Abstract
Reproductive justice contextualizes an individual’s ability to control their reproductive destiny within the conditions of their lives, including how and what they learn about pregnancy. Yet in the US, mainstream self-help pregnancy literature is rooted in the (bio)medicalization of pregnancy which considers the prenatal period as a disease state in need of medical management by “experts.” Pregnancy manuals present readers with standardized and universal directives about how to perform pregnancy, encourage individuals to heed the advice of experts, utilize technology to “know” their own bodies and fetus, and engage in self-surveillance to mitigate pregnancy risks to the fetus/baby, who is to be protected at all costs, including the erosion of bodily autonomy. Pregnancy manuals are geared to privileged women and direct them to perform pregnancy in a disembodied way to maximize the likelihood of ideal outcomes: healthy babies. In this way, pregnancy self-help literature disembodies pregnant individuals, and their one-size-fits-all advice erases the sociopolitical, economic, and historical context that RJ emphasizes as critical to health and reproductive freedom. These texts reduce pregnant individuals to reproductive vessels, frame pregnancy as a health project, and posit the (re)production of a healthy baby as a social and moral responsibility akin to eugenic thinking.
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Rutherford, P., Wood, J.M. (2022). Pregnancy Self-Help Literature as Disembodiment: An Issue of Reproductive Justice. In: Capo, B.W., Lazzari, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99530-0_14
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