Danielle Bessett
Dissertation Title: Pregnant with Possibility: Medicalization, Cultural Difference, and Women’s Experience of “Normal” in Stratified Reproduction
Dissertation Committee: Troy Duster (Chair), Lynne Haney, Rayna Rapp
Dissertation Abstract
“Normality” is the unexamined but ever-present yardstick by which most decisions in and about contemporary reproduction are made. This research investigated how, within the powerful, normalizing discourse of medicine, the “normal” pregnancy came to have multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings over time. Focusing on reproductive experiences and inequities as they are reflected in longitudinal interviews with sixty-four pregnant women in the Northeastern U.S., this study analyzed three central themes of the experience of pregnancy, as they were articulated in interviews: women’s construction of pregnancy symptoms, their understandings of fetal development, and their reactions to the prenatal classification of pregnancies as “normal” or “high risk.” I contextualized these interviews within a broader, multimethod approach, including a historical analysis of obstetric journals and popular self-help guides, ethnographic observations of public interactions in waiting rooms, extended conversations with women’s family members, and informant interviews with doctors, midwives, nurses and receptionists.
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.
Curriculum Vitae |
