‘Bad choices’: Unintended pregnancy and abortion in nurses’ and counsellors’ accounts of providing pre-abortion counselling
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2021
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444139 , vital:74195 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459320988873"
- Description: Little research tackles healthcare providers’ experiences in conducting pre-abortion counselling sessions in circumstances where pregnant persons may request an abortion. We report on a study conducted in South Africa, in which two nurses and two counsellors were asked about how they conduct these counselling sessions. Using a synthetic narrative approach, we present these health workers’ micro-narratives about their motivations for providing abortion services, the purpose of the counselling, their information-giving practices, and whether and how third parties are included in the counselling. We highlight how these micro-narratives are premised on discursive resources that problematise unintended pregnancy and abortion. These resources enable and justify directive counselling that undermines pregnant peoples’ reproductive autonomy. We locate such directiveness within dominant anti-abortion discourse and call for training to reframe normative understandings of abortion.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2021
'Choice' in women's abortion decision-making narratives: Introducing a supportability approach
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Chiweshe, Malvern T , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/446220 , vital:74482
- Description: Liberal abortion legislation emphasises pregnant persons' autonomous choices in abortion decision-making. Within psychological theories, decision-making is understood as largely individual, rational and cognitive, with various factors affecting women's1 abortion decision-making. In this study, purposively recruited from three sites in South Africa and three sites in Zimbabwe, 25 and 18 women, respectively, participated in narrative interviews which were analysed using thematic analysis and a supportability framework. Participants' narratives constructed continuation of the pregnancy as a 'non-option, abortion emerging as the only solution. Economic resources, gender norms and partnerships, and the undesirability of the pregnancy meant the pregnancy was unsupportable at micro- and macro-levels, and sometimes despite parenting being desired by the women. A supportability framework offers opportunities to understand reproductive decision-making as imbricated in the circumstances of the pregnancy which render it (un)supportable, therefore opening up or closing down particular decisions. This framework enables a necessary shift, towards systemic understandings of decision-making, and a possible reduction in abortion-related stigma.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Contradictions in womxn’s experiences of pre-abortion counselling in South Africa: Implications for client‐centred practice
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/443638 , vital:74140 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12330"
- Description: Pre-abortion counselling may play a key role in abortion seekers’ understanding of their decision to terminate a pregnancy and the subsequent emotions that they feel. In this paper, we report on a study conducted in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa concerning womxn's experiences of the pre-abortion counselling offered as part of the implementation of the Choice of Termination Act that governs the provision of legal abortion in the country. Using a narrative-discursive lens, the analysis revealed four micro-narratives in which participants appreciated non-directive and empathic counselling, as well as being provided with information. They also indicated that the counselling was upsetting and hurtful, particularly when providers drew on the awfulisation of abortion discourse to suggest that abortion leads to terrible consequences, and foetal personhood discourse to intimate that terminating the pregnancy is wrong and other alternatives (adoption, parenting) are better. The connection between these broadly positive and negative responses may lie in the dominance of anti-abortion discourses coupled with the powerful positioning of healthcare providers as experts. The attendant disempowerment of clients within the health clinic setting may constrain pregnant people's ability to question such ‘expert’ information. The implications for feminist client-centred pre-abortion counselling are discussed.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Feminisms and decolonising psychology: Possibilities and challenges
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Bhatia, Sunil , Liu, Wen
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444314 , vital:74218 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353520932810"
- Description: In this special issue, we bring together papers that speak to feminisms in relation to decolonisation in the discipline of psychology. The six articles and two book reviews address a range of issues: race, citizenship, emancipatory politics, practising decolonial refusal, normalising slippery subjectivity, Islamic anti-patriarchal liberation psychology, and decolonisation of the hijab. In this editorial we outline the papers’ contributions to discussions on understanding decolonisation, how feminisms and decolonisation speak to each other, and the implications of the papers for feminist decolonising psychology. Together the papers highlight the importance of undermining the gendered coloniality of power, knowledge and being. The interweaving of feminisms and decolonising efforts can be achieved through: each mutually informing and shaping the other, conducting intersectional analyses, and drawing on transnational feminisms. Guiding principles for feminist decolonising psychology include: undermining the patriarchal colonialist legacy of mainstream psychological science; connecting gendered coloniality with other systems of power such as globalisation; investigating topics that surface the intertwining of colonialist and gendered power relations; using research methods that dovetail with feminist decolonising psychology; and focussing praxis on issues that enable decolonisation. Given the complexities of the coloniality and patriarchy of power-knowledge-being, feminist decolonising psychology may fail. The issues raised in this special issue point to why it mustn’t.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Fertility, childbirth and parenting Defining sexual and gender relations
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Morison, Tracy
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434112 , vital:73032 , ISBN 9781108460903 , https://biblio.co.uk/book/cambridge-handbook-international-psychology-women-fan-ny/d/1521282285?aid=frggad_source=1gclid=CjwKCAjwz42xBhB9EiwA48pT70yXdV4oAp4StC49UDVfIuCISAVjZGdeibEiPkf_CNtGgog6bJ7iDxoCgSIQAvD_BwE
- Description: Major historical shifts in the field of fertility, childbirth and parenting have implications for feminist psychologists working on these topics. These shifts include approaches to sexuality and reproduction: a population control emphasis in the late 1940s, a reproductive rights paradigm in the 1990s, and progression from reproductive rights to reproductive justice. Feminist psychologists must traverse the political landscape created by these broad approaches. In this chapter, we suggest ways in which such engagement may be facilitated through examination of mainstream assumptions and outcomes and the use of nuanced feminist research. Drawing from transnational feminisms, the principles of reproductive justice, and examples of research and interventions in reproductive decisionmaking, abortion, obstetric violence, ‘deviant’ (m)others, early reproduction and contraception, we argue that feminist psychology should attend to both global and crosscutting power relations concerning fertility and reproduction, as well as localised dynamics.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Multi-layered risk management in under-resourced antenatal clinics
- Authors: Feltham-King, Tracey , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298561 , vital:57716 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13698575.2019.1697432"
- Description: In this article we contribute to critical risk approaches to studying pregnancy and childbirth in the global South. Following Sarah Rudrum’s work, our approach focusses on sociocultural inequalities amid the regulation of individuals. We draw on data from our Foucauldian-inspired ethnography of two antenatal clinics in an under-resourced area of South Africa to illustrate how multi-layered risk management operates in these spaces. These data were collected over a period of six months in the form of semi-structured interviews, observations of consultations and waiting room interactions, documents used in the clinic, and posters appearing on the clinic walls. Our findings show how a scientific-bureaucratic approach to pregnancy risk management, as encoded in international, national and institutional guidelines, is well known, highly visible, and practised through surveillance and reporting mechanisms in clinics. This approach incites healthcare practitioners to achieve particular performance standards and to monitor their professional agency. Managing pregnancy risk thus entails regulating the healthcare practitioners themselves. In implementing approved pregnancy risk management strategies in an over-subscribed and under-resourced public healthcare setting, however, healthcare practitioners face potential risk to their professional reputation and integrity. In managing this risk, they resist the scientific-bureaucratic approach through: depicting themselves as victims of unfair institutional arrangements or unreasonable patients; instituting street-level bureaucracy to control access to the clinics; and controlling patients’ actions in authoritarian ways. Our research shows that without engagement with the on-the-ground realities of the antenatal clinic in resource-poor environments, a scientific-bureaucratic approach to pregnancy risk management is inevitably limited in its effectiveness.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Resisting abortion stigma in situ: South African womxn's and healthcare providers' accounts of the pre-abortion counselling healthcare encounter
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/443749 , vital:74149 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2019.1674922"
- Description: Abortion providers and pregnant people who undergo abortion potentially face significant stigma. Researchers have started to explore how womxn respond to abortion stigma, usually focusing on individual strategies in managing or reducing stigma effects. Drawing on narrative data from research conducted on womxn’s and healthcare providers’ experiences of the pre-abortion healthcare encounter in the South African public health sector, we highlight how stigma may be resisted in social ways within this context. Everyday chatter and informal social support amongst womxn in the waiting room provided a counterpoint for health service providers’ ascription of shame to the womxn, and a sense of solidarity amongst the womxn. Health service providers narrated their decision to do abortion work through the socially affirming hero canonical narrative, and womxn described their counselling as helpful. These social and discursive practices resist the awfulisation of abortion and provide relief for the womxn and the healthcare providers in particular contexts.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Sistering and sexual socialisation: a discursive study of Xhosa women’s sisterly interactions concerning sex and reproduction
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela , Macleod, Catriona I , Young, Lisa S
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/160301 , vital:40432 , DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2020.1785551
- Description: Considerable research has been devoted to understanding and promoting parent-child sexual socialisation. Less attention has been paid to experiences of sibling interactions concerning sex. Drawing on discursive psychology, this study explores how women report interacting about sex and reproduction in their sisterly relationships. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, using Free Association Narrative Interview technique, with five Black isiXhosa-speaking, middle-aged and working class women in South Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Social and structural barriers related to menstruation across diverse schools in the Eastern Cape
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Du Toit, Ryan , Paphitis, Sharli A , Kelland, Lindsay
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444385 , vital:74224 , xlink:href="https://hdl.handle.net/10520/ejc-educat-v40-n3-a9"
- Description: The barriers to education associatedwith menstruation vary from country to countryand within countries. We report on a cross-sectional survey conducted in diverse schools in 2districts of the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Using multi-stage sampling(stratified random sampling of schools, and purposive sampling of Grade 11 female-identifiediilearners), we accessed1,035 respondents with an average age of 17.2 years. Respondents completed a questionnaire developed from previous questionnaires and our readings of the literature. We report here on results pertaining to the social and structural barriers relatedto menstruation. Just over one fifth of young womeniiiacross the whole sample reported missing an average of 1.8 days of school per menstrual cycle, while a significant minority reportedrestrictions related to sporting and classroom activities. Results show, contrary to expectations, that young womenattending under-resourced schools report missing fewer days than young womenattending resourced schools, despite young womenin under-resourced schools experiencing inadequate sanitationfacilities and feeling unsafeusingthese facilities. This research indicates the importance of recognising social as well as structural features when considering the gendered barriers to education that menstruation may represent.
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- Date Issued: 2020
The conundrums of counselling women in violent intimate partner relationships in South Africa: implications for practice
- Authors: Fleischack, Anne , Macleod, Catriona I , Böhmke, Werner
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444117 , vital:74191 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10447-019-09384-8"
- Description: Little research focuses on how counsellors experience counselling encounters concerning intimate partner violence. This study reports on narrative research conducted with eight South African non-governmental organisation counsellors. Participants spoke of creating productive and caring counselling dynamics, and providing non-directive counselling. However, they also indicated providing moral guidance, particularly in cases where pregnancy or children were involved. Success was viewed rather narrowly as the women leaving the relationship, setting up ‘all-or-nothing’ outcomes. Such ‘success’ led to counsellor happiness, whilst failure in this regard led to counsellors experiencing anger and burn-out. We conclude that the conundrums evident in these data are grounded in patriarchal systems, limiting the efficacy of counselling based on a bondage and deliverance narrative. Implications for practice and training are also outlined.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Young pregnant women and public health
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Feltham-King, Tracey
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/298572 , vital:57717 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2019.1573313"
- Description: In this paper, we outline a critical reparative justice/care approach to adolescent reproductive health as an alternative to the standard public health response to ‘teenage pregnancy’. Joining an increasing body of critical scholarship that calls for nuance in understanding reproduction amongst young people, we draw, in this paper, on data generated from an ethnographic study conducted in antenatal care units in an Eastern Cape township in South Africa. To illustrate the approach we propose, we home in on five case studies that highlight the variability of young women’s lives, the multiple injustices they experience, and the agency they demonstrate in negotiating their way through pregnancy and birth. Injustices evident in these cases centre on sexual violence, rape myths, education system failures, health system failures, shaming and stigmatising practices, socio-economic precariousness, absent male partners, and denial of services. We outline how the reparative justice approach that highlights repair and support for social and health injustices at the individual and collective level as well as at the material and symbolic level may be taken up to ensure reproductive justice for young pregnant women.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
A Genealogy of Puberty Science: Monsters, Abnormals, and Everyone Else
- Authors: Pinto, Pedro , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434065 , vital:73029 , ISBN 9781315142098 , https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315142098
- Description: A Genealogy of Puberty Science explores the modern invention of puberty as a scientific object. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical analytic, Pinto and Macleod trace the birth of puberty science in the early 1800s and follow its expansion and shifting discursive frameworks over the course of two centuries. Offering a critical inquiry into the epistemological and political roots of our present pubertal complex, this book breaks the almost complete silence concerning puberty in critical theories and research about childhood and adolescence. Most strikingly, the book highlights the failure of ongoing medical debates on early puberty to address young people’s sexual and reproductive embodiment and citizenships. A Genealogy of Puberty Science will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of child and adolescent health research, critical psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, feminist and gender studies, medical history, science and technology studies, and sexualities and reproduction studies.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Assessing the impact of the expanded Global Gag Rule in South Africa
- Authors: du Plessis, Ulandi , Sofika, Dumisa , Macleod, Catriona I , Mthethwa, Thobile
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , report
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434306 , vital:73047 , ISBN Report , https://www.ru.ac.za/media/rhodesuniversity/content/criticalstudiesinsexualitiesandreproduction/documents/IWHC_Report.pdf
- Description: South Africa has one of the most progressive abortion laws in the world and as the constitution states, South Africans also have “the right to make deci-sions concerning reproduction”(Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996). Alongside being a free service, this should seemingly translate into accessible country-wide abortion services. However, less than one in ten public clinics actually perform abortions (Amnesty International, 2017). One of the main reasons for this has been the failure, on the part of the Depart-ment of Health, to regulate conscientious objection, ie the right of a healthcare worker to refuse to provide a service against which they are mor-ally opposed. Another reason is a lack of resources, in terms of both health professionals and finances, which manifest particularly in rural areas. As a result, women who are considering abortion either turn to illegal providers whose advertisements are scattered around towns, or towards private ser-vice providers such as Marie Stopes. Both options are usually costly, espe-cially to poor women. And illegal backstreet abortions often result in sepsis and infection. Recent data on abortion services in South Africa indicate that between 2016 and 2017, 20% of all abortions performed on women aged between 15-44 years were provided by the public health sector, while 26% and 54% of abortions were performed by illegal providers and the private health sector respectively (Lince-Deroche et al., 2018).
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education
- Authors: Saville Young, Lisa , Moodley, Dale D , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444302 , vital:74215 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2018.1511974"
- Description: Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Focus on ‘the family’? How South African family policy fails queer families
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Morison, Tracy , Lynch, Ingrid
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434398 , vital:73054 , ISBN 9780367777401 , https://www.routledge.com/Queer-Kinship-South-African-Perspectives-on-the-Sexual-politics-of-Family-making-and-Belonging/Morison-Lynch-Reddy/p/book/9780367777401
- Description: The most policy document is the White Paper on Families, which aims to facilitate the mainstreaming of a family perspective into all government policy-making from the national to the municipal level and across multiple departments. The irony is that less than a third of South African families actually conform to the two cisgender heterosexual biological parent model that is favoured in family policy. South African research has shown that children of lesbian parents learn open-mindedness and to be comfortable with the family in which they live, and that men in same-sex relationships challenge gendered divisions of household tasks. Promoting the two-biological-parent family as the preferred family structure creates an impossible ideal for the majority of South Africans to live up to. Because such a family structure is strongly connected to class, it is out of reach for the majority of citizens, let alone those who live in queer relationships.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Overcoming essentialism in community psychology: The use of a narrative-discursive approach within African feminisms
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Chiweshe, Malvern T , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434131 , vital:73033 , ISBN 978-3-030-20000-8 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20001-5_2
- Description: A decolonial feminist community psychology approach understands individual experience as being embedded in, enabled and shaped by discursive and social power relations, and that transformative change is only possible through this contextualised understanding of individual experiences. African feminisms have been concerned with the challenging task of exploring and producing accounts of the complexity and multiplicity in womxn’s (and mxn’s) experiences of localised, multiple forms of oppression and the resistances enacted against them. We demonstrate how the utilisation of a narrative-discursive method in research that is guided by poststructural and postcolonial African feminist theorising may be a useful tool in realising the goals and aims of both decolonial feminist community psychology, and African feminist theorising. In this chapter, we draw on research that explored Zimbabwean womxn’s narratives of abortion decision-making and South African womxn’s and healthcare providers’ narratives of their experiences of the pre-abortion counselling healthcare encounter in the Eastern Cape public health sector. We also draw on our own intervention, a policy brief that had been developed into pre-abortion counselling guidelines which were informed by womxn’s narrated experiences. We argue that applying a narrative-discursive approach to African feminist theorising enables understandings of African womxn’s experiences and resistances which are informed by definitions of racial identity and culture, womxnhood, and social reality as dynamic social concepts and practices. These kinds of understandings facilitate community psychology interventions that are relevant and ‘emancipatory’ as they stem from the multiplicity of participants’ narrated experiences and the social and discursive power relations implicit in these narratives.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Pregnancy Decision Making: Abortion and Adoption
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434145 , vital:73034 , ISBN 9781119161899 , https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119171492
- Description: Pregnancy decision making encompasses a large range of interactions, including decisions and actions to avoid pregnancy or to become pregnant. This entry addresses the question of decision making regarding the outcome of a pregnancy: abortion or taking the pregnancy to term, with the latter resulting in parenting or adoption placement. Adolescents' pregnancy decision making has been a special area of focus for some decades now, particularly regarding whether adolescents are capable of making termination-of-pregnancy decisions. This entry highlights controversies concerning, first, teenage pregnancy as a social problem; second, risk research that seeks to outline the consequences of various reproductive decisions; third, questions around adolescents' maturity regarding making reproductive decisions; fourth, the reasons provided for various reproductive decisions; and, finally, issues surrounding the autonomy of young pregnant women in their reproductive decisions.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Psychological knowledge production about abortion: the politics of location and representation
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Chiweshe, Malvern T , du Toit, Ryan
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/443734 , vital:74148 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjsrh-2018-200208"
- Description: Despite considerable psychology research being conducted on abortion, there has been no study of the history of psychological knowledge production on the topic. The aim of our research was to analyse journal articles published in English language psychology journals using a politics of location and of representation analytical lens.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
‘Adolescent Pregnancy’ 1: Social problem, public health concern, or neither
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Feltham-King, Tracey
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434031 , vital:73027 , ISBN 9781351035620 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351035620-17/adolescent-pregnancy-1-catriona-ida-macleod-tracey-feltham-king
- Description: In this chapter we outline three major approaches to adolescent pregnancy. The first is the ‘social problem’ approach, in which adolescent pregnancy is viewed as, for the most part, deleterious for the young woman, her offspring, and society. This position fuels public outrage when the numbers of pregnant adolescents (especially when they are school pupils) are revealed in newspapers. The second is a public health response, which is well established and which has much institutional kudos. Here the neutral language of population-wide health is used to underpin preventive efforts in relation to adolescent pregnancy. In the third approach, authors point to the problems underlying both of these positions, arguing that arbitrarily separating younger pregnant women from older pregnant women is premised on particular power relations.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
‘Failed’ mothers, ‘failed’ womxn
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Feltham-King, Tracey , Mavuso, Jabulile M-J J , Morison, Tracy
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434050 , vital:73028 , ISBN 9781032082967 , https://www.routledge.com/Intersections-of-Mothering-Feminist-Accounts/Zufferey-Buchanan/p/book/9781032082967
- Description: Mothering occurs within unequal power relations associated with the disadvantages and privileges of an unjust and patriarchal society. Social inequalities associated with gender, race, class, age, ability, sexuality, violence and nationalism intersect in the lives of women as mothers, to shape their lived experiences and perspectives on mothering. Showcasing the breadth and depth of feminist research on mothering, this book gives attention to the diversity of ways in which mothering is constructed and responded to as well as how mothering is experienced. Drawing on intersectional feminist thought, the book challenges normative visions of ‘good mothering’ and interrogates constructs of ‘bad mothering’. It brings together insights from multidisciplinary scholars who use feminist approaches in their research on mothering, to inform policy development and practice when working with women as mothers in diverse circumstances. Intersections of Mothering highlights the complexities of mothering in a contemporary world, show the benefits of considering mothering through an intersectional feminist lens, make visible lived experiences of mothers and provides challenges to dominant imaginings of and service responses to women as mothers.
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- Date Issued: 2019