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1 – 10 of over 4000Kaylee J. Hackney and Pamela L. Perrewé
Research examining the experiences of women in the workplace has, to a large extent, neglected the unique stressors pregnant employees may experience. Stress during pregnancy has…
Abstract
Research examining the experiences of women in the workplace has, to a large extent, neglected the unique stressors pregnant employees may experience. Stress during pregnancy has been shown consistently to lead to detrimental consequences for the mother and her baby. Using job stress theories, we develop an expanded theoretical model of experienced stress during pregnancy and the potential detrimental health outcomes for the mother and her baby. Our theoretical model includes factors from multiple levels (i.e., individual, interpersonal, sociocultural, and community) and the role they play on the health and well-being of the pregnant employee and her baby. In order to gain a deeper understanding of job stress during pregnancy, we examine three pregnancy-specific organizational stressors (i.e., perceived pregnancy discrimination, pregnancy disclosure, and identity-role conflict) that are unique to pregnant employees. These stressors are argued to be over and above the normal job stressors experienced and they are proposed to result in elevated levels of experienced stress leading to detrimental health outcomes for the mother and baby. The role of resilience resources and learning in reducing some of the negative outcomes from job stressors is also explored.
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Purpose: Miscarriage is commonly understood as an involuntary, grieve-able pregnancy outcome. Abortion is commonly understood as a voluntary, if stigmatized, pregnancy outcome…
Abstract
Purpose: Miscarriage is commonly understood as an involuntary, grieve-able pregnancy outcome. Abortion is commonly understood as a voluntary, if stigmatized, pregnancy outcome that people do not typically grieve. This chapter examines a nexus of the involuntary and voluntary: how people who chose abortion following observation of a serious fetal health issue make sense of their experience and process associated emotions.
Design: The author draws on semi-structured interviews with cisgender women who had an observed serious fetal health issue and chose to terminate their pregnancy.
Findings: Findings highlight an initial prioritization of medical knowledge in pregnancy decision-making giving way, in the face of the inherent limits of medical knowability, to a focus on personal and familial values. Abortion represented a way to lessen the prospective suffering of their fetus, for many, and felt like an explicitly moral decision. Respondents felt relief after the abortion as well as a sense of loss. They processed their post-abortion emotions, including grief, in multiple ways, including through viewing – or intentionally not viewing – the remains, community rituals, private actions, and no formalized activity. Throughout respondents’ experiences, the stigmatization of abortion negatively affected their ability to obtain the care they desired and, for some, to emotionally process the overall experience.
Originality/Value: This chapter offers insight into the understudied experience of how people make sense of a serious fetal health issue and illustrates an additional facet of the stigmatization of abortion, namely how stigmatization may complicate people’s pregnancy decision-making process and their post-abortion processing.
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Sheresa Boone Blanchard and Tacy Rae LeBaron
Six African-American, heterosexual couples with a toddler son in a southeastern United States county were interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Couples shared reflections…
Abstract
Six African-American, heterosexual couples with a toddler son in a southeastern United States county were interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Couples shared reflections of joys and challenges in their lives right before and during the pregnancy, delivery and right after the birth of their son. Through thematic analysis, results showed that most parents shared similar experiences of planning the pregnancy, breastfeeding from birth, and both being involved in caregiving. However, variability in preparation, emotions, and adjustment existed during this period. Although differential pregnancy outcomes could be race-related (i.e. gestational period length and preterm delivery), other aspects of this universal experience were similar to the average couple in the United States. This study aims to consider the implications for how race might impact the variability across families.
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Turkish mothers’ interactions with medical authorities during pregnancy and childbirth have developed in a context of risk discourses produced by biomedical experts with…
Abstract
Turkish mothers’ interactions with medical authorities during pregnancy and childbirth have developed in a context of risk discourses produced by biomedical experts with surveillance justified by these discourses. Giving meaning to pregnancy and childbirth through the search for the reduction of risks is a reflexive part of Turkish mothers’ everyday life.
This research paper aims to discuss a study examining how pregnancy and childbirth are socially constructed, how increased medicalization is experienced by Turkish mothers, and how they assign meaning to pregnancy and childbirth. A phenomenological research was designed using depth interviews with 10 Turkish mothers with children aged 0–6 years, living in Istanbul who had high education and welfare levels.
The findings shed light on Turkish mothers’ subjective experiences and how medicine as a profession shapes these experiences. With the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, how the trust toward the experts, the knowledge of preparation for maternity in an appropriate and responsible manner have become functional for Turkish mothers to create a sense of ontological security are examined.
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This chapter focuses on the culturally assumed link between femininity and pregnancy. It situates itself using the feminist theories of performativity (Butler, 1990), female…
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the culturally assumed link between femininity and pregnancy. It situates itself using the feminist theories of performativity (Butler, 1990), female masculinity (Halbertstam, 1998) and the queer art of failure (Halberstam, 2011). The chapter is based on ethnographic research with butch lesbians and genderqueer individuals in British Columbia, Canada. It focuses on these individuals’ desires to experience pregnancy, find appropriate clothes to wear when pregnant, and not being simultaneously socially recognized as both pregnant and masculine. It argues that feminism is still needed to broaden how we gender pregnancy, and to challenge the assumptions and social pressures that link individuals with uteruses to female to femininity to pregnancy and motherhood.
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Purpose – In this chapter, I set out to unexcise the messiness of maternalisms and disparities in women's health care by addressing narratives about reproductive trauma. I ask…
Abstract
Purpose – In this chapter, I set out to unexcise the messiness of maternalisms and disparities in women's health care by addressing narratives about reproductive trauma. I ask, what might it mean to analyze the interaction between the medical industrial complex and women who experience reproductive trauma as a social practice, one that is constitutive of gender socialization and the medicalization of women's bodies in the American nation-state? I accomplish responding to the question by addressing a vastly underresearched and underaddressed pregnancy complication Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG).
Methodology/Approach – First, I thread posts from supportive online reproductive trauma forums to weave thematic narratives about and the impacts of HG. Next, I review biomedical literature in order to probe potential etiology. Third, I share my debilitating experiences with HG – reproductive traumas – to interrogate dominant androcentric biomedical discourse of pregnancy culture, maternalisms, maternal ideology, and epistemic violence.
Findings – Our knowledge about HG continues to be murky and unresolved, leaving many pregnant people – namely women – untreated.
Research limitations/implications – I call on the absence of contemporary protective sociocultural structures that provide support and care – gendered health-care disparities – for women during pregnancy, labor and delivery, and postpartum in order to advocate reproductive trauma is a viable and normal expression in the context of misogynist social scripts.
Originality/Value of the Chapter – My hope is to raise the volume on narratives of pregnancy trauma and reproductive experience using HG as a case study and my intention is to argue gender is a salient factor in health-care disparities.
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Can one describe the ‘natural’ process of pregnancy as ‘harm’, even when negligently brought about? What does that harm consist of? Offering a contextual analysis of the English…
Abstract
Can one describe the ‘natural’ process of pregnancy as ‘harm’, even when negligently brought about? What does that harm consist of? Offering a contextual analysis of the English judiciary's characterisation of wrongful pregnancy, this paper demonstrates from a feminist perspective that the current construction of pregnancy as a ‘personal injury’ is deeply problematic. Forwarding an alternative account, this paper argues for law to embrace a richer notion of autonomy that will better resonate with women's diverse experiences of reproduction, and articulate the importance of autonomy in the reproductive domain: notably, women gaining control over their moral, relational and social lives.
Theories of prosumption offer social marketers an opportunity to improve market segmentation strategies and health campaigns by improving understanding of audiences. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
Theories of prosumption offer social marketers an opportunity to improve market segmentation strategies and health campaigns by improving understanding of audiences. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to understand how women produce and consume ideologies of pregnancy.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 19 pregnant women ages 24‐38 years completed qualitative, in‐depth interviews. Data analysis included a grounded theory approach and constant‐comparative method using open and axial coding to reduce the data and identify themes across the data.
Findings
This study addressed prosumption in three meaning‐making sites: the physiological basis of pregnancy; perceptions of medicine and the biomedical model during pregnancy; and perceptions of media surrounding pregnancy.
Research limitations/implications
This study applied prosumption theory in a new social context: pregnant women. Findings articulate the importance of gender and the necessity of incorporating women's lived experiences into theories of prosumption.
Practical implications
Social marketers benefit from improved understandings of pregnant women's body identity, perceptions, and opportunities for empowerment and agency in reproductive health. The proposed “purist pregnant woman” myth impacts effective strategies in social marketing and health communication campaigns. Findings suggest that pregnant women may serve as a receptive audience for a range of health issues.
Social implications
This study extends our understanding of prosumers, suggesting that prosumption of pregnancy reduces alienation, humanizes and demedicalizes health care and the birthing process.
Originality/value
This study offers theoretical and practical implications for social marketing and health communication campaigns to improve pregnancy health outcomes through an improved understanding of prosumers.
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Fauzia Akhter Huda, Anisuddin Ahmed, Hassan R. Mahmood, Faisal Ahmmed, Alessio Panza and Ratana Somrongthong
The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of delaying first pregnancy in reducing burden of unintended pregnancy (UP) among married adolescent girls in urban slums of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of delaying first pregnancy in reducing burden of unintended pregnancy (UP) among married adolescent girls in urban slums of Bangladesh.
Design/methodology/approach
This cross-sectional survey was conducted among 783 married adolescents in five urban slums of Bangladesh during January 2013–January 2014.
Findings
Half of the respondents’ first pregnancy was reported as unintended. Of the respondents, 58 percent with no school education had experienced UP which was 38 percent among respondents with eight year’s education. Respondents who did not willingly agreed to their marriage experienced more UP (61 percent) than those who were agreed/got married by their own choice (51 percent). Respondents having five years of age difference with their husbands experienced more UP (58 percent) than those with ten years of age difference (46 percent). Respondents aged 14 years at first conception experienced 63 percent UP, while the respondents aged 18 years had 35 percent UP experience. Of the respondents, 66 percent who became pregnant within one year of marriage reported their pregnancy as unintended which was 29 percent among those who delayed their first pregnancy for three years.
Originality/value
Significant association was observed between pregnancy intention with respondents’ educational status (p=0.03), age difference with husbands (p=0.02), age at first conception (p<0.01) and delaying first pregnancy (p<0.001).
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