A healthy pregnancy is now defined well before pregnancy even begins. Public health messages promote pre-pregnancy health and health care by encouraging reproductive-age women to think of themselves as mothers before they think of themselves as women. This happens despite little evidence that such an approach improves maternal and child health. This book examines the dramatic shift in ideas about reproductive risk and birth outcomes over the last several decades, unearthing how these ideas intersect with the politics of women's health and motherhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Miranda R. Waggoner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University.
Acknowledgments1. Someday, Now: Preconceiving Risk and Maternal Responsibility2. From the Womb to the Woman: The Shifting Locus of Reproductive Risk3. Anticipating Risky Bodies: Making Sense of Future Reproductive Risk4. Whither Women’s Health? Reproductive Politics and the Legacy of Maternalism5. Get a Reproductive Life Plan! Producing the Zero Trimester6. Promoting Maternal Visions: Gender, Race, and Future Baby Love7. Governing Risk, Governing Women: Anticipatory Motherhood and Social OrderNotesBibliographyIndex
“A sophisticated study not only of a new medical trend, but also of a contemporary result of a century-old construction of modern pregnancy, modern motherhood and women’s health care.”