Risk, Responsibility, and Rugged Empowerment in Mothers’ and Birth Workers’ Birth Narratives

• In Event: 2156 - Reproductive Control and Decision-Making

Abstract

This paper explores the gendered associations between risk and responsibility- focusing, in particular, on how widespread political, social, and economic uncertainty and precarity are offloaded onto reproductive bodies and re-articulated in mothering projects. This study examines how notions of risk and responsibility become entangled, individualized, and gendered and how this entanglement is expressed in birthing ideals and experiences. Using the ways in which birth workers, midwives, and the women who use them discuss risk and strategies for managing it, this paper provides insight into a potent paradigm that is often deployed to control women's reproduction, the risk/responsibility paradigm. This study provides empirical evidence to demonstrate that investigating the risk frames, risk thinking, and risk management strategies of women navigating reproductive decisions and the workers who assist them, can reveal the cultural and societal factors that shape expectations around motherhood and reproductive politics more broadly.

Author

• Katharine McCabe, University of Illinois at Chicago