Danielle BessettDissertation Title: Pregnant with Possibility: Medicalization, Cultural Difference, and Women’s Experience of “Normal” in Stratified Reproduction Constructs of normality functioned in women’s lives both as medical measures and moral standards. Nowhere was this clearer than in women’s understandings of fetal development. Consistent with other research, I found that the ultimate responsibility for deciding which fetuses were “normal” in regimens of prenatal testing fell centrally to women and their families. My work documents how popular images of fetal development helped to shape women’s understandings of what was happening in their wombs and their expectations for their pregnancies. While incorporating the knowledge of medical experts, women also relied heavily on practical knowledge drawn from their class, race, ethnic and religious-based cultures to construct the “normality” of the fetus in ways that were consistent with their vision of the child’s well-being and their future family life. Some women provided an immanent critique of the moral implications of the concept of normality itself and, in a few cases, contested the “official” diagnosis of their pregnancies. I found that women’s reactions to conception, decisions about medical and self-care; feelings about how their pregnancies fit into their relationships, work, and family life; and deepest desires for the future all trouble the distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal” pregnancies and between “wanted” and “unwanted” children.
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