Anticipating Risky Bodies
Anticipating Risky Bodies
Making Sense of Future Reproductive Risk
This chapter examines how maternal and child health experts defined risks to healthy pregnancies around the turn of the twenty-first century, especially amid scientific uncertainty regarding the etiology of birth outcomes. Drawing on interviews with maternal and child health experts and physicians who were involved in drafting and/or disseminating the pre-pregnancy care model, this chapter details how individuals drew on long-held assumptions about strong ties between women’s bodies and reproductive outcomes in order to craft a new “common sense” about future reproductive risk. Pre-pregnancy care as an anticipatory care strategy highlights how medicine and public health today focus on preemptive clinical intervention and on future risk. Moreover, pre-pregnancy care serves as a bellwether for where this trend is headed: toward preventive interventions in the name of the health of future generations.
Keywords: scientific uncertainty, birth outcomes, responsibility, common sense, women’s bodies, reproductive outcomes, anticipatory care, future risk
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