Risk, Reproduction and Narratives of Experience

As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . . Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience sheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."

"An easy and pleasurable read from beginning to end."

--Global Public Health

Vivid ethnographies of reproductive risk and responsibility that speak to the conflicts between pregnant women and mothers and state-sanctioned biomedicine

Lauren Fordyce is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University. Aminata Maraesa is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Development of Discourses Surrounding Reproductive Risks

Lauren Fordyce and Aminata Maraesa

Complications in Measuring and Defining Risk

Conceiving Risk in K'iche' Maya Reproduction

Matthew R. Dudgeon

Failing to See the Danger: Conceptions of Pregnancy and Care Practices among Mexican Immigrant Women in New York City

Alyshia Galvez

The Vital Conjuncture of Methamphetamine-Involved Pregnancy: Objective Risks and Subjective Realities

Alison B. Hamilton

Biopolitical Narratives of Risk and Responsibility

Birth and Blame: Guatemalan Midwives and Reproductive Risk

Sheila Cosminsky

"They Don't Know Anything": How Medical Authority Constructs Perceptions of Reproductive Risk among Low-Income Mothers in Mexico

Vania Smith-Oka

Local Contours of Reproductive Risk and Responsibility in Rural Oaxaca

Rebecca Howes-Mischel

New Countryside, New Family: The Discourses of Reproductive Risk in Postsocialist Rural China

Qingyan Ma

Struggles over the Embodiment of Reproductive Risk

Negotiating Risk and the Politics of Responsibility: Mothers and Young Child Health among Datoga Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania

Alyson G. Young

Shifting Maternal Responsibilities and the Trajectory of Blame in Northern Ghana

Aaron R. Denham

Imaging Maternal Responsibility: Prenatal Diagnosis and Ultrasound among Haitians in South Florida

Lauren Fordyce

A Competition over Reproductive Authority: Prenatal Risk Assessment in Southern Belize

Aminata Maraesa