Making Kin With Parasites

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2010

This article explores the local perceptions and practices surrounding pregnancy loss in Cameroon-a topic that has long been neglected in international reproductive health debates. Based on extended periods of anthropological fieldwork in an urban and a rural setting in the East province of the country, it shows the inherent ambiguities that underlie pregnancies and their perceived dangers. By situating meanings of pregnancy loss within the complex dynamics of marriage and kinship, pregnant bodies are argued to be social bodies-the actions and interpretations of which shift along with social situations. This approach not only forms an alternative to the current focus on the body politic in global discourses on fertility risks but also shows how conventional assumptions such as the rigid distinction between voluntary and involuntary pregnancy loss distort ambiguous daily life realities for Cameroonian women whose pregnancies are not being carried to term.

Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetrícia / RBGO Gynecology and Obstetrics

Pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period are phases commonly associated with joy and hope. Even though it may be an unplanned event for many women, pregnancy usually develops without complications most of the times: mother and newborn child start together-and well-a new phase of their lives. This does not mean that the good outcome was achieved without a significant number of women experiencing discomfort, stress, anxiety, fear, or even some sadness. These are conditions that, although not desirable, tend to be present during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period. However, for some women, this is a period of great anguish, suffering, and risk. Risk of intimate partner violence, of mistreatment in health facilities, of developing physical or psychological sequelae, and risk of dying. 1-4 A maternal death is an individual, family, and social tragedy. Because it is preventable in the absolute majority of times it occurs, there is no male equivalent, and it disproportionately affects certain groups of women, maternal mortality exceeds the boundaries of clinical obstetrics and reflects broader societal issues. 5-7 While hypertensive complications, bleeding, infection, unsafe abortion, and worsening of preexisting diseases are the main biomedical causes of maternal mortality, tackling it requires broader actions. 8,9 Considered as causes of complications of pregnancy, intrinsic or extrinsic etiological agents (such as uterine atony or bacterial infection) do not act in isolation on women to produce complications. The etiological agents act under the influence of several other factors, in a complex and multifactorial process known as the health-disease process (►Fig. 1). Over thousands of years, the characteristics of the environment favored the evolution of current human beings. Among the innate characteristics and potential of Homo sapiens, lies the biological basis of pregnancy and childbirth. This includes, for instance, the shape of the pelvis and the complex endocrinology of parturition. The innate characteristics and potential of the species favored the development, over time, of the current human culture and society. Culture and society are the origin of the

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2016

Global efforts to improve maternal health are the fifth focus goal of the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the international community in 2000. While maternal mortality is an epidemic, and the death of a woman in childbirth is tragic, certain assumptions that frame the risk of death for reproductive aged women continue to hinge on the anthropological theory of the "obstetric dilemma." According to this theory, a cost of hominin selection to bipedalism is the reduction of the pelvic girdle; in tension with increasing encephalization, this reduction results in cephalopelvic disproportion, creating an assumed fragile relationship between a woman, her reproductive body, and the neonates she gives birth to. This theory, conceived in the 19th century, gained traction in the paleoanthropological literature in the mid-20th century. Supported by biomedical discourses, it was cited as the definitive reason for difficulties in human birth. Bioarchaeological research supported this narrative by utilizing demographic parameters that depict the death of young women from reproductive complications. But the roles of biomedical and cultural practices that place women at higher risk for morbidity and early mortality are often not considered. This review argues that reinforcing the obstetrical dilemma by framing reproductive complications as the direct result of evolutionary forces conceals the larger health disparities and risks that women face globally. The obstetrical dilemma theory shifts the focus away from other physiological and cultural components that have evolved in concert with bipedalism to ensure the safe delivery of mother and child. It also sets the stage for a framework of biological determinism and structural violence in which the reproductive aged female is a product of her pathologized reproductive body. But what puts reproductive aged women at risk for higher rates of morbidity and mortality goes far beyond the reproductive body. Moving beyond reproduction as the root causes of health inequalities reveals gendered-based oppression and inequality in health analyses. In this new model, maternal mortality can be seen as a sensitive indicator of inequality and social development, and can be explored for what it is telling us about women's health and lives. This article reviews the research in pelvic architecture and cephalopelvic relationships from the subfields of evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, bioarchaeology, medical anthropology, and medicine, juxtaposing it with historical, ethnographic, and global maternal health analyses to offer a biocultural examination of maternal mortality and reproductive risk management. It reveals the structural violence against reproductive aged women inherent in the biomedical management of birth. By reframing birth as normal, not pathological, global health initiatives can consider new policies that focus on larger issues of disparity (e.g., poverty, lack of education, and poor nutrition) and support better health outcomes across the spectrum of life for women globally. Am J Phys Anthropol 159:S150-S171, 2016. V C 2016 American Association of Physical Anthropologists Childbirth is ". . .an intimate and complex transaction whose topic is physiological and whose language is cultural." (Jordan, 1993:3)

Hastings Center Report, 2009

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

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2023

Abstract Since the late 1980s, the fetal origins of adult disease, from 2003 developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD), has stimulated significant interest in and an efflorescence of research on the long-term effects of the intrauterine environment. From the start, this field has been interdisciplinary, using experimental animal, clinical and epidemiological tools. As the influence of DOHaD on public health and policy expanded, it has drawn criticism for reducing the complex social and physical world of early life to women’s reproductive bodies as drivers of intergenerational ills. This paper explains this narrowing of focus in terms of a formative and consequential exchange between David Barker, the British epidemiologist whose work is credited with establishing the field, and the discipline of fetal physiology. We suggest that fetal physiologists were a crucial constituency of support for Barker’s hypothesis about early life origins of disease. Their collaborations with Barker helped secure and sustain the theory amid considerable controversy. The trajectory of DOHaD and its focus on the maternal body can be understood, we argue, as a consequence of this alliance, which brought together two distinct conceptualizations of the intrauterine environment, one from epidemiology and the other from fetal physiology. Along the way, we trace the histories of these conceptualizations, both of which were products of mid-to-late twentieth century British science, and show how Barker’s early emphasis on social and economic conditions was superseded by a narrower focus on physiological mechanisms acting upon the autonomous fetus.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 13698575 2013 876191, 2014

In this introduction, I use my nearly forty years of work in the area to reflect on the total medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth that informs even the critical sociology that purports to examine the issue. The risks that are faced in pregnancy and birth are not only the inherent dangers that midwives have worked with across time and space, but also those particular risks introduced by medicalisation itself. Medicalisation blinds us to those risks on the one hand, while it blinds us to the skills and knowledge that midwives and that birthing women themselves have on the other. The women and midwives researched in these articles show us that in pregnancy and birth, as in most of life, it is not just a matter of 'real risk' versus 'perceived risk' as Risk-theorists (too) often describe it. There is rather an intelligent balancing of risks, weighing of risks, contextualising of risks. What we see in this issue is a glimpse into the ways in which people intelligently, creatively, determinedly balance risks. P a g e | 2

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.