American Child Welfare and the Regulation of the Maternal Body: 1950-1985

• In Event: 50617 - Welfare States in Practice: Care, Control, and Inequality

Abstract

This article explains how and why the American child welfare profession, the predominant form of family governance in the United States, transformed its paradigm for interventions in pregnant and postpartum women. This transformation maps broader institutional changes in child welfare’s management of pregnancy and infant care in the United States: In its first decades of specialization as a field (1912-1960s), child welfare worked closely with medical experts in a multi-disciplinary approach to maternal and infant health, albeit one marked by frequent failures that reshaped child welfare’s mission. But by the 1980s, an increasing focus on risk management was linked to pregnancy as a site of risk, culminating in a focus on substance-using women as risky mothers who must be managed, sometimes even at the cost of the child’s well-being. As the number of reports of substance-exposed infants rose, so did the number of state polices empowering child welfare agencies as the primary authority to intervene in such cases. The evolution of these interventions over time, from early efforts at reducing infant mortality to punitive family separation in cases of maternal substance use, transformed child welfare agencies into a form of maternal and family risk governance that has reshaped parenting norms, social assumptions around children’s resilience, and the role of professional authority in private social realms.

Author

• Matty Lichtenstein, Florida Atlantic University