Reading 2015 Impact of Medicalizing Pregnancy

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2001

A major challenge of medical anthropology is to assess how biomedicine, as a vaguely-defined set of diverse texts, technologies, and practitioners, shapes the experience of self and body. Through narrative analyses of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 158 pregnant women in southern California, this paper explores how the culture of biomedicine, encountered formally at prenatal care check-ups and informally through diverse media, influences pregnant women's perceptions of appropriate prenatal behavior. In the spirit of recent social scientific work that draws on and challenges Foucauldian insights to explore social relations in medicine, we posit a spectrum of compliance and resistance to biomedical norms upon which individual prenatal practices are assessed. We suggest that pregnancy is, above all, characterized by a split subjectivity in which women straddle the authoritative and the subjugated, the objective and the subjective, and the haptic as well as the optic, in telling and often strategic ways. In so doing, we identify the intersection between the disciplinary practices of biomedicine and the practices of pregnant women as a means of furnishing more fruitful insights into the oft-used term "power" and its roles in constituting social relations in medicine.

Journal of Health Psychology, 2010

The academic study of the 'body' has come to occupy the foreground over the past two decades and the differential influences of physical and social worlds particularly upon body management practices have become fundamental to the 21st-century 'project' of the body. In this article we explore three generations of women's accounts of living in/with a pregnant and postnatal body which is now both visible and 'public' as women 'leave' the home for work. However this now takes place in the context of public surveillance (and self-surveillance) particularly about food/eating, 'health' and 'beauty'.

Nexus: Newsletter of The Australian Sociological …, 2006

2013

All the pregnant women, their partners and other intimates, and the public health nurses as well as other healthcare and social services personnel who participated in my study made this research possible in the most literate meaning of the word. They opened up their worlds, experiences and activities for me to see and hear. They made time for my study in their busy private and professional lives and shared intimate and sensitive knowledge and experiences about precarious life situations. I am very grateful to each and every one of you! This study was funded by the Finnish Doctoral School for Women' s Studies, the University Alliance Finland (KYME), the Gender inequalities, emotional and aesthetic ' body' or ' embodiment' , the approach often applied to studies of reproductive matters of health (e.g.

Nursing Inquiry, 2001

This paper draws on literature, empirical data and a range of theoretical perspectives on the maternal body to examine understandings of the relationship between a pregnant woman and her foetus, with a particular focus on the body images used by women to represent this relationship. Psychoanalytic and nursing accounts of the relationship between mother and foetus have often described a symbiotic 'oneness' or unity during pregnancy. Such accounts, however, stress the temporary nature of this unity and identify a series of 'stages' of separation or 'polarisation' between mother and foetus during pregnancy. In contrast, many of the 25 women who participated in our interview study of new motherhood described a confusion of the boundary between self and foetus. For many women the experience of pregnancy and the relationship with the unborn baby was ambiguous and uncertain. Importantly, none of these women described her relationship with the foetus as a series of developmental stages, but rather saw it as fluctuating throughout pregnancy. These findings are more consistent with the work of feminist theorists who describe pregnancy as a dynamic and fluid merging of the inside and the outside of the body/self.

Body & Society, 2004

How do women experience childbirth today? What role does the body, their body, occupy in the way they describe it? And to what extent may technology and medical practices be considered as determinant in the shaping of this experience and the positioning of the body within it? While it is true, as many analysts maintain, that western medicine establishes and assumes a body/mind or body/self dualism, the question we want to address here is how the medical practices surrounding most births today have a performative effect on women's experiences of childbirth and cause them to separate or not that which concerns their body from other aspects of the birth: emotional, family or social. Behind this question lie several critical analyses. Authors such as Turner (1992), and contrast the body as the central object of medicine with a holistic conception of the subject based on a phenomenological or psychoanalytical approach. From their point of view, it was formerly conceivable for medicine to maintain a purely physiological approach when treating mainly acute pathologies. In recent times, however, the large-scale development of chronic diseases or long-term pathologies has necessitated a profound redefinition of medicine, based on a revised conception of subjects who are not split, as in the Cartesian tradition, but unified by their embodiment, as posited by phenomenology:

The fundamental and irreducible experience of carrying a child and bringing forth new life from one’s own body is in this anthology subjected to careful analyses that specifically, though not exclusively, draw on female experiences. In this way the crucial role of a phenomenology of pregnancy for contemporary thought is investigated. Exploring the phenomenon of pregnancy not just as a biological process, but also as a problem of lived bodily meaning, the contributions investigate a wide array of experiences that engage the limits of human life, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and ethics, but also opens important methodological perspectives on the relation transcendental phenomenology and empirical research. Eds. Jonna Bornemark and Nicholas Smith Content: Jonna Bornemark, Nicholas Smith, Introduction Nicholas Smith, Phenomenology of Pregnancy: A Cure for Philosophy? Stella Sandford, Feminist Phenomenology, Pregnancy and Transcendental Subjectivity Alice Pugliese, Phenomenology of Drives: Between Biological and Personal Life Sarah LaChance Adams, Erotic Intersubjectivity: Sex, Death, and Maternity in Bataille April Flakne, Nausea as Interoceptive Annunciation Mao Naka, The Otherness of Reproduction: Passivity and Control Erik Jansson Boström, The Unborn Child and the Father: Acknowledgement and the Creation of the Other Joan Raphael-Leff, “Two-in-One-Body”: Unconscious Representations and Ethical, Dimensions of Inter-Corporeality in Childbearing Grainney Lucey, The Difference of Experience between Maternity and Maternal in the Work of Julia Kristeva Erik Bryngelsson, The Problem of Unity in Psychoanalysis: Birth Trauma and Separation Jonna Bornemark, Life beyond Individuality: A-subjective Experience in Pregnancy

The Psychologist: Practice & Research Journal, 3(1), 2020

Background: To become a mother represents, for many women, a challenging existential process. Women have to deal with countless changes and adaptations, which can be experienced as sources of imbalance but also as moments of personal enrichment. Currently, this process is influenced by the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, which may have positive or negative consequences to the individual experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Goals: This study aimed to deepen the understanding of the experience of pregnancy and expectations regarding childbirth in a group of women, in a context where pregnancy and childbirth are increasingly medicalized processes. Methods: In this qualitative study, we used semi-structured interviews to collect data regarding the experience of pregnancy and regarding expectations about childbirth in a sample of women (n = 37), recruited in health care centres or obstetric clinics by research assistants. The individual interviews took place at their home...

Feminism & Psychology, 2000

them and affects the extent to which they experience pregnancy and childbirth positively or negatively.