Abstract
In the United States, the historical condemnation and punitive legal consequences of substance use during pregnancy—ranging from incarceration to termination of parental custody of a newborn—render pregnant women in state of biosocial precarity. Yet pregnant women who use illicit substances who desire to parent must generate a legible narrative for bureaucratic groups, such as Child Protective Services, through engagement with biomedical care in order to demonstrate parental capacity. Based on longitudinal interviews with pregnant women who were actively using illicit substances and attempting to parent after delivery, we posit that the relationship between biosocial precarity and biomedical care is a procedural interaction that is rooted in the potential to parent, described as the ability to have a “take-home baby.” In order to achieve this goal, the need for engagement in biomedical care and the creation of a biomedical narrative, described as a “résumé for the baby” is required. The relationship between care and biosocial precarity is a unique, underdeveloped concept within medical anthropology and has important consequences not only for the ethical turn within anthropology, but also how applied researchers consider engagement with this highly marginalized, vulnerable population.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 35-55 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 1 2020 |
Funding
The authors wish to thank Lauren Bedel, Arianna Cassidy MD, Melissa Myo MD, Rubi Luna, Alexandra Woodcock MD, and Amanda R. O?Hara DO for their help with interviewing, compiling, and transcribing data. Special thanks to Kelly Knight PhD in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at University of California San Francisco; Carolyn Sufrin MD PhD in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Department of Health, Behavior and Society in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University; and Caroline Bledsoe PhD in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University for their thoughtful commentary on initial drafts. Portions of this paper were presented at the National Conference for Physician-Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities in Boston, MA in April 2017 and the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C. in November 2017.
Keywords
- Care
- Moral anthropology
- Obstetrics
- Precarity
- Substance use in pregnancy
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Health(social science)
- Anthropology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Psychiatry and Mental health
