisation of reproduction. A newer concern is the growth of assisted reproductive technologies and commercial surrogacy, which raise questions of consent, exploitation of poor women's bodies and the commodification of reproduction. The medicalisation of reproduction transfers control from women to clinics and markets.
Adolescent and mental health. Early marriage exposes adolescent girls to pregnancy before maturity, while menstrual health and reproductive-tract infections remain shrouded in silence. The mental-health dimension — postpartum depression, the stress of infertility and reproductive coercion — is only beginning to receive attention.
Neglected groups. Migrant, single and sexually marginalised women, and Dalit, Adivasi and poor Muslim women, face the sharpest deficits, so aggregate improvement can conceal widening gaps.
These emerging concerns show that reproductive health is a mirror of gender inequality. Progress depends less on clinical intervention than on enlarging women's agency and moving from a population-control mindset to a rights-based framework of reproductive justice.
Examiner's perspective
The commonest weakness is a purely medical answer — a catalogue of diseases and schemes with no sociological analysis of gender and power. Because this is a sociology paper, the examiner expects reproductive health framed through patriarchy, autonomy and intersecting inequalities.
The word emerging rewards candidates who move beyond maternal health to newer issues such as surrogacy, medicalisation and mental health. Deploying Sen's missing women and agency and citing Indian scholarship on son preference signals reading. A crisp list bound by the single argument that reproductive outcomes track women's social power, in British spelling and within ten-mark compass, secures the top band.